Be a Lover Not a Lawyer

All right. And welcome back. On today's episode, I want to talk about an area that a lot of us men get into trouble when it comes to relationship.

And this is a pattern and a tendency I've often seen in myself. Just ask my wife. But I see in a lot of men as I support them in men's groups and coaching and everything I do. And it comes from this tendency for us guys to want to fix things, right, to bring things to an end, or as I was telling some of my guys in one of my programs last night, to reduce tension is one of the big drives of the masculine part of all of us.

So how this often manifests, and this will kind of lead into the main point of this episode, is in our kind of drive to try to fix problems. So particularly if our partner, whether she's a man or a woman, comes to us, one of the defaults for men is to try to fix the problem. Oh, it's this. Well, have you tried this? Oh, you're feeling this. Well, maybe if you thought about it this way, you wouldn't feel that way. There's a drive to get the person out of whatever feeling or experience they're having.

And this can be pretty frustrating for our partners sometimes. Particularly, but not always limited to our feminine partners, who oftentimes feel like by us going right to fixing, we're missing them. We're not actually connecting them. They're not feeling seen and felt and heard by us. This is feedback I've often got from my wife. And even with all the practice I do, it's easy for me to fall right into fixing mode.

But where this can show up in an even more challenging way, and where I want to focus on for this episode is when we're in conflict with our partners. Specifically, where I really see this show up is when we get feedback or criticism from our partners. What tends to happen if we're not careful is we'll go into what I call lawyer mode. So lawyer mode is when we're no longer relating to our intimate partner.

We're no longer actually connecting to them, and instead we're presenting a case. So we're lawyering up to make an argument to persuade them that our viewpoint or perspective is the correct one. Now this will often connect back to this ideal of, you know, feel her, don't fix her in that. In doing so, we often are actually limiting the amount of real, genuine connection.

So our partners lose touch with us, and frankly, we're losing touch with them. And this lawyer mode is such an easy thing to slip into because it's really just our rational mind, you know, there's nothing nefarious about it. Sometimes, yes, we want to make excuses or explain why the intent of something we did was not to hurt our partner, even if our partner actually got hurt by it.

I know this is one that I fell prey to a lot early in my marriage. My partner would be impacted by something I did or didn't do. She would give me feedback around that, around how it hurt or how it really landed for her, and I would lawyer up. I would start to explain how well, that wasn't my intent. Here's what I was actually trying to do and what I was hoping to do with that was, well, if she understood why, then she wouldn't feel upset, right?

How could she be upset with me if she knew that it wasn't my intent to do X, Y, or Z? The thing is, that almost never works, lawyering up in this case, particularly when we're defending ourselves from criticism, it never works unless we can first drop into the connection with our partner. So rather than being a lawyer first, we connect as a lover.

And connecting as a lover means we slow down, we attune to our partner, and we feel what they're feeling. So before any of the rational mind about who's right, who's wrong, what my intent was, how she just doesn't understand before all of that, first you have to attune and feel her.

So you actually have to attune to the feeling in her body. This is the key for us men. We attune and we resonate. So we allow ourselves to drop in and feel them. Feeling that once we've done that, the conversation can often shift and often will. But if we skip the that, it's disastrous. In my experience and with so many men that I work with, this is a common point of frustration in a lot of relationships, that the partner comes to the man with something, some kind of feedback or way they were hurt, and the man tries to explain it away or defend or lawyer up and make a case.

Right? In order to hopefully diffuse that tension, either that tension in her so she'll feel something different than she's feeling, or sometimes the tension in ourselves. Right? There were definitely times that I Realized, oh, wow, yeah, I dropped the ball on that, or I wasn't thinking about that, or honestly, I just wasn't conscious and I didn't want to feel that because I think of myself as a good guy that loves my partner and it doesn't feel good to know I hurt my partner.

