Kevin Anthony 0:00
Welcome to the Love Lab podcast, the place to be for honest and real talk about relationships and sex, whether you’re a man or woman, single or a couple, this is the show for you. I am your host, Kevin Anthony, and I am here to help you have the relationship of your dreams and the best sex of your life.

Kevin Anthony 0:23
All right, welcome back to the Love Lab podcast. This is episode 393, and it is titled, What is a pause button marriage, and are you in one? So we’re going to be talking today about what my guest calls a pause button marriage. And I’m not going to explain to you exactly what that means just yet, but it is an interesting one. And you know, it’s a name for something that happens in a lot of relationships. And I think identifying it and giving it a name is kind of important, because once we identify that this is actually happening, then we can take steps to fix it. Because I might not tell you exactly what the pause button marriage is just yet, but I can tell you, when you hit the pause button in your marriage, bad things happen. So you really don’t want to do that. So what you want to do is you want to learn to recognize the signs you want to learn to prevent it, or if you’re already in it, you want to figure out how to reverse it. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Short intro today, because I want my guest to really do you know the talking, as far as describing exactly what this is and how it works.

Kevin Anthony 1:38
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Kevin Anthony 3:00
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Kevin Anthony 4:09
All right, my guest today, Dr. Lee Baucom, is a marriage coach who believes something most therapists won’t tell you: you don’t need your spouse on board to start saving your marriage. For over two decades, he’s helped 1000s of people in hurting marriages discover that real change begins when one person decides to stop waiting and start acting. His approach is hope-infused and action-oriented because he knows that the people who find him are tired of feeling stuck and ready for a new direction. Welcome to the show, Lee.

Lee Baucom 4:43
Hey, Kevin, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Kevin Anthony 4:47
You know, before we dive into the questions, I love what you wrote in your bio, which is, you don’t need your spouse on board to start saving your marriage. And I just. That really struck me when I was, you know, obviously I prepped this, you know, when we spoke before, but I was reading it over this morning just to make sure I had it down before we got on. And it just really struck me in that moment, because this is something that I say to clients all the time. I get on calls with people who potentially want to work with me. And, you know, we start going through how we might work together.

Kevin Anthony 5:21
And one of the things I often hear is, Well, maybe I should just wait until I’m in a relationship, or maybe I should just wait until I can get my partner on board. Like these are really common things that I often hear from people, and I always say, Would it be better if your partner were on board? Yeah, it would. If we could work with both of you, that would be amazing. However, even you alone can make great progress, and you would be amazed at the shifts that will occur in your relationship once you start shifting who you are. And so I was really glad to see, as you wrote, that exact thing in your bio, and I’m glad to see that other people really, really believe that as well.

Lee Baucom 6:03
Yeah, you know. And one of the things about change is it almost always starts with one person going, okay, something’s got to pivot here, and then we talk ourselves out of it. Sometimes, I’ve had a lot of people who would say, ” You know, it takes two to tango, and so I can’t do anything. I’m like, you’re already tangoing. It’s just not a really great dance. So maybe you want to change your dance steps. And the fact is that just as you’re pointing to one person deciding to take responsibility, not take responsibility for everything, but take responsibility for themselves and how they’re going to interact in the relationship, that changes one part of the dance, and that always is showing up in how the dance goes itself.

Lee Baucom 6:45
So yeah, one person can start the process. Just to be clear, both people have to be involved at some point to bring it to the end, but one person can always start. And if you’re waiting for the spouse to decide to do it, you lose time, you lose momentum and you lose potential, because if they are not ready to change, it’s because they’re not feeling that there’s possibility, they’re not feeling that there’s pain, there’s something they’re not quite ready for at that point, but they can join the process as it continues. It just has to get started.

Kevin Anthony 7:20
Yeah, and I haven’t even gotten to my first question yet, but we’re kind of already going off in a different direction. But I think this is a really important thing to mention, because, you know, I’ve told this story on the show a couple of times about my relationship with my father, and there was something that I sort of held against him for a number of years, something I felt that he did that was not right, and as a certain point in my life, I just decided to let go of that. I was like, ” Why am I carrying this around anymore? And I never said a word to him. I never, then said, Hey, Dad, can we have a talk? I want to talk to you about this. I never, I just said, You know what, I’m done, holding on to this, and my entire relationship with Him shifted.

Kevin Anthony 7:59
And you know you can say, Okay, how I showed up shifted, but literally, how he started showing up to me shifted, without any conscious discussion about what had changed in the dynamic. And so I like to use that as an example, because the same thing is possible in your relationship. When you shift how you’re showing up in the relationship, you might see the other person shift. In other words, we’re talking about whether the other person needs to come on board. Yeah. And what you might see is not a guarantee, but what you might see is, when you shift first, suddenly they’re willing to come on board, whereas they weren’t willing before, right? Or at least to some extent, yeah.

Lee Baucom 8:40
Well, you’re talking about something interesting there. Because interesting there, because we both are noting a conscious choice by one person to pivot, and then there’s the unconscious pivot from the other person. They might not even be aware. And so it doesn’t have to be even this formal place that at some point your spouse goes, Okay, I’m ready to be a part of this. You may find that they’re just slowly joining in, and they’re not even aware of the shift. And then one day, you’re like, wow, we’re in this great relationship. How did that happen? One person took conscious responsibility, which affected the whole process.

