Are you married or looking to get married? Well, before we jump in, let me share an analogy with you. I love tangible analogies as they make it easier to grasp concepts and make your point. So, let’s use a house as an analogy for marriage. Marriage is a house on a street. Before even stepping foot in the house, both people should actually want to live in that house. If one of the two or neither of them want to live there, the house will eventually foreclose due to some of the very same reasons we’ll discuss below.
There are long lists of things that damage marriages, but when you study them all, one can see three common causes at the core: Resentment, Dishonesty and Communication. So now, we’ll take a look at these causes individually, show how they feed and perpetuate one another and then present some remedies to help eliminate them.
Let’s start with Resentment, as this is one I will admit to being guilty of. Dictionaries define this as a feeling of anger or displeasure towards someone whom you feel has done you wrong (merriam-webster.com). Well, allow me to define this even further with a real-life example.
Example1:
A young couple recently married, the wife wants to start a family immediately, but the husband wants to wait and few years. The husband is not honest with the wife and doesn’t communicate that he really wants to wait to have children. Instead, he reluctantly goes forward with having their first child. Now that the husband has to take on fatherhood earlier than he wanted and has to put several of his other goals and aspirations on hold, he begins to harbor resentment towards his wife. Over time, this feeling grows and begins to show in how he treats her, with sort of a cold distain. The wife doesn’t know why so, she translates it as neglect and she’s prompted to think that he may be cheating or that he may not love her anymore. So, that begins to rip at the fabric of their marriage every time there’s the slightest disagreement between them until it ultimately escalates to divorce.
This is dishonesty, which most of us just associate with lying or betraying someone. However, in a marriage the act of dishonesty is being committed simply by not telling your spouse how you truly feel. When we suppress our true feelings just to avoid confrontation or just to please the other person in fear of hurting their feelings or losing them, that can be considered dishonesty. Let’s look at another real-world example.
Example:2
A couple are recently married and the husband continues to hang out with his buddies just as he did before their marriage. The wife thought to herself that once they got married, he would spend more time with her instead of hanging out with his friends. The thing is, she never communicated to him how she felt nor about her expectations of spending more time together once they got married. The wife now wants to confront her husband about his spending so much time with his friends but, she is afraid it will push him away from her or that he may begin to resent her. So she suppresses it and doesn’t tell him how she feels. She’s deeply saddened, depressed and turns to the comfort of food only to soon become overweight. The husband never noticed that his spending time with his buddies was bothering her, but he did soon notice his wife’s gradual weight gain. He begins to drop hints and make comments to her about it which saddens her even more and sends her into a deeper depression. One night while her husband is out with his buddies, she takes an overdose of anti-depressants.
This next cause of marital destruction is usually the spark that starts the fire which eventually burns down the house of marriage. That’s right, it’s communication or lack thereof. We saw this as a key factor throughout the previous examples, so it’s not difficult to see how crucial communication is within a marriage. In addition to this, we have to address the fact that there’s also methods of communication, verbal and non-verbal, that can hurt or hinder a marriage. Since we’ve already covered the impact from the lack of communication, let’s briefly look at some of the questionable ways in which many couples actually do communicate.
Example 3(Non-Verbal):
In this example, a wife takes on the task of preparing meals each day for her husband when he gets home from work. However, when she is upset with something he does, she communicates it by not cooking for him. He has learned his wife’s non-verbal tactics over time, so now he just follows the queue to approach her apologetically to ask her what he did wrong and pleads for her forgiveness. Now for this couple, that may be the ebb and flow of communication that works for them. However, in other instances this could build ongoing resentment of each other as the wife may begin to feel unappreciated for preparing his meals everyday and the husband may begin to feel he is not being appreciated for going out and working everyday.
Example 4(Verbal):
We can now see that it’s not just communication but, how we communicate that can make or break a marriage. Here’s an example of a couple who are both strong willed, opiniated and neither of them backdown from an argument. You may think that their personality traits would make them compatible but, instead of respectfully conversing and patiently talking through their differences, they argue extensively. At least three to four times a week they engage in an ongoing shouting match, yelling over each other’s words, never getting to an agreeable solution. They just argue until they tire and then go to their separate corners of the house until the the next round. Now, it’s obvious to them and everyone around them that they are not happy together, but they agreed to stay together for the kids. Well, though they thought this would be a noble idea, it actually created a dysfunctional home environment for their children who later fell into substance abuse and depression as they tried to endure their parents’ on-going fights and arguments.
The Remedy
To remedy the marital ills we discussed above, you only need one thing, love. Now it sounds cliché and I’m not a fan of clichés at all so please, allow me to elaborate. When I say “love”, I mean loving your spouse enough to be honest with them about how you feel even if you think it may hurt a little. Next, love your mate enough to not only forgive them for past wrongs, but to also forget. Yes, I know another cliché, “forgive and forget”, but it’s true and it works. Last, love your significant other enough to communicate with one another constantly, respectfully and in a productive form and fashion that you both agree to. So yes, the remedy at the core of all these solutions is love.
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Previously Published on Medium
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