I do not drive for work as much as I did in the past. However, it was very common for me to have to park at a hotel, doctor’s office, or hospital. Often, because I was a guest or a member of the healthcare team, my parking would be paid for by the facility. Often, I would be asked “Can I validate your parking?” or “Do you need your parking validated?” Some places I visited had a sign that said, “Go to _______ for parking validation.”
Parking can be quite expensive these days, so it was nice to have the parking validated and not have to pay the fee. I always found it relieving to not have to worry about parking costs, keeping a meter filled, or keeping track of time while I work with my clients. Parking validation made it easy to take care of business and not have the extra hassle of parking fees.
Occasionally, I would forget to get the ticket punched or get the appropriate signature or slip of paper that validated my parking. This was always frustrating. I either had to go back in and find the right person or place to get parking validation or just pay the parking fee. The parking attendant was never validating if I neglected to get the appropriate validation. I could never expect to get it there. They were not understanding of my situation and only gave me more hassles. If I wanted the right validation, I had to get it from the right source.
The right validation in parking is important. The right validation in marriage is even more important. Please let me explain.
Married couples who may be struggling with a problem in their marriage often look to get support from a friend, family member, or coworker. It is not unusual for a married person to vent to someone about a conflict, disagreement, or hard experience. This makes sense! We want some support in these difficult moments. Some experiences in marriage can be difficult. It is only natural to want to talk it out with someone.
Most people will choose a best friend to talk it out with. So, they call (or even text) a friend and share what happened. They may unload the whole story, going through every little thing said play by play, or they may just share a juicy tidbit about the whole thing. It may be just a text that says, “My husband is such a jerk, and I cannot talk to him about anything.” It may be a complete download of all his faults and foibles connected to the frustrating event. Either way, the partner reaches out.
Again, it seems natural to talk it out or share concerns with a trusted friend. This makes sense when things are painful or frustrating. Who does not want some validation from another when we feel wronged or hurt in some way by another person? Like in parking, how this validation goes down can affect how the whole thing turns out. We do not always think about this when we seek or deliver marriage validation. Well, this is where it gets potentially problematic.
The truth is that most of us are not seeking marriage validation when we reach out to another person. We are seeking support for our side and our perspective.
Often, when we are in an interaction that goes poorly or we do not like the outcome, we only want someone to support us in our perspective of how our spouse has mistreated us. We want someone to be on our side. We want an ally and someone to “have our back.” We feel wronged and hurt, so we want someone to bind up our wounds, be willing to say, “we ride at dawn,” and “I can hide the body in my trunk for you!”
So, what we get in these moments is individual validation. We get our perspective, our thoughts, our story (not usually totally true in the retelling), and our hurt supported and assuaged. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it may actually be invalidating to the marriage. In other words, we may get support that helps us feel better about ourselves and our point of view to the undermining of the marriage.
Let’s be honest here, who among us can talk about our hurts with another without inflating, exaggerating, and maximizing our role as the innocent party and obvious victim in our tragic story? Frankly, very few of us can process the struggle in our marriage or other relationships without telling a distorted story. It is like those old-time carnival mirrors. It is going to look warped or twisted in some way when we show it. The reflection is not even close to accurate.
What happened was a marital interaction between two people. To be sure, most of us never want to validate what our partner did in these interactions. We want vindication not validation—at least for the marriage. And this might be where the rubber hits the road—or burns the road. What we seek and what we receive in this moment matters.
So, how can we be better at seeking and delivering marriage validation?
If you are the one struggling with something in your marriage, please be careful about who and how you seek that feedback. Most likely, you are in an emotional state and that makes thinking less clear and accurate. In this moment, you are likely to play an “I-am-married-to-the-most-awful-person-on-the-planet” sad song. It will be likely laced with hurt and emotion and a definite focus on how you are the innocent victim. It might be wise to calm down first before you reach out to a friend or vent to a coworker. It is wise to seek some distance between the emotional event, so that when you process it, you can do so calmly and without extremes in emotion.
Calming down and allowing yourself to move out of the heat of the moment, can help you get clarity and perspective. It can also keep this from just being a verbal vomit of what happened and how you were wronged and move it to a more supportive and helpful interaction. Taking the time to be calm, helps you look at what is the purpose of the call to a friend. What do I really need help with when I call my friend? What is my goal in this interaction? What do I hope to accomplish by sharing this troubling event with my support person?