Kevin Anthony 9:15
Yes, okay, let’s get into my actual questions for this interview. Now, you know, in the title of this, it is, of course, what is a pause button marriage? And so let’s just start with describing to the audience what you mean when you say pause button marriage? What is that?

Lee Baucom 9:37
Yeah, so we’re going to bridge back to that unconscious thing for a minute. So let’s talk about how we subconsciously or unconsciously get into this process. So couples spend a lot of energy getting together, joining, getting this momentum, going into the relationship, and you don’t think of it as, oh, I’m doing this effort, this work. You’re just attracted to this person. You’re responding to this person. You’re trying to bring in this relationship. Relationship. And so you bring all of this energy and focus in. For some people is, you know, it’s just kind of the overwhelming thing that’s on their mind, being with this person, seeing this person, and attending to this person and drawing them in.

Lee Baucom 10:11
So you get to this place where you go, ” Wow, you know, we could probably do this the rest of our lives. And so you decide to get married, to pledge the rest of your lives, and after that. And I’m not saying it’s after the honeymoon. I’m not saying it’s a month in or even a year in, but at some point you go, Wow, all of that energy we had in getting our relationship, we’ve got that now. It’s what we’ve got that’s nailed down. We don’t have to worry about that anymore. And so now we can get back to the rest of life, and many times it’s a focus on, okay, so now we’re going to do the kid thing, or now we’re going to do the career thing, or now we’re going to do the hobby thing, or the friends thing, or the, you know, taking care of aging parents, or whatever it is. And you make a subconscious, unconscious decision to hit the pause button, thinking we’ll get back to us when we have a chance.

Lee Baucom 11:01
And that pause button is always the UN pause, of it is always somewhere out in the future. It’s interesting that, instead of going, what do we need to do to sustain our relationship? Instead, they go, ” We’ve got that. We don’t have to worry about that anymore. And the momentum of that carries you for a while, so you hit the pause button, and you don’t notice that the momentum is starting to fall off the relationship, because you come in kind of with that energy. But the pause button is really a choice, subconsciously or not, to disconnect from this person that you spent all of this energy connecting with, and slowly over time that accumulates, given the fact that we humans are very connecting creatures, probably more than any other creature on the planet, we start feeling that as pain of missing that connection, of feeling like we don’t matter to our spouse, even if we are also doing the pause we’re not aware of the fact that, you know they’re they might be hurting too. We’re aware of what we’re missing. And so the pause button is really a process of going from connection to disconnection with the plan at some indeterminate time in the future, always moving out further, that will get back to us.

Kevin Anthony 12:23
So you and I both know that hitting the pause button is bad, right, potentially toxic to your relationship. And I think pretty much anybody that you know does this sort of work for a living knows that my question to you is, why is it that more couples don’t recognize the dangers of hitting the pause button?

Lee Baucom 12:50
So at the beginning of my career, most of my career, I spent a lot of time working with premarital couples who were getting married in seven places in the community I was working, and they had to come through my office three times. And so I heard a lot of stories about how they got together, and I often ask the question, so let me just own the fact that part of my job was to kind of pick a fight to puncture what they thought was the perfect relationship. I just needed them to have some reality based to the fact that every relationship requires effort and work. And so I’d often say to them, okay, if you walk down the street and ask the statistics on the success of a marriage, everybody would know what it is, basically somewhere in the vicinity of a coin toss. So it’s not quite, it’s a little more to the positive, but let’s just round it up to a coin toss.

Lee Baucom 13:37
So why is it you think that you’ve beaten the odds? You know you’re planning on doing this, knowing the statistics. Why do you think you beat the odds? And they always would tell me, it’s because they had the real thing, like they had the love it would take the real thing, as opposed to those who thought they did, got into the marriage, and realized they didn’t have love. That was what they had in their mind. So that’s why I had to pick a fight with them a little bit, because they weren’t willing to listen to anything to the contrary at that point, because they had that belief of we’ve got what it takes. So you believe you’ve got what it takes already. What do you have to do? You’ve got the relationship nailed down. You got that, what do you have to do? Well, now we have to do these other things, not realizing that. Part of the why, the reason you have that connection, the why of the love, is connection. And connection doesn’t stay static, right? You don’t just freeze it in place, and they miss that piece. So, because they think they already have it nailed down, and because they have a lot of momentum, that makes them feel like they are at those early stages, still in connection, they miss the disconnection.

Kevin Anthony 14:51
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. They think they’ve got what it takes. And you know, obviously, as I’m listening to you. I’m thinking about the things that you’re saying. I’m not just waiting for the next question to come. I’m really like listening to what you’re saying, and I’m thinking about and one of the thoughts that popped into my mind in that moment was thinking about all the conversations I’ve had with clients and friends when they get into new relationships, and listening to the way they describe them and then comparing that to what the outcome of that relationship was a few months, a few years down the road. And I was thinking about that while you were talking, I thought that really is true. Everyone of them thought that this, this was it. They had what it took, and this was going to be the one. In fact, this weekend, I was just listening to a friend who’s in a new relationship telling me exactly all of that.

Lee Baucom 15:49
And this is the one. This is the right one this time.

Kevin Anthony 15:51
And knowing her history over the many, many years I have known her, you know, I mean, and she obviously knows what I do for a living. I’ve helped her many times, and, you know, I just listened to the message, and I’m just going, okay, good. I’m glad that he sounds like a nice guy. I’m wishing you the best of luck. And in the back of my mind, I’m also thinking, I’ve watched how this plays out a dozen times over the years, right? So that’s interesting. Why do so many couples go into it thinking, like, this time they really got it all figured out?

