Marriage problems; every marital relationship suffers from them from time to time. How quickly you address any problems you come up against will affect the impact they have on the relationship.
When marriage problems are left to incubate, they have repercussions on how you perceive your relationship, on how you perceive your spouse, on how you perceive other “issues” in your relationship, and on how you feel and behave in the marriage.
Negative experiences, when left unresolved, shape how we communicate with our spouse about other matters and how we behave during other difficult situations. Your experience of the latest marital hurdle is coloured by the unresolved issues of the past.
The first step is taking responsibility
Unless you take responsibility to fix your relationship problems when they happen, things will get progressively worse. I see it all the time when clients come to me with issues that weren’t that big to begin with but as those problems began years ago, they now seem to be huge. In fact, sometimes they now are that huge simply because they’ve been left untreated. It’s like a disease that spreads. The disease is reversible up to a point, but there is a limit.
It’s your responsibility, as husband and wife, to try to fix your marriage problems. If you have tried everything you can think of, truly tried, then it becomes your responsibility to seek professional help if you feel you cannot do it alone. There is no shame in getting help. In fact, the shame is in not getting help if you think it will save your marriage and you absolutely want to save it and need the help.
Whether you’re in the process of repairing your relationship yourself or seeking out relationship counselling or coaching, it’s still your responsibility to get your partner to come on board if they’re not already.
If they won’t agree to trying to save your marriage with you then you need to tell them that their actions signal one of two messages to you:
- that they are willing to do whatever it takes to save your marriage OR
- that they have given up on the marriage and are merely waiting for it to die.
There is one other message this action signals and that is:
- that they are willing to live an unsatisfactory life with you where you dwell as two souls under one roof, living separate lives…which is pretty much the same as waiting for it to die.
You were both responsible for uttering, “In sickness and in health, ‘til death parts us” and you are both responsible for dealing with the relationship sickness, now.
I wish you all the happiness in the world. Everyone deserves to be in a wonderfully happy, healthy, successful marriage and I sincerely hope you both take it upon yourselves to live the life you deserve.
