How to keep yours alive and well.
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I’ve been a marriage and family counselor for more than forty years. One of the most valuable things in our lives is a good marriage, but too many of them fall apart without the couple understanding the real reasons why. When people come to me for help they know they are unhappy, but the causes of their unhappiness are usually unclear. Here are some of the most common things people say that make them want to leave a long-term relationship:
- Sexual incompatibility
- Boredom
- Lack of mutual interests
- Unhappiness
- No longer in love
- Value conflicts
- Drinking
- Growing apart
When a woman or a man reaches the point where they call for help, three things are true. First, the problems have usually been going on for a long time. Second, what they’ve tried to do to make things better hasn’t worked. Third, they look for a simple reason to make sense of the confusion and pain over the potential loss. But the reasons given, including those above, often conceal the real marriage killer.
The One Thing That All Good Marriages Have and The One Thing That Will Destroy a Marriage
There is a scene in the movie City Slickers where the character played by Billy Crystal is talking to Curly, the rough-and-tumble old cowboy played brilliantly by Jack Palance. Although Curly is a man of few words, Crystal comes to recognize that he is quite wise. Curly tells him that the secret of life is one thing. Crystal hangs on the next words as he asks Curly to tell him the secret. After a long pause, Curly tells him he must find the “one thing” for himself.
Most of us are looking for that “one thing” that will make our marriages successful and give us the love and connection we so deeply desire. But too often our marriages fall apart and we are not really able to figure out the reason. We try again, and sometimes, again and again.
Before Carlin and I got married 35 years ago, we had each been married twice before. Being a therapist and marriage counselor hadn’t helped me keep my first or second marriages afloat.
Before marrying for a third time, I thought deeply about what had gone wrong and decided the real cause was mutual betrayal. My first wife and I married young and had two children, who we loved deeply. But the stresses of making a living and raising a family gradually took precedence over the care and nurturing of our relationship. We each built up resentments, which eventually pulled us apart. She blamed me for the problems and I blamed her.
When I married for the second time, I vowed I would make a better choice in mates.
I picked someone who I thought be better than my previous wife, but after a number of years, the same pattern repeated itself. By the time Carlin and I got married, I began to suspect that it was the small betrayals that undermined the trust in the relationship that was the real cause of the problems.
John Gottman, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading experts on marriage and family. In his famous “love lab” he has developed a scientifically sound body of information that can accurately predict which marriages will do well and which ones will fall apart. In his most recent book, What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal, he offers a simple, yet profound understanding that can help us all improve our relationship lives.
In working with thousands of couples over a period of more than 40 years he found that there is a single toxin that undermines people’s commitment to each other. “It is a noxious invader, arriving with great stealth, undermining a seemingly stable romance until it may be too late,” he says. “The name of this toxin is betrayal.” When most of us think of betrayal, we think of a sexual affair. And certainly infidelity is one of the most obvious and painful forms of betrayal.
But betrayals are often much more subtle and can go unrecognized by the couple until the structure of the marriage collapses under the weight of pain and confusion. Often one or both partners wonder “what the hell happened? How did it come to this?” Betrayal is a silent killer that masquerades as “the ups and downs of everyday life.” Most couples are not even aware that they are betraying their partner or that they are suffering from their partner’s betrayal.
This came home to me and my wife when we looked more deeply had how we often handled conflict. I would feel hurt and misunderstood and would become irritable and angry. Sometimes I would yell. Other times I would just go silent. Carlin would say, “You get that beady-eyed look that is frightening.” To protect herself she would often close up emotionally and withdraw her affection. Even when I tried to make up, she would remain closed like a clam and I felt lost and alone.
It never occurred to either of us that my anger was a kind of betrayal because it undermined her sense of safety and she lost trust in me. Likewise her emotional withdrawal causes me to feel that I couldn’t make a mistake without being punished by her closing down her affections. Betrayals are common and they are so prevalent in relationships we often don’t recognize them.
Gottman offers a few examples:
- If a husband always puts his career ahead of his relationship, that is a betrayal.
- When a wife keeps breaking her promise to start a family, that is also betrayal.
Pervasive coldness, selfishness, unfairness, and other destructive behaviors are also evidence of disloyalty and can lead to consequences as equally devastating as adultery.
