If You Let These 7 Things Slide, Even A Strong Marriage Can Start To Crumble
Marriage can be playground, but not if you slide on these critical issues.
PeopleImages | Canva Marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be. There has been collusion by culture, religion, and family to glorify marriage. These pillars of society have invested interests in keeping couples together and have for thousands of years.
Today, we have options. We can remain single, date, live together, get married, be monogamous, swing, or be polyamorous. There are communities to support all of these choices. Regardless of how you define your marriage, all relationships require attention.
If you let these things slide, even a strong marriage can start to crumble:
1. Attention to intimacy
Intimacy is one of the primary reasons people gladly get into a committed relationship. They think it will be on-demand and wild. Often it is for the first few months, and then things change.
Whether it is at the six-month mark, one year, or whenever, there will come a time when the quantity of intimacy changes. It might be due to tiredness, illness, boredom, or the demands of children, but it will change.
If — and this one is usually pure luck — you find a partner who has similar needs, the road back to an ongoing and mutually satisfying relationship will be easier. If not, if you have differing desires, the relationship can stumble and crash on this pitfall.
The relationship may not fall apart right away, but over time, the foundation will erode as the connecting power of intimacy slips away into the night. You may stay for the kids, or because you think you can deal with the lack of intimacy, and, if not, you will justify having an affair.
Successfully navigating this pitfall takes patience, communication, flexibility, and lots of love. And the biggest thing about intimate relations they didn’t teach in school — it changes over time.
"Rather than asking your spouse to change," advised relationship counselor Nicola Beer, "support them and aim to inspire them by being loving, happy, and full of energy and light yourself. By becoming more focused on your happiness and self-care, you will become more attractive as you give them the space that they need."
2. Financial planning
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Money is a huge problem for many couples. It becomes the focal point of the hidden stresses in the relationship. Any other little irritations and pet peeves flow nicely into money conflict. Money gives you something tangible to latch onto and point blame at the other person.
Money problems are exacerbated when there is a lack of communication, secrets, and shame. Without the ability to deal effectively with the conflict that is sparked by money, tensions rise, anger increases, and love suffers.
3. Forgetting romance because of children
I love children. You may not. But if you have children, they are your responsibility. And that’s part of the problem, it's a 24/7 job with no downtime.
Having children can skew your view of your partner. That’s assuming you even see them anymore. When your children are newborns, they demand your complete attention. Unfortunately, some parents forget they have a partner.
This is the setup for a big problem down the line. It might show up within a year for a partner with little patience, or 15 years later, when one partner realizes they simply do not have a relationship anymore with the person they used to love.
Don’t let the kids make you forget your romantic relationship. The impact of becoming a parent on the marriage causes short and. long-term strain on communication, romance, closeness, intimacy, and connection in a marriage, as explored by research in Midwifery.
4. Having adventures
It is easy to fall into the boredom trap. It is an insidious pitfall, one that silently creeps up and strikes swiftly in the night. You wake up one morning in a sweat to wonder what your life is all about.
Everything looks grey, matching how you feel. Life tastes like ash, and you thirst for something, anything, to wash away the filth in your mouth and soul. Welcome to boredom and ennui. It seems humans need for novelty that is hardwired into us.
At first, I thought there was something wrong with me. Not that I get bored very often, but it does happen. Where it can be a problem is when you get bored with your partner.
Unless you have been conscious and actively engaged in keeping your relationship alive, you will get bored with them at some point. It’s natural, so don’t fight it. Acknowledge it with your partner and look at how you can bring some excitement back into your relationship and life together.
5. Effective conflict management
We are fighting, arguing, getting defensive, attacking, pouting, raging, stonewalling, and guilt-tripping. Fighting is a nasty business, and nobody likes losing.
As a man, I was taught to win at all costs and never admit defeat. This spilled over into relationships when I was younger. It was so bad I didn’t apologize to a woman until I was in my mid-thirties, and I nearly choked the first time I did.
Again, unless you saw your parents fight constructively, you don’t have a clue how to fight effectively. And if you do have a clue, your partner may not.
Learning to fight effectively is often learned, if it is learned at all, by trial and error over time, or by reading a book on communication or going to therapy.
6. Being an open book
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Do you remember when you first fell in love? You and your partner spent endless hours talking to each other and getting to know each other.
As trust was built, you divulged more and more of yourself, even sharing dreams and dark secrets. In this protective bubble of love, you were safe.
Then, one day, you forget to tell your partner something. Nothing big, nothing special, just some small experience you had that slipped your mind. The next day, you deliberately withhold a belief, a preference, a wish, or a desire.
Before you know it, your conversation has a stilted quality to it — there is not much to say or share. At this point, you find yourself with little in common with your partner and wonder how this happened.
In worst-case scenarios, you are caught up in an affair and now actively lying and betraying your spouse daily.
7. Showing appreciation
This is easy to let slip, especially in a good relationship. Things are going well, and you think it is the natural order of things. It isn’t. Life is full of surprises and demanding challenges that require a flexible response if you are to overcome the drama you face.
When your eye strays from your purpose in a relationship, when you take your loved one for granted and do not recognize and honor the gift that has been given to you, feelings are hurt.
Of all the pitfalls, this is perhaps the easiest to fix. All it takes is giving your partner time and attention (though finding time might be a challenge), then making the effort to continue doing so on a consistent basis.
Oh, it goes both ways. If you feel taken for granted, make sure you communicate your feelings and needs. Strong family units, whether nuclear or extended, form the foundation stone of society. Until recently, happiness seemed to be irrelevant to marriage.
Marriage was first and foremost a financial agreement, a binding together of families to protect and ensure a positive future as well as could be predicted.
In the Middle Ages, the concept of chivalry and romantic love entered the public domain. However, not much happened until the last 150 years, when romance and the concept of love, being in love, and marrying for love took hold in modern society.
Here we are now in the 21st century, and with all the social schisms that have happened since the last century, the idea of what constitutes a marriage has undergone significant change.
Most people, it would seem, still feel the need to couple. How much of this is biological and how much is cultural is still up for debate. In some societies, men and women are separated and only come together at special, specific times. For most of us, however, there is a push, whether internal or external, to find a suitable person to live with.
These pitfalls are real, and if you are in a relationship for any length of time, you will encounter most, if not all of them.
We are not told what to watch out for when we enter a marriage or committed relationship (unless you have taken one of those pre-marital courses religious organizations offer). We enter unaware, guided only by cultural norms and the media, both of which are suspect at the best of times.
Over the years, I have found that two critical factors have supported me when dealing with these pitfalls. One is an awareness that these pitfalls, or challenges, do indeed exist, and two, having the willingness to communicate with my partner whenever one of these challenges enters my life.
If they enter your life, don’t hesitate to take action. They will not go away on their own, and the longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to deal with them. If you try to avoid these pitfalls, they turn from being challenges into relationship killers.
Steven Lake is an author, speaker, and relationship coach.
