A Marriage Reinterpreted
I am an insecure wife.
We have been married for twenty plus years and still, this sense of insecurity sometimes bugs me.
Insecurity for me means I am not confident with my capacities as a wife (or spouse). However, things have changed enough that I’m slowly changing my mind.
Maybe, just as I am a good enough mom, I am likewise a good enough wife.
This quote by Aravind Adiga in his famous bestselling novel The White Tiger captures what I have come to realize after all these years of marriage: I have been looking for the answer to my insecurity whereas the answer was with me all along.
Because I am a psychologist, I try to understand my husband better using behavioral theories.
In terms of cognitive typology using the MBTI, my husband is a Feeler and I am a Thinker. He is a Perceiver, while I am a Judger.
What this means in my day-to-day life is, as a Feeler, his primary filter for making decisions are his feelings. Mine are logical suppositions (Thinking). One is not superior over the other. Carl Jung posited that thinking and feeling are modes of judgement at par with each other.
Another distinction between the two of us using the same theory is I am a Judger and he is a perceiver. This means that when I decide, I do it with an iron will, while he does not like deciding until the last moment because he loves to keep his options open.
Because I am the one writing this, there is a slight bias towards him. If you asked me my opinion about him ten years ago, it would have been very unbalanced, teeter tottering on contempt.
But my immersion as in psychotherapy has changed my perspective.
In the past, I did not have as many clients. A year ago, that changed. I was ready for the immersion, and thanks to the platform called Saya, I got more exposure.
My spouse and I are very different people, and yes, I still believe that both our unconscious processes pulled us together. What I am sick of is insecurity having a chokehold on me and my happiness as a wife.
I am sharing this with you because I don’t think I’m alone with the struggle. There are so many of us with low-grade relational anxiety. It hums in the background; it’s a nuisance I want to directly address.
A Husband SOP (or Romantic Partner SOP)
I mentioned earlier that understanding my partner’s MBTI helps. Begin with that to widen your understanding of your beloved. It is up to you how much you dive into the theory, but for me, the most useful parts are about communication style and decision-making process. Study these two aspects and you will begin to develop compassion for their points-of-view.
Another thing helps me deal with my insecurity as a wife is an SOP I developed. I notice that if you are a high-anxiety-level person, overthinking is a given. Too many what-ifs and you question your worth as a partner.
Usually, what triggers me is a vague look: my husband’s poker face is unbeatable. And whenever he pulls that in the middle of nowhere, I almost go bonkers. So, I developed this decision tree (SOP) for myself.
Here is how you can use it with your romantic partner.
When you notice a shift in them (a quiet, vague look, or different energy), pause. Do not react immediately.
Ask yourself: “When was the last time we were okay?” Use this as specific memory as a reference point for your flitter fluttering thoughts.
Check. Ask yourself, “During that moment, did I intentionally do something that may have offended his feelings? The keyword here is “intentional.”
If the answer to this question is YES, do not chase. Wait for a good moment (when he is calmer), then, approach. It is crucial to check your partner for readiness, not yourself. Reel in the strong desire to need to know the answer immediately.
If the answer is NO, meaning, you, after combing your memory, know that you did not intentionally do something that may have offended their feelings, then follow this assumption. “It is not about me.” The vague look is not about you. This is cardinal sin for many of us highly anxious people. We think that the world revolves around us or is connected to us in so many ways. But the reality is, 90% of the time, people are just going about their own business. So, yeah, do not take that vague look personally.
But how to live the next few moments of your life with this assumption, “It is not about me”?
You do one very casual temperature check on your partner. I purposely avoid asking, “Are you okay?” because that isn’t a casual check at all—it is blatant, heavy, and betrays exactly how neurotic I am feeling in that moment. Instead, I ask something light and highly dependent on whatever we are doing right then.
If he is driving, I might casually ask, “Where are we going next?” or if it’s getting close to noon, “What are we having for lunch?” If I want to be a bit more invasive without sounding accusatory, I might look over and ask, “Do you have a headache?”
Sometimes I follow it up with an slightly more direct step: “You got quiet all of a sudden.” But this is completely optional. The headache query usually works well alone.
Most of the time, when he replies I get a reading for that temperature check. If he does say or hint, during that temperature check that there is something more that needs to be discussed (my mind screams, “We are in the danger zone!”), then I will trust him to bring it up in his own timing. I will not dig or make it a big deal. Because more often than not, it is not about me. Whatever is bothering him is his business, and it is in his control, his area of responsibility, if he shares it with me. Or not.
