A Marriage Therapist's Blog
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Archive for the ‘Marriage Dynamics’ Category
Think back to your childhood. Do you remember a time when you got in trouble or were punished for something you didn’t intend to do? Take a moment now to put yourself back in that situation and recall how you felt as your parent (or caregiver) reacted without even trying to understand what actually happened. Did you feel angry? Misunderstood? Hurt? Unnecessarily criticized? Unfairly treated? Disrespected?
Most likely, you can identify with this. You might have even have sworn that you would never do this to someone else. The unfortunate reality is that many of us end up doing this to our partner or spouse! Sadly, a sudden and often intense reaction (that can end up feeling like a punishment to the other person) often precedes a full understanding of the situation.
Here’s a “for instance”. A friend of mine described an outing she had with her husband. They went on a bike ride, sharing quality time and enjoying the sunny weather. Everything was going well until her husband accidentally cut her off on the bike path, resulting in her losing her balance and falling. She verbally lashed out at him. Yes, of course, she was hurt, but did her husband did not intend for that to happen.
So what went wrong? My friend assumed that her husband cut her off intentionally. Instead of assuming the best about him and giving him the benefit of the doubt, she assumed the worst. She didn’t gain any information or try to understand whether or not he meant to cut her off. You might be thinking, “Well, she still fell and got hurt, whether he meant to cut her off or not.” Yes. But that doesn’t justify her yelling at her husband about it.
The effect of not giving your partner or spouse the benefit of the doubt has its consequences. In the above example, the husband felt extraordinarily hurt and angry due to feeling completely misunderstood, unfairly criticized, and disrespected.
Bottom line: While it might be difficult at times, practice assuming the best about your partner or spouse. Give him or her the benefit of the doubt in all situations—even when you are adversely affected—until you have information or understanding to prove otherwise. When your partner or spouse does something that makes you feel like lashing out or criticizing, take a deep breath, count to 10, and remember that giving him or her the benefit of the doubt is a way to diffuse tension, misunderstandings, and potential retaliations. And it’s also a powerful act of love and respect. And I guarantee that in the end, you’ll feel better about yourself too.
- New York City, Seen From the Hudson River
- Photo © 2008 Jay Slupesky
Some young people in unhappy marriages think that having a child is a good way to improve the happiness and satisfaction of their relationship. I get a little uneasy when I hear this because I know it’s not always true. I know that sometimes having a baby adds enough stress to a marriage that divorce is the eventual result. The child that was hoped to bring happiness winds up being a child of divorced parents.
Studies show that marital satisfaction levels can drop when a couple becomes parents for the first time. This is more likely if the couple didn’t plan to get pregnant or weren’t in full agreement about getting pregnant, and if the couple didn’t talk in advance and plan about life with a newborn.
On the other hand, if the pregnancy was planned and the parents were both enthusiastic about parenthood, the couple can maintain their satisfaction, or maybe even increase it, after their baby is born.
- Sails
- Photo © 2009 Jay Slupesky
It’s been almost nine months since my Turn Off the Television! post, and I’d like now to follow up with another plea, to wit: Turn Off the Video Game!
I work with couples as young as their early 20s, and I work with couples as mature as their 60s. In my work I’ve noticed that some men up to about age 35 or so spend a lot of time playing video games.
I am curious about that age 35 cutoff because I can think of two possible explanations. The first possibility is that once they reach their late 30s, men begin to lose interest in video games. The second possibility, and the scarier one, is that men don’t really lose interest in video games, but that the guys who are about 35 now were the first group of pre-teens to be around when video games became really popular: they were around the impressionable age of 10 in 1983. If memory serves, that’s when the Atari video consoles were just beginning to catch on.
Regardless of which explanation is correct, I do know this: some men spend so much time playing video games that their marriages suffer as as result. To make things even worse, now that people play games against one another over the internet, it’s more common for people to become online friends with another player of the opposite sex (yes, there are some women out there playing too) and to have the relationship turn into an emotional affair.
- Statue of Liberty, 10/2/08
My vacation is over and I’m back at work. Just in time to see our economy crumble!
The turmoil in the economy has been dominating the news recently. It even seems to have overshadowed the presidential campaign, which is significant given that there are less than four weeks left before the election.