Lee Baucom 16:26
This actually, it explains a little bit. There’s some research that shows that people who believe that there is one are less likely to have a successful relationship than those who believe that it’s a process of finding a person and then making it right. So the one is the problem, and that is because when you believe it’s the one, you don’t have to worry about that, right? Because you found the one and the level carries you through, and then, as that is no longer working, you can simply pivot to, well, they weren’t the one I was wrong about that, right? And so that’s why that myth is so damaging to the long-term prospects of a relationship. But we all have some piece of that, of going if we have the right love that will carry us through, we don’t have to worry about it, not attending to the fact that the effort of connecting is a daily part of a successful relationship.

Kevin Anthony 17:21
Yeah, I was kind of laughing inside when you said the one, because I actually did an episode on this show. I think I called it something, something about twin flames and soul mates or something like that. And the whole point of that episode was basically what you were just saying, and the impetus for that episode, and actually, that was one that my wife and I did when she was still alive. It was because we, we had some friends who called them. They were, they were always talking about how they were twin flames, and they were just meant to be together, but they had the most dysfunctional relationship we had ever witnessed. I mean, badly dysfunctional. And so the impetus for that was, like, we’re watching our friends here have this really dysfunctional relationship, but they absolutely will not end it, because they believe that they are twin flames and meant to be together. So yeah, I’ve witnessed that happen more than just that one time. So that’s a really interesting point.

Kevin Anthony 18:21
I know I’ll say that, you know, in my marriage with my wife, you know, we did believe that we had it as well. But what, what made me believe that we had it was simply that when we got together, it felt different than every other person I had ever dated. And I was like, something was really different here. All of those patterns that I had repeated in my past relationships aren’t here anymore. And I was like, Okay, this has potential. But even then, I still knew that it needed work and that you couldn’t just like, sort of okay. Now we got, it’s like, I love to use analogies, right?

Kevin Anthony 19:03
So if you get, you know, a brand new, say, house plant, you went down to the garden store, and you got a new house plant, and you plopped it down in the spot that you thought was going to be the right spot for it, and you’re like, great, I got it. I have a beautiful houseplant. I’m done. I can return to it maybe next year, when I’m thinking about rearranging the house or something like that. What’s going to happen to that? A new car, you buy a new car. You got what it takes. You finally saved up enough money. You finally got the car of your dreams. Well, can you just drive it forever without doing anything to it? Of course not. So why do we think as humans that we can get the relationship, and you’ll see this too, like, women get super hyper focused on the marriage, right, getting him to marry her, right? And then they finally get him to say, Great, I’m married. That’s it. It’s like, no, no. That’s just the beginning. That’s where you’re starting.

Lee Baucom 19:59
But isn’t that the message we get in media, from Disney to Hallmark and all the others, that leads us all the way up to I do and then happily ever after? And when the work kicks in is when you’re in the relationship, and you actually have to say, ” What do we do? So I’ve used the car analogy by saying, What if you find that there’s this new law? And the new law is, you have one car for the rest of your life. That’s it. How would you treat that car? I would not be hot-rodding it around town. I would make sure it got its regular service. I would wash it. I would make sure I park it away from anybody else who’s going to mistreat it. I wouldn’t let people who would mistreat it get near it. All of those are the same thing, you know, how what are you doing when the relationship you built, the marriage that you just vowed to be in for the rest of your life?

Lee Baucom 20:52
That’s the one. How do you treat it, and so many times I watch as people, you know, rev the engines and don’t do the maintenance and don’t keep it safe, just like we just said, what you would do if you knew it was the one. So how do you treat it? How do you think about it? The house plants? A great analogy, though, because that’s the daily care. You know, I’m not making sure that it gets the water it needs and the food it needs and the light it needs. Or do I just think that it’s going to do its own thing? Relationships never do their own thing. So if you hit the pause button, you’re creating patterns of disconnection now. So you’ve gone from habits of connection to stalling them out and moving to habits of disconnection. And over time, that accumulates until the relationship begins to show all the symptoms that people would come to my office, you know, they would come in and say, we’ve got a communication problem. So you need us to learn to communicate better. You need to teach us the communication skills. I’m like. Communication itself is not the problem. It’s what you’re communicating that’s the problem.

Lee Baucom 22:00
If you’re communicating from a place of connection, you’ll feel that if you’re communicating from a place of disconnection, you’ll feel that. So communication is not a problem. The fights about parenting are not the real problem. That’s a symptom of the disconnection, as are fights about money and sex and whatever else they’re having, these arguments that they think are the problem. I’ll even go as far, so far as I say, in most situations, an affair is a symptom of the disconnection. Whoever did that, whoever acted out, is 100% responsible for having broken the boundaries of the relationship. And both people can say, ” Gosh, we were a part of a disconnected relationship that made it vulnerable to that. So even that is a symptom, with some rare exceptions, it’s the symptom of the disconnection.

Kevin Anthony 22:46
I completely agree with that. I don’t actually even think that’s a radical statement. I know you were kind of saying, like, I’ll even go as far as to say maybe, maybe a lot of people listening think that’s radical, but, but again, having done this work for a number of years, I completely agree there are exceptions. Of course, there are people who will cheat no matter what. Right, you know, there’s, there are some of those, but they’re more the outliers in most relationships. People cheat because their needs aren’t getting met because somebody hit the pause button. That’s that is literally the reality of it. Somebody feels like their needs aren’t getting met, and the other person is not, most likely not even trying or not.

