How do you feel?

What are you gonna do about it?

If you’re unhappy in your relationship or angry at your partner, what would unhappiness or anger have you do?

Emotions have their own agendas. We recognize this when we talk, for example, about getting “carried away” by anger. Anger might move you to attack—to shout or grumble at people around you, or silently berate yourself. Shame might ask you to hide. Fear might tell you to shrink.

Does that emotion’s agenda align with your interests and ethics?

Consider courage. Courage itself isn’t an emotion—you don’t feel courage, you feel fear. Courage is action driven by purpose and intention in spite of fear. It is an ethical response to fear’s agenda. Fear would have you run; courage allows you to stand.

This is not to say you should discount emotion. Emotions hold information. Fear knows about danger. Guilt knows that you committed yourself to a responsibility and didn’t live up to it. Anger and unhappiness know about disappointed expectations. They know there’s a shortfall between what you wanted and what happened.

Sometimes an emotion will carry you away and sometimes it will stand with you on solid ground.

When you account for the information that emotion has for you and consider how you want to respond, then you’re neither run by an emotion nor oblivious to it, you’re in relationship with it. That’s integrity.

If unhappiness would have you leave your partner or anger would have you confront them, what would integrity have you do?

I help queer couples who want to care for their relationships with integrity. Reach out if you’d like to consider working with me.