Frankly, too many of us call just to dump the trash. Even more, we are not typically seeking improvement or advice in these moments. We are surely not teachable or trying to take any accountability in the heat of the moment. Our radiator is steaming, and we just want to let it all out. This is probably never a good time to send that text, shout in that phone to your bestie, or post something on social media tagging your best girlfriends. It is wiser to calm down and seek clarity before you reach out.
Those questions above can guide the conversation. Then, the supportive conversation turns more to statements that begin with “I am having a hard time with something that happened between me and my wife last night. Can I talk to you about that?” It might be better to use statements like “I did not handle something well last night when my husband came home from work? Can you help me with this?” Do you see the difference?
When we seek help from another, especially if we want marriage validation, it is so much better to do it from a place of calm, accountability, and willingness to get help. Can you see how it would go so much better if you went into it calmly with questions like the above? You will get both the support you need and marriage validation.
If you leave an interaction with a friend about a problem in your marriage, you feel vindicated, angrier, justified, or puffed up, you probably got a whole lot of individual validation for your made-up, one-sided, not accountable story of what happened. Pay attention to how you feel after you reach out to friends. If you always feel this vindication and justification of your side when talking with a certain person, they may not be the best source of help. A true friend would never cut down your partner and hurt your marriage just to support you in the moment.
Please be very cautious about texting when you are in conflict with your partner. Texting includes all the above-mentioned challenges without any of the body language and tone of voice. Additionally, texting often adds short summaries, negative labels, and no context. Texting when you need support after a tough marital moment may be one of the worst things you can do. It might work when you are calm, but certainly not when you are heated up.
If you are the best friend or loved one to whom someone reaches out to when during a marital struggle, please be careful what you say in that moment. You could be the very thing that helps destroy your friend’s marriage and cause them even more difficulty. Your comments, even well-intentioned, might just be another nail in the coffin on the way to killing a marriage. Be careful about feeling like you should validate your friend in exactly what they say while unintentionally invalidating the marriage. Please choose how you validate very carefully.
It is often best to assume your friend is hurting and extend empathy. Phrases like “that sounds tough” or “wow you must be struggling with that right now” can be more helpful than joining in name calling (or even initiating the name calling). It can be even more helpful to say things like “marriage can be hard at times” or “sometimes communication is difficult.” In this way, you support the individual without taking a risk of undermining the relationship. We can offer individual support without tearing down the other partner.
If you are one so trusted in those moments, please help your friend look at their role, what patterns exist, and how they could use your individual strengthening and support. For example, one best friend supported her bestie by saying “I know this is a hard area for you and it sounds like your husband may have stepped into it.” It can be helpful to focus on helping your friend to calm down, get perspective, and maybe not even think about it before opening up more. A good walk in the park or quick drive together may be more helpful than anything else you may say. You could even ask your friend if the two of you could just calm down together before you offer support. All of us handle things better when we are calmed down and clear headed. Help your friend get there.
Trusted support persons can do much to support a friend struggling in a difficult marital moment. It is wonderful to have a good friend to get through these things together. Marital partners often benefit from trusted friends when marriage storms arise. However, trusted friends need to be careful they are not magnifying marital problems, demeaning the other partner, or tearing down the institution of marriage itself. Trusted friends should always remember they are only getting one side of the story and need to validate accordingly. Most marriage problems are patterns or systems where both parties are equally accountable for how it went down.[i] Offer help to your friend to get through their part, their experience, their feelings on the way to helping them go back into the marriage. Labeling the other partner as a narcissist or immediately concluding its gaslighting (or whatever other popular internet searches say) is never helpful.
In short, how marriage validation is delivered really matters. If we seek validation in heated moments, we may feel vindicated and justified and supported but at a cost to the marriage. We may offer a whole lot of individual validation to our friend, but our misguided support may create a heavy toll on what happens next for the couple. We need to calm down and seek proactive support for what we need to do to be better in the marriage. We need to offer empathy and support to our friends taking extra caution not to hurt marriages and couples. This really matters. Validation from the right sources in the right way can make all the difference in a marriage.
[i] If you are supporting someone who is reporting receiving any kind of physical or sexual violence, please help them get professional and even immediate help.