Lee Baucom 23:25
So let’s go a step further. I generally think that most people, in most situations, they both hit the pause button. But there are two different reasons that can happen. One is a parallel pause where they’re both like, oh, we need to do the parenting thing. We’re going to be mom and dad now, or parents together, and that’s just how we’re going to view each other. Or you need to get your career going, and I need to do this. And so it’s kind of a parallel. It’s time for us to do other things. The other is what I think of as a reflective, like, Oh, I’m hearing you say you want to do this in your career, so I’m going to give you the space to do that. So they’re reflectively hitting the pause button, seeing that their partner has done that. In the end, both people are entering into a pause button marriage, subconsciously in agreement with each other. So it’s not like one’s going, wait, wait, wait, we need to attend to this. It’s like, oh, okay, well, that’s where we go, but it’s okay, because the relationship will take care of itself, right?

Kevin Anthony 24:24
You actually went into my next question, which was, what are some of the reasons why people hit the pause button, and some of the most common ones that you mentioned they want to pursue a career, and children are a really big one. I mean, there are other reasons as well, you know. But one thing I want to explore is, rather than going into, you know, what all the individual reasons are, I want to take a couple of the top reasons people hit the pause button and talk about why that isn’t necessarily a great idea. So what I mean by that is, I want to take children. People do this often, and they say, Well, you know, it’s all about the children. We’re going to focus all of our time in a. Tension on the children. We’re not going to nurture the relationship, because the children come first. And to that, I always say, what kind of childhood or development are they going to have growing up in a relationship that is unhealthy? Basically, your relationship is the container for these children to feel safe and to develop in a healthy way. And if you don’t nurture that right, you’re actually doing your children a disservice. And so I tell parents all the time, you think you’re doing the right thing for your children, you’re actually doing something that could potentially be harmful for them. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.

Lee Baucom 25:39
Absolutely, I think that the primary relationship in any household is that relationship, the marriage, not the kids, is the marriage and and so you treat it that way, and you make sure you bracket it off and say that’s the priority, not the time priority, but the priority in focus, like everything else will fall in place around that if we make the kids the focus, we often raise fairly narcissistic kids, because the focus is on them. It’s not like they are partners in that, right? They’re getting all of that focus, and so they’re able to think they are the most important thing there. And by the way, they’re correct, but it raises them in a certain level of narcissism that’s not helpful for them, because the rest of the world is not going to say you’re the most important thing.

Lee Baucom 26:26
Here, they end up with a misguided notion of who they are in the world, as opposed to when they go, okay, Mom and Dad are the most important, and they deeply love us and will protect us and take care of us. That still comes from feeling safe, and the same with a career. I mean, you know, I don’t know how it’s less true now than when I was early in my career, that people would think that they had decided to pause the relationship until, like, retirement. I don’t hear as much of that talk anymore, like that’s the mindset. It still happens. It’s just that that’s not the mindset. That’s why we are seeing so many great divorces these days, because they toughed it out thinking, Okay, well, we’ll finally get back to us, and then it’s back to us. And they’re going, Who are you, and ” Do I want to be around you?

Lee Baucom 27:13
And that’s true at the end of raising kids, you know, if you’ve been that disconnected, that’s some pretty big years of change, you know, 18 to whatever, 20-some years of change that has been focused on those kids, and suddenly you’re staring at each other going, Oh, empty nest. That is why an empty nest is also one of those big points of divorce. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people as their kids go to college or launch into their own lives go, yeah, we’re done now, and they think that it’s okay because the kids are launched having talking to all those people before they got married, they all tell me how wherever it was that the parents broke up was hard on them, even if they were technically adults.

Kevin Anthony 28:00
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It always just sort of boggles my mind that people think that, you know, it’s okay to let that primary container of the relationship, you know, sort of fall apart when that really is the container that holds all of that, okay. So that one is kind of an easy one to understand, like, if we talk about it, and, you know, we say, here are the reasons why you would really want to nurture that and think about the kids and the effect on them, that I think is pretty easy for people to understand. But let’s take another common one that maybe seems less apparent, and that is career, because that is another big one that we definitely see people put their relationship on hold to pursue their career. And, you know, again, I think this one seems less apparent because it’s like, well, you know what? What damage could really come from that, right? Like, what’s the big deal with that one? I have my own thoughts about why that’s a big deal, but share your point of view of why, I mean specific to that particular reason, that it can be an issue.

Lee Baucom 29:07
So there are a couple of pieces. One thing we talked about was that we’ll get back to you after the career. That means that there’s this big span of life where you’re completely separated. So that’s a piece. The other is how important it is to stand together in these struggles. So there’s not if you’re climbing through, you know, you don’t have this person and feeling like you’re on the same team with that, and so suddenly you don’t have the feeling of we’re in this together. So that piece comes in, and it is also the fact that, if you allow that it’s easy to put the focus, the emotional energy, into the career, instead of into the relationship. So the career becomes a substitute spouse. In fact, I’ve often said, especially to entrepreneurs, you’re a fair partner. Is your job, it’s your business, because it’s always there with you. In Arms, welcoming you to come do more work. And there are people there who are giving you praise and telling you what a great job you’re doing, and they’re pulling you further and further in because you’re not getting it here. You need that because you’re not having it here. And so you’re not a team, you’re not supporting each other through that. You’re not seeing those pieces. And then you have the seductive side of the job that’s always waiting.

