5 Peace-Making Truths That Will Save Your Marriage (When You've Tried Everything)
Most people don’t understand what real, lasting love is all about.
Winnie Bruce | Canva Love nourishes our lives, love addiction leaves us feeling depressed and can even cause our hearts to function improperly. If it’s love, not love addiction, we experience comfort and joy as we build a life together. But even the best relationships have trouble when we go through disillusions and wonder "Who is this person I’m with?"
The things that used to be so endearing to us, now feel like irritations that drive us up the wall. We wonder where our loving partners went and why they’ve turned into Mr. Hyde or the Wicked Witch of the West. Many people bail out of relationships during this stage, but you shouldn't.
Here are 5 peace-making truths that will save your marriage, when you've tried everything:
1. Real love begins in disillusionment and incompatibility
Most of us remember the things we loved about our partner at the beginning. Carlin was the first woman who had ever gone after me. I had always been the pursuer, but she made it clear she was interested in me and I loved it. Later in our marriage, she seemed preoccupied with other things and I felt she no longer cared. We began to drift apart. This is a bad sign in a marriage. Research states disconnection is one of the biggest reasons couples get a divorce.
I became disillusioned and it seemed we had less and less in common. But instead of leaving, we went deeper. We went through the hurts and losses and realized that most of our unhappiness was coming from comparing our present lives to the ones we imagined in the first two stages of love. As we committed to our healing and getting to know the real person we were living with, not the projected lover we had thought we were with, real love began to grow.
2. Falling in love is not a good reason to get married and falling out of love is not a good reason to get divorced
If we’re over the age of 14, we know that falling in love is not a good reason to make a life-long commitment to a person. But many of us still long to go back to the falling-in-love stage. There are many stages of love, with research from the Gottman Institute stating there are three main ones.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard clients tell me, "I still love her/him, but I’m not in love anymore. I need to leave." Variations on the same theme include, "The chemistry just isn’t there anymore" or "We’ve grown apart and we’ve lost that loving feeling."
Marriage and family counselor, Diane Sollee, captures my experience with this witty quote: "To get divorced because love has died, is like selling your car because it’s run out of gas." Too many couples split up when what they need to do is learn to refill the gas tank.
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3. Love is not what you think
I always thought love was a quality that lived inside a committed, healthy relationship. Once I found the right person and we became a couple, I thought love was a stable quality that was part of the very fabric of our lives. It might fade a bit through time, but it was, somehow, built in.
Another way I used to think about love was that it was a third entity that moved in with us when my wife and I declared our love for each other. I had a vague idea that there were things we needed to do to keep love alive, but it was more like "When love is in the house," we’ll be fine.
In this view, love is a magical and mysterious being that comes when she wants and leaves when she wants. If love leaves, the relationship either becomes "loveless" and the couple becomes "housemates" rather than lovers, or you accept that love is gone and you go looking for another lover who will join with us and we create a new threesome: You, me, and "Love."
4. Love is the emotion of connection
However, the new science of love tells us that love is an emotion that is generated during certain kinds of interactions. As Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D., author of Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become says, "Love is not a category of relationships. Nor is it something ‘out there’ that you can fall into, or — years later — out of … Although you may subscribe to a whole host of definitions of love, your body subscribes to just one. Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being."
This means that love is an interaction, an exchange, that comes into being, and then disappears again. It’s much more ephemeral than we once believed, but it is also much more nourishing.
5. Love is like food, you can’t go long without it and you need it at least three times a day
I began to see that love comes from feeling seen, heard, cared about, and supported. It can flourish when we feel safe, but it shrivels when we are afraid.
It’s nice when we remember and celebrate the "big love" days — our weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, etc., but it requires continual nourishment. It’s not just telling our partner every day that "I love you," but demonstrating over and over again, every day that there is an emotional connection, a bond of intimacy.
It is expressed in those everyday exchanges and can be as simple as, "Carlin, could you get me a glass of water when you’re up?" With the loving response, "Sure, I’ll be glad to." And it can be lost in simple discounts, "Can you pick up a carton of milk when you’re out?" And a dropped-the-ball response, "Oops, I forgot," when you get home.
I’ve learned to look for those opportunities for those micro-moments of emotional connection at least three times a day. We’ll die just as surely when our hearts are not fed as when we are starving from lack of food. What are you doing to feed your relationship every day?
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Jed Diamond is a licensed psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in International Health and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. He's the author of 17 books and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, Huffington Post, and many others.