Then other times where, yeah, I actually don't think anything I did directly contributed to the situation. What I learned by this process of being first a lover and not a lawyer was that by resonating and attuning to my partner and just feeling it, just acknowledging, yeah, wow, I get that it impacted you in this way. I don't try to change what she's feeling. Even if I think, you know, the reasoning she's feeling, it isn't necessarily me or what I did or whatever that might be.

The game changer for me came when, well, the realization that even when I have a good intent for something, my choices, my action, my presence, my behavior can still impact my partner in sometimes negative ways. And the default script I would get into would be to argue about that and, and make her wrong for feeling what she was feeling and try to explain why she shouldn't be feeling it because it wasn't my intent.

And like I said, that was pretty disastrous. That would only get my partner more frustrated and have her feel even less connected to me and more distant to me. Now, the alternative, when I first lean into lover and not lawyer and really just slow down and acknowledge what she's feeling like, yeah, wow, I get that and I feel that. And I see how that would impact you that way. You know, that wasn't my intent, but I really get this is, this is what happened, and I'm sorry, even though I didn't intend for that clearly had an impact on you.

And now this is not about overextending or becoming over apologetic like a lot of nice guys, it's just acknowledging that my partner was impacted in a certain way. And I'm genuinely sorry that she's having to feel that, but I'm sorry that my actions impacted her in that way. And if I've attuned to her and she feels me feeling her, and I'm not trying to change or explain or lawyer or defend, she'll often soften and then our connection can take a different path.

But when I lawyer up and it's all coming from the head and there's no heart, as I often say, head evokes head and heart evokes heart. So if I'm lawyered up, which in my Mind is a term for, yeah, kind of closing down our hearts and focusing and really coming from our heads. That puts my partner in that same spot where then suddenly we're arguing about details or perspectives or facts or things.

And that's not what my partner is wanting in these moments. She's wanting connection. She's wanting to re establish connection because it's the re establishment of connection that's actually going to help us both unwind, feel safe and reground. The thing about lawyering is it doesn't leave much room for a connection. It's more of like if you think of a lawyer going into court, it's kind of like a battle.

I'm here to persuade and convince the other person that my perspective is the one right perspective in truth. And the problem with that, particularly with our partners and feminine partners, is that if we're holding to there's only one right truth and that's more important than your feelings. Well, you can just feel, even in how I said that, how that's probably going to land in our partner that oh my God, we're going to feel missed or you don't care about me or you're trying to change me.

Can't you just be with me and feel with me? You know, this is something my partner really had to work hard to give me good feedback on, to slow me down so I could just be with her. Oftentimes she didn't even need an apology. She just needed an acknowledgment. This happened. Can you feel that with me? Can you say that you see how this happened and how I feel? And just by doing that, things would change, right? We'd reestablish that connection and kind of come back to each other.

And it takes practice for us men, right? All the work we do around embodiment and building a resilient nervous system and, and cultivating deeper presence, it's for these moments when our partner is coming towards us from a place of hurt, particularly when we're maybe the source of that hurt, intentional or not. And rather than just react in lawyer mode, we can slow down and be lovers first and attune and actually connect to our partners.

We feel them, they feel us feeling them. And we're reestablishing connection in that moment. And that allows the relationship to move forward. And it's taken me a lot of practice and I'm not perfect. This is still something I battle every day and every week. But I'm getting way better in my case at first, coming towards my wife as a lover and not not as a lawyer that there's so much magic in being able to feel her first, being able to feel your partner first to come into some resonance with each other.

Then once you're on the same page, yeah, the discussion about the details or whatever may may happen. But I guarantee your partner, man or woman, is going to be more open to them if the attunement, if the love has been established first. How do you show up as a lawyer? What are some of your telltale signs? There's a challenge for you over the next coming days and weeks. Keep a little journal. When do you lawyer up to defend or explain when or assert your truth on a situation at the cost of somebody else's feelings, Right?

At the cost of actually acknowledging where your partner is at. Let me know what you find. You can email me at jasonvolutionary. Men and until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men. Apply.