How to Know if you are Compatible for Marriage

Episode Summary of “How to Know if you are Compatible for Marriage”

Welcome to The Communicate & Connect Podcast, where we focus on helping military couples and families build stronger, more fulfilling relationships. This episode, titled “How to Know if You Are Compatible for Marriage,” is a must-listen for anyone contemplating tying the knot. Host Elizabeth Polinsky, a seasoned military marriage counselor, delve into the critical topic of marriage compatibility.

In today’s discussion, Elizabeth reveals how our family upbringing and generational patterns can significantly impact our relationship choices and marriage dynamics. She bravely shares her personal journey of navigating patterns of emotional availability, alcoholism, and trauma within her family, offering listeners a chance to reflect on their own family histories. You’ll discover why understanding these patterns is vital in preventing them from affecting your marriage, and how you and your partner can proactively address potential areas of conflict.

The episode also emphasizes the value of relationship assessments, such as the Relate, Prepare, and Focus assessments, as tools to gauge emotional readiness and identify strengths and weaknesses in your relationship dynamics. Elizabeth provides actionable insights to help you and your partner conduct a family tree analysis, a crucial step in identifying recurring patterns and planning for a healthy marriage.

Free Relationship Pattern Assessment

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Episode Transcript for “How to Know if you are Compatible for Marriage”

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:02]:
This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual, couples, and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Milit Relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinski, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes. We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast. And if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too, because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:58]:
Foreign.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:03]:
You’re listening to episode 22 how.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:07]:
To know if you are compatible for marriage. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Communicate and Connect podcast. I’m pretty excited about this episode. It’s the second episode in this series series that I’m doing about how to get ready for marriage and how to start your marriage off well. And part of doing that is knowing whether or not you’re compatible.

And I actually ended up making an entire checklist for starting off your marriage and what are some tips and tools and things that you should be doing to start off well. And if you’re interested, you can download that from this episode’s show Notes. Just go over to communicateandconnectpodcast.com, look for this episode in the search box and you’ll be able to download it right there.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:02:03]:
So this is a pretty important conversation whether or not you and your partner are compatible for marriage. And it’s sometimes it’s hard to know. This is because the way that we were brought up in our families often leads us to be attracted to certain types of people. And oftentimes what we’re attracted to in dating is not always compatible with what would be a good fit for us in terms of a marriage type of relationship.

Because if we are attracted to people that are similar to what we experienced in our family growing up, they often will kind of trigger some of the family drama emotionally inside of us, which then causes more conflicts. So there are different ways of figuring out if you’re compatible, but thinking about what were the patterns in your family that might be likely to kind of trigger you emotionally, and what have you been attracted to in previous relationships that has been triggering emotionally?

Are those same patterns being replicated now in your relationship with your partner? If they are, then it Then that may mean that you’re not compatible together, I think. But more likely what it means is that those are going to be areas that are going to be challenging, that you’re going to have to navigate together if you want to stay together. But it’s nice to know about those things up front.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:03:38]:
I’ll just start off with myself as an example. So my family has a really long history of military service, Navy on both sides. And let’s see, other things that run or are patterns in my family. Alcoholism runs in my family. Obesity runs in my family. Something that’s called multi generational trauma. In my family, going back a few generations, a lot of the people experienced various traumatic events in their lives. And there is also a pattern in my family tree of single moms, multiple divorces, affairs, and men who were unavailable for whatever reason.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:04:29]:
There were a variety of reasons if I think through my family tree, but the common thread is like, men who were not available. And so it’s interesting to look and think about what are some of the patterns that run in your family tree. And you want to know this for your partner also, because we often replicate things like this, get passed down generation by generation and through different means, different.

But we often end up replicating the patterns that have existed in our family. And this is something that I did a lot is I had a pattern before my husband of picking people who were unavailable, similar to the rest of my family tree. And so that was a really big pattern that I had to work with with my therapist to start changing.

And I’m really grateful that I embarked on that endeavor before getting married because it was a really difficult pattern to change. And I don’t think I would be married to my current husband if I hadn’t done that work with a therapist.

Breaking Family Patterns in Relationships

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:48]:
And so I had to work really hard to understand how my family dynamics were influencing the type of people I was choosing to date and how I might start choosing different partners who didn’t repeat the same patterns in order to have, you know, hopefully a very different outcome than what people in my family tree have experienced.

So this is why this is important, because no one wants to just replicate all the things in their family. But unless I’m thinking really hard about it and working on it, I likely will replicate a lot. And this is the case for both people in a relationship. You and your partner have unique family trees. It may be really interesting to know and look like, do a family tree together and see what patterns exist in both of your families.

So that way you can come up with A plan for how you might want to try to avoid those patterns or change those patterns and things like that. So this is one of two things that I think is really important for determining if you’re compatible.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:08]:
I’ll come back to this in a minute. Other than family patterns, the other one is doing an actual relationship assessment. There are a few different types of assessments out there. Obviously there’s the Relate relationship assessment, which is the one I tend to really recommend, their sponsor for this podcast. And it is the assessment that my husband and I did during our premaritals couples counseling. But the relationship assessment is one of them. It’s, you know, my favorite, and it’s the most well researched in my opinion. But there are others as well.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:45]:
There is one that’s called Prepare and one that’s called Focus. So Relate, Prepare and Focus, those are the three that are supported by the American association for Marriage and Family Therapists. And so I tend to recommend those because they are very well researched and they’re supported by the American association for Marriage and Family Therapists. Prepare and Focus. They do require a therapist to interpret the results for you.

