Inside of all of us are two forces that are very important to understand if you want to have a good marriage. These forces are your Giver, and your Taker.
Everyone, from the greatest saint, to the most hardened criminal, has a Giver. Your Giver is the part of your thinking that follows this rule: make other people happy, without worrying about your own happiness. Your Giver is happy to “give till it hurts.”
Everyone also has a Taker – even the most sacrificial person you know. Your Taker is the part of your thinking that follows this rule: make yourself happy, without worrying about the happiness of other people.
Your Giver and your Taker aren’t bad, but they are not very intelligent, and they are very shortsighted. If you listen to one or the other too much, the things you do are likely to result in your own unhappiness in the long term. Your Giver doesn’t think about your own happiness, so the ideas it gives you have a good chance of making you unhappy. And while your Taker thinks only about your happiness, its ideas can make the people around you upset enough that they will lose any motivation to care about your happiness.
Marriage gets really complicated from the fact that your spouse also has a Giver and a Taker. That sounds like a whole lot of people in your marriage, doesn’t it! Some people have the impression that their spouse has a split personality – what they are seeing is moments when first the Giver, then the Taker, are in control.
If you go along with an idea from your spouse’s Giver, you may wind up pretty happy in the short term. After all, your spouse’s Giver is following the rule of making other people happy! But over time if your spouse is doing things that make him or her unhappy, your spouse’s Taker is going to wake up. The Taker will be feeling massive resentment and will tell your spouse “Look, it’s time to think about me, now!” It may suggest that your spouse do something that makes you very unhappy, and your spouse may be happy to let the Taker take control for a bit. (That might look like the only way he or she is going to ever be happy, in the heat of the moment.)
The same thing can happen inside of you. Most people get married with an intent to lavish very generous care on their spouse. But if you do that in a way that makes you unhappy, if you follow the Giver’s rule, you may discover one day that you are very resentful. And suddenly your desire and motivation to keep giving that care to your spouse may vanish. Your Taker might suggest that you demand what you want from your spouse at that point – after all, you feel like you deserve it after all of the giving you have been doing! Your Taker might even suggest a fight or an angry outburst, which could do a lot of damage to your marriage (and to your account in your spouse’s love bank) if you give in.
Your Giver and your Taker can be viewed as two sources of ideas. The Giver’s set of ideas are ideas that will make other people unhappy, but might not make you happy; the Taker’s set of ideas are ideas that will make you happy, but might not make other people happy.
The good news is that some ideas are in both sets. There are some ideas that will please your Giver because they will make other people happy, and will also please your Taker, because they will make you happy. There’s another part of your mind: there’s you, the thinking part. You can think about the ideas that your Giver and Taker give you, and you can filter out the Giver’s ideas if they will make you unhappy, and you can filter out the Taker’s ideas if they will make your spouse unhappy. You will still be left with a lot of ideas – but they will be good for your marriage. You’ll be left with ideas that won’t make love bank withdrawals for you or your spouse, and will likely make love bank deposits.
An interesting thing about the Giver and the Taker is that if one of them is strong, the other is usually strong as well. A person who gives their Giver free reign often turns out to let their Taker have free reign over on. But if you will let the thinking part of your mind be stronger than the Giver and the Taker, if you will make the Giver and the Taker serve that thinking part as sources of ideas rather than as dictators, you will probably be able to build a much happier marriage for you and your spouse.
Get to know your Giver and Taker well, but don’t let them be in charge. Get to know your spouse’s Giver and Taker well also – if your spouse is thinking of doing something for you that you think might ultimately make your spouse unhappy, your spouse’s Giver might be about to make a mistake for your marriage, and you might want to propose an alternative idea instead.
You can read more about the Giver and the Taker in the Basic Concepts.
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