And from this point on, after the casual temperature check, resume normal programming. I do this by noticing the everyday things. Regulating my breathing. Being where I am and doing that I am doing. It helps if what I am doing has step-by-step procedures that I can do on auto-pilot, like cleaning or cooking, or some almost mindless chore. And that is how I get back to the rhythm of my life at that moment.
Jungian Dreams and Psychological Safety
The technique I shared is a surface level guide designed to effectively combat overflow of anxiety when dealing with your partner on a daily basis.
This next part I am about to share goes deeper, into the realm of the unconscious.
The key element that made me realize I am in a good place spouse-wise were two symbolic dreams. I track Jungian dreams. Lately, I noticed a series of them. Two jump out in connected to my anxiety as a good enough wife. I call these the Flooded Toilet Dream, and the Maya Dream
The Flooded Toilet Dream
In the first Jungian dream, I dreamt a flood entered our home. One part of the house that got flooded was the toilet. When the waters receded, the toilet did not look the same, it was not really dirty, but it looked somewhat changed. What was more important for me, the dreaming me, however, was that it was still functional. Inexplicably, after this dream, I felt that something shifted in me. Something massive just made sense on an unconscious level.
Days after the dream, I felt some sort of peace regarding my spousal situation. Along came the thought: this is as good as it gets with him. My husband is an imaginative person. His mind naturally wanders toward possibilities, alternate futures, fantasy selves. So yes, he has feelings and fantasies that betray me. But this dream seems to communicate that even with all of those things in existence—all the flooding and uncertainty—we’re good. Our relationship functions. It may not look pristine white like how a toilet bowl ‘should’ be, but it still does the job. I don’t know a lot of people with pristine white toilet bowls.
Later on, while researching, I would discover that toilets in dreams can symbolize private emotional processing, while water often symbolizes emotion itself. This interpretation made intuitive sense to me. The toilet is where we privately ruminate, metabolize ugly things, and that’s just a dirty, but essential part of life.
The Maya Dream
The other dream involved me wearing a necklace with a key pendant and seeing a bird I initially thought was a robin. A few weeks later, however, I realized it was actually a maya bird (Lonchura atricapilla). Outside our window is a maya nest in plain view. My spouse has a habit of feeding the birds and encouraging them to make a home nearby. He has a nurturing side, and this is simply who he is. He parents our children the same way; when the kids are distressed, they naturally run to him (not me, and I’m the mama!).
Eventually, I realized what the dream was trying to communicate. The maya was the symbol, and the symbol was the key.
My spouse’s attitude toward the mayas—his caring nature—is exactly what he applies to me. With this attitude, I have a home, I am safe, and he will care for me, hopefully until my dying days. The maya became central to the meaning of the dream because it captures something essential about him. Nests, too, he does not abandon. Like the maya, he does not forsake his baby chicks or those he cares for.
And then, the image of the necklace made sense too. The key pendant was not pointing toward some hidden answer outside myself. The key was already around my neck.
I have always had psychological safety with him. My nervous system simply took years to understand the message.
As Aravind Adiga wrote in The White Tiger, “I have been looking for the key for years but the door was always open.”
These two dreams settled something inside me, but they did not remove my tendency to look outward for validation of what I was experiencing.
Belle Burden’s Book and My Cognitive Error
In searching for answers to my insecure wife conundrum, I came across Belle Burden’s book, Strangers. It’s a nonfiction work documenting the author’s gray divorce—a divorce in middle age. In the Philippines, legal separation and annulment are our realities, but they refer to the exact same rupturing of the marital bond.
In an interview, the author recounted how her husband built a separate life entirely apart from her, eventually exorcising her from his world. He even distanced himself from his kids until they were later able to reach a workable solution.
I naturally started comparing my experiences with Belle’s, comparing my husband with hers. All the more, there were structural parallels between me and the author: we are roughly the same age, our children are at similar developmental stages, and we are both professionals (she in law, I in psychology) who write. With so many overlapping lines, it was no wonder my brain automatically made the parallels and the connections.
But then I caught myself. I realized I was running with her narrative. I had some unknowns in my head, and because human beings are hardwired to create stories, I was plugging the gaps. Humans usually do this by following a spelled-out path, in a “monkey see, monkey do” way (we are still primates, after all). What I was experiencing was a classic cognitive distortion, a fallacy of thought.