So every day we read about the stock market losing another few percent, about banks collapsing, and about the government making unprecendented efforts to restore stability. What we don’t seem to hear too much about is how these events are affecting real people like you and me.
I’m guessing that many people must be suffering a great deal of distress over what is happening. I’m imagining a family where in the past few weeks the value of their retirement nest egg has lost about 25% of its value, their jobs are in jeopardy because their employers are close to bankruptcy, and their house is worth less than what they owe on it.
What do these stressors do to a marriage? As I’ve written before, problems like this that are external to the relationship itself can either bring a couple closer together or drive them apart.
How can it bring a couple closer? Easy. They decide that they are going to get through this hard time together together, no matter what. The agree that they are going to support one another, and that no matter what happens, they still have each other. Give that a try.
- Marine Drill Instructor Addresses His Recruits
Some fascinating new research is out on the topic of personality differences between men and women.
As just about everyone knows, men tend to be more reckless, assertive, competitive and unemotional, while women are more emotional, nuturing, cautious, and coopertive. Some people think these differences are innate, while others think they are the result of the way children are raised in our society.
The really interesting and surprising result of the research is that the personality differences between men and women are actually increasing. You would think that as women move closer to equality with men, have their own careers, etc., the differences would tend to diminish. One theory that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is that in modern societies, as external barriers between the sexes diminish, some long-dormant internal differences are reviving.
Finally, it appears that most of the increasing differences in personality are due to changes in men. In other words, men are becoming more competitive, assertive, etc. in our society! This doesn’t sound like a good thing.
- The Altamont Commuter Express
True or False: The longer a couple is married, the more boring and passionless the marriage becomes.
False. According to researcher Richard Levenson, who for the last 20 years has been conducting a study on long-term marriages. “Marriages continue to be really just as emotional, in terms of the overall amount of emotions, in middle and late life as they do early in life,” according to Levenson.
The research data show that for some couples there is a dip in marital satisfaction during the middle years, when children are in school and careers are being built. But then, after the children leave home and as retirement approaches, those couples who stay together rediscover the love they had in the early years of their marriage.
What does the research show to be the keys to long-term marriage success? There are two: (1) communication and (2) emotional maturity.
You’ve probably heard about the Five Stages of Grief. The stages were initially identified by author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to describe what a person goes through after finding out that they have a terminal illness. Here are the five stages and an example of what a terminally-ill person might say while in each stage:
- Denial: “There must be a mistake. I’m fine.”
- Anger: “Why me? This isn’t fair.”
- Bargaining: “God, I’ll do whatever you want. Just let me live for a few more years.”
- Depression: “What’s the point of anything? I’m dying.”
- Acceptance: “There’s nothing I can do. I might as well make the best of the time I have left.”
Some time after Kubler-Ross introduced this model, relationship experts realized that people who are going through the end of their marriage also go through the five stages of grief. Here again are the stages, along with a person what a person approaching divorce might say in each stage:
- Denial: “He won’t really divorce me. He’ll change his mind.”
- Anger: “This is outrageous after all I’ve done for him.”
- Bargaining: “I’ll do whatever you want…just don’t leave me.”
- Depression: “I never thought I would be divorced. What will people think of me?”
- Acceptance: “Life will go on after the divorce. I’ll be OK.”
In working with couples who have recovered from infidelity, I’ve pieced together the thought process that gets people into and out of affairs. I’ve written the following from the perspective of a man, but it wouldn’t be too much different for a woman. By the way, this thinking (except for the parts about sex) applies to emotional affairs as well as physical ones.
- Excitement. “Wow! An attractive woman likes me! Yes! Even though I’m [insert age here] I’m still in good shape and attractive. I’ve still ‘got it’! This is going to be great. I haven’t felt this much excitement in my life for a long time. We’re going to have a lot of fun and I’m going to be happier now. My girlfriend understands me, unlike my wife, who hasn’t understood me for years. I just have to be careful so that my wife will never find out about it. Actually the sneaking around part adds to the excitement!”
- Boredom. “This is starting to become monotonous. And it’s getting harder to sneak out of work and then to make excuses at home. My wife is asking why we aren’t intimate anymore, and at the same time the sex with my girlfriend is boring now. That excitement I felt a few months ago is gone. And my girlfriend is starting to annoy me; she wants to know where this ‘relationship’ is going.”