Kevin Anthony 30:24
I was nodding so hard in agreement that my in-ear monitor started falling out. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And those, those were my thoughts exactly. You know you want to, but careers are hard. I mean, an entrepreneur’s career is especially hard. But even other careers can be really hard. They can be demanding, they can be long hours, they can be high stress, and without that teamwork and without that support from your relationship, it can be even harder. And so not only is focusing too much on your career and hitting the pause button on your relationship bad for your relationship, but you’re also not getting the benefit that the relationship itself can bring to the job. And I think that’s something that a lot of people just don’t get. And they just like, No, I need to focus on my career right now. And I really need to do this. And it’s like, how much better could you actually do that if you had a solid foundation of a relationship to do it from?

Lee Baucom 31:21
Yeah, it’s the partnership that’s there to stand together. I mean, it is hard to go through life, period. It’s harder to go through life when you feel like you’re the loner in that, that you’re trying to do that without the support. I mean, that is what marriage has added at its best when it’s operating, you have the sense that this person is your teammate. You’re doing this. I call it being a we, like we are in this together. We have this entity that’s separate. It doesn’t mean you lose yourself to the relationship. It doesn’t mean you disappear. It’s actually bringing your best self. So now we go to sports analogies. If you’re on a sports team, right? The goal is to win the game, and the way you win the game is by playing your best, bringing your best skills to the game.

Lee Baucom 32:05
That doesn’t mean you have to prove that you’re the best out there. It doesn’t mean that you play poorly because your spouse or your teammates are not showing up. It means that you continue to be your best, showing up for the goal. So the goal for a marriage. Let’s get through life and be successful in that, and let’s do it as a team together. Being on a team also means that you’re not always going to be at your maximum. So when I talk about being your best, I mean at that moment, like what you have today to offer is what you’re giving. I play a lot of pickleball. So when I step out, my partner, I’m immediately watching and going, where do I need to shore up the game? How can I best support this person? Our goal is to be the first to 11. How can I do that?

Lee Baucom 32:52
I don’t tear them down when they miss the shot. I don’t fuss at them about how they should be playing harder. I’m going with what we have on the court. Let’s play that game the best we can. And for me to be asking the question, how do I show up best for this game? Maybe I have a really good, I don’t know, forehand, but they have a really awesome backhand, so I’m gonna let them take that shot, because even though I could do it, I shouldn’t, and then there are times when I’m gonna step in the same in life. Are there ways that we can communicate about that, but both bring our best to that game?

Kevin Anthony 33:23
Yeah, the idea of really being a team in a relationship is huge. It’s something my wife and I used to talk a lot about. We used to call ourselves Team US, right? And we always looked at the relationship exactly how you just described it. If we are a team. How do we lift each other up for ultimate team success? And unfortunately, in my work, I don’t see a whole lot of that in other couples. And therefore it’s a big piece that I’m always trying to teach them. So couples come and, you know, they start working with me. Yes, we’re going to work on how do we improve your communication and all that stuff, too, but a big piece of it is shifting their mindset around how they show up in the relationship, because many of them are literally competing with each other. They’re competing with each other, and it’s like, no, no, you’re on the same team.

Lee Baucom 34:16
Yeah, this is my mode, or we mode. Which one are you in? And my mode is that competition? I do think that that is a, if you haven’t decided you’re a, we there. It’s you, me that’s in the relationship, and you and I often become competitive. And that competitiveness you have to reorient to. It’s not, you know, we’re out there dealing with the world. So, back to pickleball. I was at one point, I was like, maybe I could play advanced, let’s see what happens. And so I got there, and there was an advanced player on the court, and there were three of us who were all kind of going, ” Can we do this? And one of the guys came up and said, I’m playing with you. I don’t want to play with the advanced player. I’m like, okay, but I’d want to be playing with an advanced player.

Lee Baucom 34:59
So he and I whipped the other team, and the reason we did is that the advanced player continued to berate his partner and compete with his partner for all of the shots. And so here we are, much less capable players who stomped them simply because the advanced player took his partner down because he made it a competition on that side of the court, my partner and I were like, well, let’s see what we can do out here. We’re probably gonna get blasted away, but let’s see what we can do. Let’s be a team here, and we watch the other team fall apart. It’s what happens in many marriages. It ends up being a competition or a blame contest to ask the question, you know, how can I be blameless in whatever’s going on? And how can I make it your problem?

Kevin Anthony 35:44
Yeah, which is just another form of competition, just sort of the inverse form of competition. It’s, I’m competing to be the one who’s not at fault for anything, right?

Lee Baucom 35:55
I’m going to compete to be the best.

Kevin Anthony 35:57
Yeah, exactly. So this is a good segue into some of the problems that hitting the pause button on marriage can create. So we’ve talked about what a pause button marriage is. We’ve talked about some of the reasons why people hit the pause button. We’ve talked about, you know, how that can impact the things that they’re hitting the pause button for, as well as the relationship. Let’s just talk a little bit about what some of the biggest problems that can occur in relationships are as a result of hitting that pause button.

Lee Baucom 36:28
So if we step back and recognize that we humans are in that connection mode, we, if we don’t have it, feel the pain of that. And so that starts off the spiral. So when we if I hit my hand with a hammer, I am completely aware of the pain of my hand, and I want to stop the pain. And so that’s often what I watch in relationships. They’ve been a part of the disconnection, but are not aware of their part of it, keenly aware of their spouses’ part of that. And so they’re going, why don’t you want to show me attention? Why don’t you want to be with me? Why don’t you want to respect me, whatever it is, fill in the Word.

