"The
9 most overlooked threats to a marriage.
I
feel bad for marital communication, because it gets blamed for everything. For
generations, in survey after survey, couples have rated marital communication
as the number one problem in marriage. It’s not.
Marital
communication is getting a bad rap. It’s like the kid who fights back on the
playground. The playground supervisors hear a commotion and turn their heads
just in time to see his retaliation. He didn’t create the problem; he was reacting to the problem. But he’s the one who
gets caught, so he’s sent off to the principal’s office.
Or,
in the case of marital communication, the therapist’s office.
I
feel bad for marital communication, because everyone gangs up on him, when the
truth is, on the playground of marriage, he’s just reacting to one of the other
troublemakers who started the fight:
1. We marry people because we like who they are. People change. Plan on it. Don’t marry someone
because of who they are, or who you want them to become. Marry them because of who they are determined to become. And then spend a lifetime joining them in their
becoming, as they join you in yours.
2. Marriage doesn’t take away our loneliness. To be alive is to be lonely. It’s the human
condition. Marriage doesn’t change the human condition. It can’t make us
completely unlonely. And when it doesn’t, we blame our partner for doing
something wrong, or we go searching for companionship elsewhere. Marriage is intended to
be a place where two humans share the experience of loneliness and, in the sharing, create moments in which the
loneliness dissipates. For a little while.
3. Shame baggage. Yes, we all carry it it. We spend most of our adolescence and early
adulthood trying to pretend our shame doesn’t exist so, when the person we love
triggers it in us, we blame them for creating it. And then we demand they fix it. But the truth is, they didn’t
create it and they can’t fix it. Sometimes the best
marital therapy is individual therapy, in which we
work to heal our own shame. So we can stop transferring it to the ones we love.
4. Ego wins. We’ve all got
one. We came by it honestly. Probably sometime around the fourth grade when
kids started to be jerks to us. Maybe earlier if our family members were jerks
first. The ego was a good thing. It kept us safe from the emotional slings and
arrows. But now that we’re grown
and married, the ego is a wall that separates. It’s time for it to come
down. By practicing openness instead of defensiveness, forgiveness instead of
vengeance, apology instead of blame, vulnerability instead of
strength, and grace instead of power.
5. Life is messy and marriage is life. So marriage is messy, too. But when things stop
working perfectly, we start blaming our partner for the snags. We add
unnecessary mess to the already inescapable mess of life and love. We must stop
pointing fingers and start intertwining them. And then we can we walk into, and through,
the mess of life together. Blameless and shameless.
6. Empathy is hard. By its very nature, empathy cannot happen
simultaneously between two people. One partner must always go first, and there’s
no guarantee of reciprocation. It takes risk. It’s a sacrifice. So most of us
wait for our partner to go first. A lifelong empathy
standoff. And when one partner actually does take the empathy plunge, it’s almost
always a belly flop. The truth is, the people we love are fallible human beings
and they will never be the perfect mirror we desire. Can we love them anyway,
by taking the empathy plunge ourselves?
7. We care more about our children than about the one who helped
us make them. Our kids
should never be more important than our marriage, and they should never be less important. If they’re more important,
the little rascals will sense it and use it and drive wedges. If they’re less
important, they’ll act out until they are given priority. Family is about the
constant, on-going work of finding the balance.
8. The hidden power struggle. Most conflict in marriage is at least in part a
negotiation around the level of interconnectedness between lovers. Men usually
want less. Women usually want more. Sometimes, those roles are reversed.
Regardless, when you read between the lines of most fights, this is the
question you find: Who gets to decide how
much distance we keep between us? If we don’t
ask that question explicitly, we’ll fight about it implicitly. Forever.
9. We don’t know how to maintain interest in one thing or one
person anymore. We live in a
world pulling our attention in a million different directions. The practice of
meditation—attending to one thing and then returning our attention to it when
we become distracted, over and over and over again—is an essential art. When we
are constantly encouraged to attend to the shiny surface of things and to move
on when we get a little bored, making our life a
meditation upon the person we love is a revolutionary act. And it is
absolutely essential if any marriage is to survive and thrive.
As
a therapist, I can teach a couple how to communicate in an hour.
It’s not complicated. But dealing with the troublemakers who started the fight?
Well, that takes a lifetime.
And
yet.
It’s
a lifetime that forms us into people who are becoming ever more loving versions
of ourselves, who can bear the weight of loneliness, who have released the
weight of shame, who have traded in walls for bridges, who have embraced the
mess of being alive, who risk empathy and forgive disappointments, who love
everyone with equal fervor, who give and take and compromise, and who have
dedicated themselves to a lifetime of presence and awareness and attentiveness.
And that’s a lifetime worth fighting for."
Interesting and insightful. every little bit helps. I hope everyone out there figures out what makes a good marriage and stop the divorce epidemic for once and for all. Wouldn't that be admirable!
Con amor,
Vero
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