I came to discern that my story is not Belle’s. If I were not so self-perceptive, I would have swallowed what the social media algorithm fed me. It had latched onto my anxiety and kept giving me themes of marital disharmony, separation, and divorce. What I experienced then, at the height of my search for answers, could have easily led me to doomsday scenarios and unnecessary spats with my spouse. But instead, I sat with the core realization. I differentiated my experience from that other woman’s. I probed deeper inside my head and heart, and then waited for things to unfold.
Choremance
At the height of my anxiety, during my search for answers, I began having those Jungian dreams. But three ordinary events also occurred within roughly two weeks of each other. These events cemented the path toward my realizations. Looking back now, they helped me decipher the dreams I wrote about earlier in this essay.
The first event happened when I asked my spouse to walk with me to the palengke. On the way there, I brought up one of my couples counseling clients—a couple who was almost a mirror version of my husband and me from ten years ago, with the added punch that the woman was Chinoy like me. Then, on the walk back home while discussing our purchases, the conversation switched to how much I had personally changed compared to that past self.
The second event happened later that same afternoon. We were at the Landmark Makati food court, buying takeaway meals for our teenage children. We continued the same conversation from the palengke, this time focusing on sacrifice: the kind required for long-term meaning instead of short-term gratification.
He reminded me of something that stayed with him from 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson: “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).” Privately, we call this the “Pick Your Sacrifice” rule. It has become one of the foundational philosophies of our life together as parents and as individuals.
The third event happened during another grocery trip. My spouse and I were talking in the car about the film Love Actually, which we both loved during our early years of marriage.
The conversation reminded me how much we still share the same Gen X cultural references and values. Eventually, the discussion expanded into our relationship itself: the way we function as a couple, our future plans, aging, finances, and growing old together.
What’s funny is while our palengke talk was about how much I’ve changed, this discussion conversely reminded me of how much he has stayed the same. Seeing him identify with the socially awkward male character in the film revealed his enduring, torpe nature. (Torpe being that Filipino term for a romantically awkward, emotionally shy man).
I realized then, “This is data!” The consistency of his character gave me comfort—his steadfastness, his nurturing side toward the maya birds outside our home, and his tendency to care deeply for the beings he considers part of his world.”
The three events I detailed are examples of what we call “choremance.” We build marital intimacy while running household errands and managing household business, grocery and National Bookstore trips, food court conversations included.
We do it regularly, and maybe this is what counts in the end, as a building block for a strong marriage.
Differentiation and Autonomy
Two months ago, our twenty-first wedding anniversary passed without festivities. He forgot the exact date, though I remembered it. Like the many years before it—has it been a decade now?—I did not mind.
I stopped counting on him to remember anniversaries long ago as an act of radical acceptance.
I know him, and his forgetting is nothing personal. He did make a little face when I mentioned it. And since I now feel secure enough about his love, I slept peacefully that uneventful night.
I find myself looking forward to more uneventful, “boring” nights with this man I have been married to for a long time. I have known him longer than I have not known him in my life.
I noticed recently that when I told my spouse about my appearance in a mental health talk, he spoke of me in glowing terms. He admires me. Even if it is not expressed romantically, he respects me as a person.
Why he stays with me—and it is surely not for my looks—remains a mystery, but anyway, I am adored.
This realization is solid gold.
Collating both the Jungian dreams and the choremance experiences, an enduring thought now echoes in my mind: “I got you.” Said to myself.
I felt that something shifted in me, something that made sense on an unconscious level, especially after those dreams. Jungian psychology suggests that when a dream leaves behind a profound feeling of peace, it may indicate that the unconscious has accepted or integrated something unresolved. It is part of the psyche’s integration process, where the conscious ego ceases struggling against the unconscious and instead begins to work with it. That’s my truth now; that’s what it feels like to me.
As I reflected earlier on the blocked toilet dream, I will say it again: I do not need to fully understand something in order to accept it.
So, going back to Belle Burden, perhaps the allure of her book for me centered on the word “divorce.” Because in some strange way, I feel like I am divorcing my husband without actually divorcing him.
With surgical precision, let’s replace the word “divorce” with “differentiation.”
I am learning how to live a life that is less psychologically dependent on him.
I will love him within my capacity while also doing the internal work necessary to make my inner home safe. I am practicing boundary-conscious love, the kind emotionally mature adults should exercise in romantic relationships.
If he changes, that is ultimately on him. His feelings are his feelings. His actions are his actions.
I have terms now.
And with this shift, maybe I can finally concede that I am, indeed, a Good Enough Wife.