Lee Baucom 37:07
And so then these problems start to flow from that. When you start to get to that place, we’re in an immediate frame of blaming. I’m going to find your fault. It’s that blame frame that happens, that you’re the problem here. And so you need to change. So now I’ve given up my responsibility, and when I give up my responsibility, I also give up my ability to do something different, because now it’s not my fault, it’s your fault. So everything begins to be other-focused, the breakdowns we see of communication, of working together on, you know, different areas of life, of basically doing the divide and conquer, even though that’s the wrong use of, you know, what that strategy was about. It wasn’t to divide the household; it was to divide the enemy and stay together as an army, right?

Lee Baucom 37:54
And so we get into these places where I hear people saying things like, We’re just two ships passing in the night, so they’re living parallel lives. We’re roommates at best, where they again are just not communicating about anything other than what has to be, and they’re feeling the pain of that. And so from there, we can, I call it the arc of disconnection, and it goes from that disconnection all the way down to disdain, and along the way, you hit disrespect and other disses as you’re dissing the relationship, until you hit that point of disdain. And disdain is just that deeply wounded place where you’re just so put out with the other person that you’re going to blame them completely, right? That is, you’re not worth it, and that’s the end of the process. You know that at that point, it’s very hard for couples to step away from it; it’s very hard at that point; they usually are taking legal action.

Kevin Anthony 38:52
You, you pretty much summed it up perfectly, all the different things that show up in the relationship when you end up hitting the pause button. And you know, if you’re listening to this, if any of those were like, oh, that sounds familiar, then you know something needs to shift. You know that something needs to change, and you know that you need to unpause that button. And that’s what I really want to talk about next. I’m a little bit past when I wanted to take a break, so I want to take a break now just to read another sponsored ad. And when we come back, what I really want to focus on is how does a couple unpause it? Is it really that easy? Is it as simple as just hitting the unpause button, or is it a little bit more involved? So let’s talk about that when we come back on the other side of the break.

Kevin Anthony 39:47
All right, are you a couple? Are your relationship and sex life where you want them to be? Are there changes you would like to make, but just don’t know how? Maybe you think there is nothing that can be done if you’re not 100% happy with where your relationship or sex life is, then get help today and change your life. Go to https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/couples/ and schedule a strategy call with me today so we can map out a strategy to get you where you want to be so you can have it all your way. That is https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/couples/. And you know if you’re listening, I say this every time I read this ad. If you’re listening to Lee and you like what he says, you like his approach, go reach out to Lee. I will give him an opportunity at the end to share where you can find out more about his work. I say this all the time, but there are a lot of people out there who need help. I’m only one person. Lee’s the only one person like there’s enough room for we should all have 100% booked calendars with the number of people that need our help. So if you like me and you like listening to the show, go to https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/couples/, and at the end, I’ll give Lee an opportunity to talk about where you can find him. I personally am really resonating with everything that Lee is sharing, so I think he would be a great option to work with as well.

Kevin Anthony 41:08
Okay, so we talked about what a pause button marriage is. We talked about the reasons why people hit a pause button. We talked about some of the consequences of it. Let’s talk now about what couples can potentially do to unpause so a couple realizes that something isn’t right, that they’ve lost the connection, that they’re not happy in their relationship. How can they turn things around?

Lee Baucom 41:41
So let’s start with the likely case that it’s one person who’s realizing that and one person who’s going to start taking action. If both people are doing it, that’s what I mean, that I have an assessment of where somebody is and their possibility of working on things. That’s a green light. It’s like, you know, you can get resources and work on that. And so the same things I’m going to talk about here will apply there too. It’s just that it’s a little more pivotal for one person working on it. One of the things that often happens when one person wants to work on it is that they decide to go full steam ahead. The other way, you’ve been working on disconnection all this time, and so you’re like, I’m going to do everything to connect. And so I call that being the chaser. And what happens when you’re chasing? So my dog is sleeping beside me, if she’s in the backyard, and I decided to try to go get her, she likes to stay away from me, right? She’s running around the yard now. She’s doing it because she thinks it’s the game.

Lee Baucom 42:34
And I’m not suggesting that it’s a game and a marriage, but that’s the same dynamic. If I’m chasing her, the faster I go, the more she’s going to run from me, the more she’s going to space from me. And so I got to find some ways of pacing and inviting her to come over. So if I have a treat in my hand and I stand still, she will come towards me, because she wants that reward. And guess what, humans are not entirely unlike that. So the danger is in trying to go too fast, like chasing this person down, you’re never going to catch them. You have to have that pacing point. So I talk about being more Invitational. So one of the things I often hear from people is they’re like, Oh, we’re going to do date night. Date Night doesn’t work in a disconnected relationship. It can work great in that green light thing, right?

