Who's to navigate and who's to steer...?

On the treadmill the other morning, I was thinking about one of the couples I am counseling—pondering their issues, ways to address them, and approaches to help the couple work through them.

Once again, my Pandora “Oldies” station gave me some food for thought. This time it Dan Fogelberg’s song “Hard to Say.”  When he sang the words “it’s never easy and it’s never clear who’s to navigate and who’s to steer” it hit me. That was the problem! They were having a tug-of-war with the steering wheel.

Driving is easy if you know where you’re going. When you’re in a new place, trying to follow directions, trying to locate and read street signs, as well as operate the car in a safe manner, it can be a difficult challenge. It’s a great benefit to have a navigator. Working as a team—with each person fulfilling their particular task—the challenge is a lot less daunting and you arrive safely at your destination. Smooth as silk—right? Well, as one who has operated as navigator for my husband on multiple occasions, it doesn’t always go smoothly. So what’s the problem and how can we overcome the conflicts and obstacles that arise?

In the first place, it’s important to know your task. The one steering needs to know how to operate the car. The one navigating needs to know how to read a map. In marriage, we need to know the tasks, roles, and functions that are before us as husbands and wives. We come into marriage with an idea of how marriage is supposed to work (or not work) from our parents and our spouse comes in with their own idea (sometimes diametrically opposed to our own ideas). Discovering, examining, reassessing, and adjusting those ideas together as a couple can be a daunting challenge but a very beneficial exercise. If that doesn’t get figured out, there will be a tug-of-war over roles, functions, and tasks…and you’ll get nowhere.

In addition to knowing your task, it’s important to actually do your task.  Once on a long trip, when I was acting as navigator, I became enthralled with the beautiful scenery and forgot about checking the map. As a result, we missed our exit and ended up making about a twenty-mile detour. Yes, that made our trip a bit longer, but it wasn’t horribly drastic. In marriage, both partners need to be on board and contributing to the relationship in order to make it work. One person cannot carry the weight alone. Refusing, or just not bothering, to do your part can have drastic results.

The other side of that coin is that you need to let your partner do their task. Trying to drive and read a map at the same time is very stressful and certainly not safe. Having a navigator grab the wheel to force the car to turn where they want to turn could be disastrous. However, each one knowing and doing their own task and allowing the other to do their task produces teamwork that can accomplish great things.

This teamwork is what marriage is all about—two together, going in the same direction, working toward the same goals, arriving at the destination together. Some couples have gotten so tired of the tug-of-war that (to keep the analogy going) they’ve given up and each have their own car. Teamwork or togetherness only occurs when the cars are parked side-by-side in the garage at night. Separate directions, goals, and destinations.

How about your marriage? Who’s navigating? Who’s steering? Are you headed in the same direction? Do you have the same destination? Are you in it together—or just going through life side-by-side? Take time to talk about it.