- Reality. “Maybe my wife isn’t really the problem, because things weren’t any better with my girlfriend. Maybe I have some issues of my own that I should look at. Maybe it’s true that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. I’ve cut things off with my girlfriend, but my wife is very suspicious because of some e-mails that she found. I wonder if I should come clean with her or if it’s better to keep denying everything. I really hope my wife doesn’t leave me.”
Rick,
I didn’t begin this letter with “Dear Rick” because you aren’t dear to me right now. Far from it. So for now “Rick” will have to do. It’s hard for me to even think about your name, let alone say it out loud.
There is no way that you will ever comprehend the magnitude of what you have done to me. The devastation is total. Everything that I married you for, hoped for in you, believed about you, KNEW about you is gone. All of it. There is nothing left. Where do I go from here, Rick? What do you expect me to do?
So even though I don’t believe that you will ever really get how I feel, I’m going to try to explain it anyway. My therapist says it will be cathartic for me to write this letter.
Remember the night you asked me to marry you? I do. I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve always been a dreamer. When I was a little girl I dreamt about the day a man would propose to me. I imagined what it would be like. And then it actually happened. I was the happiest girl in the world. I started to dream about our perfect wedding.
Remember when we talked about what name I would use after we were married? You told me that I should keep my maiden name because it’s my dad’s name and I am so proud of him. You were right. I am so proud of him. But I was marrying YOU and I decided to take your name so that it could be one more thing that we would share. I wanted us to share everything. Rick, I didn’t want to have my world and you have your world. I just wanted us to have OUR world. You could say that I left my family behind and invested my whole life and future in you. EVERYTHING. In YOU, Rick.
Then we had the perfect wedding and started our life together. I was still a dreamer, only now my dreams turned to us having kids, buying our first house, even growing old together.
Those dreams are shattered now. My whole life and future have been ripped away from me over the last few days.
How could you do this, Rick? I put my WHOLE LIFE into this. Everything I did, every thought I had, was about US. I thought you were doing the same for me and that you felt the same way about us. And all the time you were deceiving me. I feel so stupid now for falling for your lies. I cannot believe that you had a secret life that I wasn’t a part of. It’s hard for me to see how I could ever get back to how I used to feel about you or to ever trust you again.
Here’s the part that I don’t understand: I still love you. And that really puts me in such an awful place. I love a man who has treated me like dirt. Where do we go from here, Rick?
This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.
Becky
Note: this is not really a letter from a betrayed spouse. I would never violate a client’s confidentiality. This letter is merely the product of my imagination.
We’ve all heard of a man having a “mid-life crisis” during which he does things like buy a sports car and try to look and act younger in an (ultimately futile) effort to stave off feeling like an old man. This happens to middle-aged men all the time, but lately there is a new phenomenon that affects women who are in mid-life: the Walkaway-Wife Syndrome. I have been seeing more of this recently in my marriage counseling practice. (The term “Walkaway-Wife Syndrome” was coined by Michelle Weiner-Davis.)
Walkaway Wives usually initiate divorce within a year or two of the youngest child’s graduation from high school, when the home has become an “empty nest.”
Remember that during the early years of a marriage, the wife is typically the primary caretaker of the relationship. As the years go on, if she is unhappy, and her husband is unresponse to her concerns, she may eventually give up on the relationship and “check out” emotionally. However, she keeps this decision a secret because she wants to hold on until all of the kids have left home.
Then one day, “D-Day” in a way, she tells her husband that she wants a divorce. He is taken by surprise: “I had no idea you were unhappy. Why didn’t you tell me?” In fact, she had told him many times, but eventually gave up because he was unresponsive.
At this point, a lot of men will spring into action in an attempt to save the marriage. He’ll get in shape, losing weight and going to the gym. He’ll start to go church. He’ll read relationship books. He becomes very attentive and responsive to his wife for the first time in years.
Now the wife has a dilemma. Are these changes genuine, and will they last? Or will her husband go back to his old ways once she decides to stay in the marriage?
This is a very delicate time in the relationship, and marriage counseling can help the couple navigate through it.
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