The Five Reasons A Marriage Fails
Linda and Charlie Bloom, authors of “101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married: Simple Lessons To Make Love Last “ discuss how you can prevent your marriage from becoming a stale business-like arrangement.
Commitment: Why do so many married couples start off madly in love with the highest hopes for a great relationship, but later find that something sours between them and the marriage is not at all what they thought it would be?
Linda and Charlie Bloom: Infatuation and disillusionment are normal stage of relationship that all couples go through.
In the infatuation stage there is a strong tendency to idealize the other person seeing them through eyes that magically screen out all of their not-so-wonderful qualities.
We are literally "blinded by love" to these aspects. What goes up, however, must come down, and there is inevitably, a reaction to this idealization which is often referred to as the "disillusionment" stage of relationship, in which we may go to the opposite extreme, exaggerating those aspects of our partner's personality to which we had previously been unaware.
Infatuation is nature’s way of hooking us up with each other. It’s a temporary state that is always, of necessity, balanced when the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme.
Like infatuation, disillusionment is also a temporary state and the challenge for all couples is to see the truth about each other, integrating both perspectives and ultimately coming to see that our partner is, like ourselves, an ordinary mortal, neither absolutely divine, nor absolutely evil, but a combination of a wide range of qualities. In so doing we can begin to accept and learn to appreciate the differences, rather than to see the other person as being demonic. When we fail to do this, we can expect the relationship to sour.
If we are able to successfully disengage from our illusions and see each other more clearly we can turn what would otherwise be a serious breakdown in a relationship into an opportunity for true, mature love, rather than the immature love of infatuation to grow and flourish.
Commitment: Through your experience as psychotherapists with a specialty in relationship counseling what do you see as the five biggest reasons so many marriages fail or end up with a couple living more like business partners than people in love?
Linda and Charlie:
a. More marriages die from neglect than from conflict. When relationships are put on a starvation diet and deprived of the attention that all living and growing things require, they inevitably wilt and dry up. Taking your relationship for granted is a sure-fire prescription for disaster.
b. A lack of personal responsibility and tendency to project blame are major contributors to relationship breakdowns. Partners often focus on each other’s contributions to relationship problems rather than looking at what they can do to put in corrections.
c. We all want to have things the way we want them to be. When we apply strategies of control and manipulation to the people in our life in order to coerce them into accommodating our desires, we inevitably get into power and control struggles. The desire to control is one of the most powerful and pervasive issues that most couples deal with. This desire is driven by an underlying fear, that has not been addressed, or need that has not been met. Until we get below the power struggle and address the real issues underlying it, the cycle will in all likelihood continue.
d. Couples are often unskilled in the art of conflict management. They either do it poorly or avoid it all together, neither of which works in the long run. The solution is to learn conflict resolution skills and develop them through practice. Remember, differences are inevitable; conflict is optional.
e. We all come into relationships with unresolved issues and unhealed experiences from our past. When couples don't deal with the issues left over from their past, they end up their unfinished business into their marriage and project their unresolved feelings on to each other. Until we can distinguish our current partner from significant others in our lives, we run the risk of projecting unresolved feelings from the past onto our current partner.
When both partners do this simultaneously they can get into endless loops of arguing that can be horribly painful and very destructive to the relationship. The answer is to when necessary, work out your own issues, usually with the guidance of a helping professional.
Commitment: Tell us about some of the challenges you've faced in your own marriage, and how you overcame them to enjoy a close, intimate marriage.
Linda and Charlie: We have faced the same challenges that most couples face. We've had to deal with differences about child rearing, finances, running an organization, differing desire levels regarding sex and physical intimacy, we've both had serious health challenges, you name it, we've been there!
We've dealt with them by first and foremost by being committed to working together to sustain and to deepen our relationship no matter what obstacles came up. We always have come back to our commitment to the relationship and to using our marriage as a means to promote our own and each other's growth and inner development.
We had to take a higher level of responsibility to learn how to stop blaming the other person and being a victims. This is, of course, much easier said than done, and we couldn't have done it without getting some good help from friends as well as professional relationship counselors and workshop leaders.
Commitment: You write that you are both very different, and while initially that attracted you to one another, it also presented some challenges. How can a couple who is very different learn to live with each other's differences?