So you don’t ever get to see, see, like the print out of your results. The therapist gets the printout and the therapist tells you a summary. The thing that I like about Relate, the Relate Relationship assessment is that you are allowed to also have the printout of your results.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:08:38]:
And that’s really nice. There is a fourth relationship assessment. It’s not one of the. One of the ones that’s supported by the American association for Family Therapists, but it is also really well researched, and that is the Gottman assessment. The Gottman assessment is also an assessment where the therapist has to be the one to interpret the results and then provide you a summary and you don’t get the printout of that.

So for a lot of reasons, I prefer Relate, and that is what I tend to recommend. But the other ones are not bad options. You could certainly, if you were working with someone in your hometown that did either Gottman Prepare or Focus, those would be excellent things to do as well.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:26]:
But if you end up doing a marriage checkup with me, we’ll be using the Relate assessment. So these, this assessment is really helpful. So assessments like this are really nice because they are. They’re tests. You and your partner both take the test and then it comes up with results on different categories. So, like, one of them is our emotional readiness. Are you guys emotionally ready for marriage? Family background? That again, is like one of those patterns. Patterns that run in Your family have a really big impact on your marriage relationship.

Relationship Assessment: Key Focus Areas

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:05]:
So those are things that sometimes get tested in these assessments. The quality of your relationship, how good you guys are at communicating, how satisfied you both are sexually, how you guys do at conflict, and different, different things like that. And then, and it’s based on research. All of all four are. They’re based on research on what is proven to work well in relationships and determine where your strengths are as a couple and where your weaknesses might be and where you might want to focus more and put more effort into those weak areas to help strengthen your relationship moving into marriage.

So again, if you’re interested in doing this, the relate assessment is one you can do just on your own and get the results given to you. Okay, now let’s go back to family patterns. So family patterns are something that do get, get assessed for in those types of tests, the relationship assessment tests.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:11:17]:
But you can also do this, this on your own. And what I really like to do with people is have them create a. Gosh, we call it a genogram. But really what it is, it’s just a family tree. So we, we lay out a family tree and you go through and you figure out, okay, who had these medical, like, what did, what did mom and dad have that were medical problems? What about the grandparents or aunts and uncles? What about great grandparents does? Okay, so like Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. That is a medical thing that runs. Breast cancer runs in my family.

Family Health Risks and History Insights

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:12:03]:
So those are, those are things to be aware of. And I would want to know what runs in my partner’s family. And then on this family tree, I would also go through and put down what about psychological and mental health things? So who, who in my family tree and in my partner’s family tree has depression? Who has anxiety or PTSD or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or anything like this.

I want to know about what’s going on with mental health also. I want to know if anyone, if anyone died by suicide just because that also is an indicator of increased risk for suicide. So we’re wanting to look at what might you and your partner and even your kids be at increased risk for giving your guys’s family tree. And then once we’ve got the medical and the mental health thing listed in this family tree for each person, then we would start looking at relational dynamics.

So who all got divorced in the family tree? How many divorces are there? Who all got were in affairs and were the affairs known? Were they secret? Did everyone know about it? But no one talked about it.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:13:34]:
Those are kind of relational patterns, a history of traumatic events. So, like, I have a lot of military in my family tree. And so there were people with ptsd, alcoholism, and. Yeah, just lots of. I had. There were some sexual assaults. There were lots of. Some physical abuse and neglect, things that happened, even going back to like, grandparents and great grandparents.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:14:05]:
So those are things that are nice to know going into a relationship, what’s on your. Your side and what’s on your partner’s side. Now, the other one that I really think is important to include in this sort of family tree is difficulty with boundaries.

And then the second one would be emotional availability, which is actually a boundary issue. But for the sake of this episode, I’m going to talk about them separately. So you can have somebody who is not good with boundaries. I think everybody has met someone in their life, probably has someone coming to mind who is not great with boundaries, who. They’re intrusive and they don’t respect your boundaries.

Family Boundaries: Navigating Emotional Conflicts

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:14:55]:
And so you want to know, where was that all happening in your family? And if you’re not entirely sure this is where, you could talk to a therapist because they can ask questions to help you determine something like this, even going back, like, if you can describe some of the interactions between your parents or your grandparents and the therapist can ask you some questions about that, they can help you determine how the boundaries were, even between your grandparents and things like that.

So, but knowing, knowing about boundaries, if you’re, if you have a family history of people not respecting boundaries and then you’re. But your partner doesn’t have that, well, then you know, that might be a source of conflict either when they interact with your family or even maybe sometimes between the two of you. That is something to be aware of so you guys can plan for that together.

The other one is emotional unavailability, which, like I said, technically is a boundary issue, but just kind of like on the opposite end. But if, if one partner comes from a family where they were really, really close and. And they spoke a lot about emotions and another partner comes from a family where nobody spoke about emotions. Everyone was very independent.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:16:20]:
They. There was just no, like, emotional content, then that is probably going to be area where you guys clash a little bit. It doesn’t mean that your relationship won’t work or that you can’t have a healthy, happy marriage, but it does mean that it’s something that you want to look out for.

And so. So using a family tree like this is to understand what are patterns in your family and your partner’s family that may impact your marriage and things that you want to be on the lookout for and allow you to discuss what type of action plan you want to have for managing areas where you might clash in regards to this. And so your action item for today is to discuss what patterns exist in your family that you might want to change, patterns that you don’t want to replicate, and how you might go about trying to prevent replicating that as a couple.

If you want help with this, please go see the show notes for today’s episode. I included kind of like a fillable worksheet for you to use that will help you with the family tree and helping you figure out what are the patterns in each of your guys’s families.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:17:48]:
So that is something that you could use to help you have this discussion if you would like. Thanks for listening and I hope you guys enjoyed this episode.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:18:07]:

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so Please take a second to go rate, review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for our FREE 10-week relationship email course.

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