Lee Baucom 43:21
But if you’re disconnected, doing things like date night or romantic getaway, or an encounter weekend, a couple encounter weekend, or some other big thing like that, it feels overwhelming to the person who’s not ready to step into it, and that can collapse the system. It just can’t hold that level of connection, but it can take little pieces of connection, and you can grow that. You can build it up. It’s not that you can’t do those things at some point. It’s when you do those things. So you’re layering it. The first pieces are more Invitational. So instead of date night, let me suggest a tag-along, which is something like saying, Hey, I heard about this new place down the road that has a great sandwich. I was thinking about trying it out tomorrow for lunch. Would you like to go with me? That’s a light ask, right? And they can say no to it, because it’s an invitation. It’s not, let’s do date night. It’s just going to get a sandwich. I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. Going in a couple of minutes to get a cup of coffee. Would you like to go with me this time? Go with me?

Lee Baucom 44:23
The same thing, they can say no, and if they say no, you go get a cup of coffee. You go get the sandwich. You follow through on what you offered, recognizing that there is still a residual connection embedded in that. If a friend of mine calls me and says, Hey, you want to go grab a cup of coffee, and I can’t do it. I’m like, No, I can’t, but I still go, wow, that was really nice of them to ask. It still has an embedded connection piece. And so you start building those pieces up. I’ve got several other ways that people can do it, but that’s just kind of, it’s Invitational. You can’t force that. You have to invite that. So that allows the person to not feel pressured and to begin to join in on smaller pieces along the way.

Kevin Anthony 45:07
Yeah, you know, this is something I’ve been saying for a really, really long time, is it’s the little things that you do, and you mentioned earlier in the show. You know? Well, that’s the message that we get from movies, TV, and stuff like that. Do you know what the other message that we often get when it comes to this sort of thing is, is that you can screw up left and right, you can completely destroy the relationship, and then in the last 10 minutes of the movie, you can do some great, grand gesture of apology, or vacation or something, and suddenly it’s all good, and it’s all fixed. And I think that really does a huge disservice to people, because it’s not, you know, okay, things have been off the rails for the last 15 years while we were raising our kids, and now we’re going to simply go to a couples encounter weekend, and suddenly it’s all going to be better, all done. It’s just It doesn’t work that way, and it’s exactly what you said. It’s starting to establish a little bit of connection and a little more connection, and a little more connection, and those little things that you’re doing day in and day out that will start to rebuild the connection, rebuild the trust.

Lee Baucom 46:18
Yeah, so I was talking, I had a client financial planner. And he was like, you know, I’m just, I’m going to this big thing. I’m going to throw it all in. I’m like, I wouldn’t do that. Let me just go with you as a financial planner. What would you advise me if I’m, you know, whenever back, if I’m back there, and you were to say, ” How do you build your portfolio? What would you tell me? He said, invest a little at a time, be consistent about and build it up over time. I’m like, that is exactly what I would suggest you do. You can’t do the big lump sum, sure. I mean, it’s possible that it would really help financially, but in relationships, the lump sum will overwhelm the situation. If you’re doing it a little at a time, you never hit the pause button, but let’s say you did hit the pause button, then you start building up. You’re out of the habit of using, you know, his idea. You’re out of the habit of investing. So start the investment small, and build it up over time. And it’s the same thing, you know, the movies do get us to that point with the speaker over your head, you know, playing the song that turns it all around, and then it stops there again, and we’re still not getting the picture that there’s still work to be done to actually bring something back on board.

Kevin Anthony 47:27
Yeah, what might some of that work look like? So we, you know, I asked you after the break, you know, how does a couple go about unpausing? The first part of that answer was to start gradually reconnecting. What can we get, a little bit, maybe more descriptive of, like, what does that start to look like, like? What? What types of things could they or should they be doing? What types of work, you know, might they want to look into in order to help this process?

Lee Baucom 48:00
Yeah, so I think there are actually three pieces to this little puzzle: the 3c of saving, a marriage of connecting, changing, and creating. So connecting, we already talked about that Invitational piece of a tag-along. But connecting can also be done in three levels of connection. There’s a physical, emotional, and spiritual connection. So when you become aware of those pieces, you can say, ” Okay, how can I do a little bit more than where we are now? A lot of couples still, even though they might be in trouble, they may still have some connection pieces. I hear a lot of people like, Okay, well, I mean, we do a side hug when I come in the door, I haven’t been around for a while, or a pat on the back, or him on the back, or whatever.

Lee Baucom 48:43
So, okay, that’s a physical connection. What would be a little bit more emotional connection, that is, do we get each other? Do we feel like that? Can I communicate that I get you to a spouse, like I understand who you are and what’s important to you? That feels very connected when somebody does that, not expecting it back at this point, right now, you’re investing, right? And can I make you understand that I support you, that I’m there for the hard days, the not-so-hard days, the good days, right? And so asking, ” How was your day, and not just accepting the oh, I had two meetings, and you know this, but How was the meeting? What happened there? How’d you feel about that? That’s the difference between reporting and rapporting. Building rapport with somebody. How was your day? Is an imitation of what was going on inside of you, and allowing it to just be a calendar rendition doesn’t allow much of that.

Lee Baucom 49:37
So working on some emotional connection, spiritual connection, is talking about what’s important to you. That’s actually where a lot of people fall in love. Talking about what their dreams are, their hopes are, and where life took them. All of those pieces. The shortcut around that, if you’re at that level of disconnection, is saying, you know, that I saw this movie and it had this, like, this important thing that was really. Important to me, whatever it was, the theme in the movie, the theme in a book, something that you took from that to share about how that was important to you, and ask them what they thought about that idea, because that gets you into a different level of communication.