Learning to recognize and minimize these common betrayals can go a long way towards healing the wounds that pull us apart. Trust is the glue that holds us together and provides the safety and security for love to flourish. We may imagine that what is pulling us apart are things like, boredom, lack of mutual interests, unhappiness, falling out of love, value conflicts, drinking problems, sexual dysfunction, or just growing apart. But these are all the result of a long series of betrayals that build up over time.
One of the most common betrayals is unfairness in household responsibilities. When one partner feels they are doing more than their share resentments build up. A University of Missouri study finds that marital bliss stems from sharing household and child-rearing duties.
Here’s a fable my colleagues George Pratt and Peter Lambrou tell in their wonderful book Code to Joy:
You are walking through a field, munching absentmindedly on a snack. The sun is out, the air is balmy. A light breeze at your back. Life is good.
Suddenly the earth shook.
You look up at the horizon just in time to see a gigantic plume of ash and dust volcanoing up into the sky and spreading out to form a gigantic cloud that will persist for days, weeks, perhaps years. It will blog out the sun and completely change your world.
Oh, one more detail: you are a dinosaur.
Historically, we know the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid strike that sent so much debris into the atmosphere that it darkened the skies. The dinosaurs probably didn’t realize that something as simple as rocks striking the earth might mean the end of their 165 million year presence on the planet.
Similarly humans haven’t recognized that common breaches of trust are actually betrayals that can undermine and destroy a marriage. The first step in healing is to recognize the “asteroid strikes” of betrayal that send up a cloud of fear blotting out the trust we have in our partner.
How have you felt betrayed by your partner? How have you betrayed the one you love? These betrayals are so common, we often don’t recognize them. Bringing them into our awareness is the first step to healing them.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Hi Jed
I like the photo.
I was surprised but not shocked by the photo. I’ve just been on a series of three weekends for couples, and there was one lesbian and one gay couple, and I think that it was a very positive learning experience for us all. I struggle with the confusion and pain of a ‘mixed orientation marriage’. My wife came out to me and to herself as a lesbian two years ago. And so one of my passionate convictions now is to work for a society where people dare to look at the reality of their sexual orientation early enough to avoid… Read more »
I was surprised by the image and fully welcome its use. It reminded me how non-hetero couples must feel when they always see only images of straight couples to illustrate most relationship articles.
Here’s a question for readers. How did you feel about GMP putting up a picture of two married men to illustrate my article. Did it expand your vision of “marriage” and why it succeeds or fail? Did it put you off, make you uncomfortable? I’ll admit, for me, I was startled when I first saw it. I realize, like most of us who live in a homophobic society, I’m a bit uncomfortable seeing men with men or women with women (even though consciously I believe in same sex marriages). For most of my life “marriage” had the image of a… Read more »
Hi there, great item on marriage-will read more of your links asap…
And I loved the photo of the guys having a snuggle—I totes agree with what you said— despite my values I take a moment to catch up with myself at times, just bcos we do not see enuf images reflecting the wide diversity we are as ppl, lovers, friends, families etc…
Cheers from me!! Thanx…
Been reading and learning from GMP for several months now, great article by the way Jed. Have to say the picture had zero reaction, I’m straight and married, but it seems I’m more modern than I thought, as showcasing two married men on a men’s advice site had no impact at all. Feeling proudly enlightened and with it now 🙂
As a man, a married heterosexual man, I found it refreshing. This will be a part of marital conversations in the future…this is an exciting time to see how discrimination won’t be tolerated in more science focused societies.
Too often small betrayals of trust go unrecognized or we come to think they are too small for comment or we bring it up, but then let it go…until the next time. With so much going on in our lives its often difficult to pay attention to nourishing the bonds that keep us together.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. We are all enriched when we can give each other the gifts of our, otherwise, private experience.
“It undermined her sense of safety and she lost her trust with me…” A toxic friend, who was financially successful but relationship-wise dysfunctional (divorced twice), got between me and my spouse…I was ready to break things off at one point because no one was listening to me…but for the sake of our child, I knew I had to go in and fix this even if it meant swallowing my pride and rocking the boat…although I understand the value of man-to-man bonding, I had to break this one up because it was so destructive to our family and home…I am still… Read more »
This sound like a good analyses of what often happens to us in marriage.