Linda and Charlie: You have to make something more important than being right, or being in control. When one person is right, there is always another person feeling wrong. When one person is in control, there is another person feeling like a victim. The differences may still occasionally annoy you, but they will only damage the relationship if you are attached to being right and being in control.
If you are willing to consider the other person’s point of view, and to respect their perspective, rather than trying to coerce them into agreeing with yours, the differences will eventually enrich the relationship and promote appreciation and respect. They will bring you together rather than tear you apart.
Commitment: You wrote, "The development of self-awareness and self-knowledge is both the means to and the end of a good marriage." How can a person attain the self-awareness and self-knowledge necessary to enjoy a good marriage?
Linda and Charlie: If we can bring an attitude of curiosity and understanding to our own reactivity, we can begin to use those difficult moments and painful incidents to become more self-aware and self accepting, rather than use them as evidence that there is something wrong with one or both of us.
A sincere desire to promote mutual understanding can override the intention to protect ourselves and to control the relationship. This desire will create a sense of trust and safety in the relationship rather than mistrust and fearfulness.
Strong reactions that we experience towards our partner often arise because he or she is activating aspects of our personalities with which we have not fully come to terms. As we integrate these shadowy parts of ourselves we come to know and accept ourselves with more compassion and less self-judgment.
This process of self-understanding allows us to respond to our partner without the defensiveness that can cause so much suffering on both parts. In cultivating an attitude of curiosity and openness to learning rather than one of defensiveness and control, we bring out the best rather than the worst in each other, and in so doing, we both become much easier to love.
Commitment: Why does name-calling, insults, loud yelling, and basically intimidating a partner into submission ultimately going to kill the caring and respect in a marriage? What advice do you have for a person who is so frustrated by their mate that perhaps yelling and name calling is something they just can't help doing?
Linda and Charlie: Any time you react to someone with name calling, insults, or any form of attack that is verbal, physical or emotional will have the same result. It is human nature to contract and withdraw or to retaliate in the face of hostility. When people are engaged in an aggressive conflict in which there are offensive and defensive behavior patterns, it is inevitable that they will shut down and become unavailable for any respectful honest communication. If they can’t help these aggressive tactics, they need to get help, or they need to get out of the relationship.
In most cases where the claim is made that “I can’t help it.” The truth is closer to “I don’t want to change my reactivity." Such a person may be being driven by anger, revenge, or vindictiveness. In most cases their reactivity is motivated by unacknowledged fear or pain, and when that can be recognized and addressed, there is a much greater possibility for reconciliation and understanding. But it requires patience and vulnerability on both partners' parts.
Commitment: You wrote, "One of the greatest gifts you can give your partner is your own happiness." How is this possible if perhaps a person feels their partner doesn't make them happy, so being happy is out of their reach? What steps can they take to achieve their own happiness if maybe their marriage feels boring and stale?
Linda and Charlie: If you are holding your partner responsible for your own happiness, the relationship is already in big trouble. While we can’t be the source of each other’s happiness, we can contribute to the well being of each other by bringing good will, care, love and support to the relationship. If their marriage feels boring and stale it’s not necessarily because they have the wrong partner.
More often than not, the cause of such feelings has less to do with who you are with, than how honest each partner is being with regard to their feelings, desires, needs and longings. A lack of emotional honesty is probably the greatest contributor to stale or flat marriages.
Unconditional truth telling requires the self-awareness necessary to recognize deeper feelings, and the courage to express them in a respectful and nonjudgmental manner. When both partners are committed to this process and dedicate themselves to bringing honesty into their relationship on an on-going basis it is unlikely that either of them will ever feel bored with each other.
Linda and Charlie Bloom are authors, psychotherapists and seminar leaders. They have been facilitating relationship workshops for over thirty-five years and have worked with thousands of individuals and couples across the country and internationally.
The Blooms have spoken at conferences throughout the world and appeared on over 100 radio and TV shows. They have been married for thirty-six years and have two grown children and one grandchild. Their book 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married, Simple Lessons to Make Love Last was
published in 2004 and has sold over 80,000 copies. Their organization, Bloomwork, can be viewed at
www.bloomwork.com.
To purchase 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married click here.