Lee Baucom 50:14
And so three levels give you three different targets, and people are like, what exactly do I do in those three areas, and my response is a little bit more than what you’re doing now, not a lot bit more, a little bit more, but it depends on where you are in those points. The change is changing yourself, and that is not something I think is wrong with anyone, because I don’t know, but I do know that we grow stagnant, and that we all have places that we can grow and become more of ourselves and show up in better ways, if we are focused on, ” How can I grow here? So that’s the change piece, creating a new path. The creation piece is the new path to we. That’s a lot of thinking internally. How do I think of we? Do I think about that when I think of money, of options, of choices, of time management, or do I think of me in that? And how can I broaden that out to us, to our situation? And so when you do that, you have you just created kind of a plan for how you can begin to implement that.

Kevin Anthony 51:15
Yeah, now we’re coming back around full circle again to what we talked about in the very beginning of this episode about how you don’t necessarily need your partner to be enrolled, right? Because you’re talking about creating change, and that’s the change in yourself.

Lee Baucom 51:32
So that is the stepping in and saying, you know, the I always think about that word responsible, the being able to respond. So responsibility, the ability to respond, instead of just being frozen or reacting, right? Those are the kind of counterpoints, frozen. I can’t do anything about this because of this. This is your fault reaction. I am reacting against you because I think it’s your fault. Still, it’s the plane’s responsibility. I get to choose how I’m going to respond to any situation, and suddenly I’m aware that I have some power in that, some choices in that that are about where I want to go in life. And that changes the equation a good bit.

Kevin Anthony 52:12
Yeah, that is really important. Huge conversation this weekend about that whole idea of you have the power to decide how you want to react and act in a given situation, and so I think that’s a really important point for people to really hear, is that, you know, I have, I have a little bit of a that’s not really a trigger, but it’s a thing that irritates me in society today, which is how much people are in basically victim mode, right, where they’re constantly everything that’s wrong and everything that didn’t happen in their lives, or couldn’t happen, or was an obstacle that somehow somebody else’s fault.

Kevin Anthony 52:55
And I just find that to be incredibly disempowering. And I know that there are, there are forces in society that deliberately want you to feel that way. So I get that there’s pressure to do that, but I just wish that more people could sort of wake up and go, Hey, wait a minute. I have a role in this, too, and I could make different decisions. And I, you know, it doesn’t mean it’s going to solve everything and always fix the problem. But rather than sitting there doing nothing, going, Oh, woe is me, it’s terrible, you could actually do something about it. And you know that that’s something that was sort of coming up for me in that moment when you were sharing, you have the power in your relationship to do something about it.

Lee Baucom 53:39
Yeah, the growth mindset has a great question. I’m constantly, no matter what the situation, asking myself, the growth question is, given where I am, what’s now possible, and that there’s always something that’s possible and may not be optimal. That’s not saying, given whatever’s going on, I can get whatever I want, but given where I am right now, given what’s happened, what’s now possible, and that gives us that, that new possibility, where are the roads that I can now follow instead of feeling like I have no options?

Kevin Anthony 54:13
Yeah, I love that question. Given what’s happened and where I’m at now, what’s possible, it’s a great open-ended question, and one that definitely would get you to really start to think about it, because it’s not a yes or no, it’s not an easy thing to answer. You actually have to give it some thought. That’s great. Okay, we are just about out of time for today’s episode. I’m just curious if there’s any last advice you have for couples who think they might be in or maybe they know they’re in, and they know something needs to happen. Any last advice you have for them?

Lee Baucom 54:53
Yeah, the binary question is always a sticking point. I either have to stay in this and the way it is, or I need to get out. Out and flee the scene. Those are the binaries. There’s always the third option of, ” What can we create here? And what we can create is almost always about building that team, and so having that team mindset, how can we step towards that team? How can I be a better part of the team? Get you a long way into the process of figuring it out?

Kevin Anthony 55:20
Yeah, I love that. What can we create here? Another great open-ended question that gets you to think, hopefully, think a little outside the box, and get creative. That’s great advice. I want to thank you for coming on the show, sharing your experience, your knowledge, and your wisdom, and I would love if you could tell the listeners how they could find out more about your work.

Lee Baucom 55:44
Let’s consider two paths. One path is if your marriage really, truly is at the end of the line, like you’re going, oh gosh, my spouse is saying, I want out. My spouse is threatening to leave. My spouse is just done. That’s the save the marriage system, and that’s at savethemarriage.com. Savethemarriage.com, but a lot of people are at a more chronic point where they hit the pause button, and they realize that’s not where they want to be, and they can’t continue down that path, because that path is what leads to the save the marriage spot. So you can start the work on that with the unpause app, which is designed to help people go through daily exercises and learnings to get to a relationship they both would want. And that’s it. Unpauseyourmarriage.com. That’s the unpause app, and it actually does go on a phone, either type of smartphone, and you can use that as a daily process to get to that, back to the habits of connection at unpauseyourmarriage.com.

Kevin Anthony 56:46
Awesome, and that link is in the description, so go check that out for sure. Well, Lee, thank you again for coming on the show, sharing your knowledge, experience and wisdom.

Lee Baucom 56:56
Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

Kevin Anthony 56:59
All right, everybody, that’s all the time I have for this episode, and I will see you next week.

Kevin Anthony 57:10
I hope you liked this episode of the Love Lab podcast. If you enjoy this show, subscribe, leave me a review, and share it with your friends, and for more free exclusive content, join me in the passion vault at https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/vault/. That’s https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/vault/. Thanks for listening, and remember, as Celine used to say, you’re amazing!