A Common Marriage Problem

A great relationship will cost you something. Cheezy as it sounds, nothing good comes easy.

But one thing that makes marriage feel impossible is something that few people will come to grips with. As a married human of almost 20 years, and someone who’s done a bit of coaching for others (and sat through more than a few of my own therapy sessions), I’d say this one can be a killer.

First, a little background:

Nobody makes it to adulthood without a significant amount of baggage, as we like to call it (in our culture, we love giving nice names to broken things; baggage is an understatement).

For now, let’s refer to it as “trauma.”

To my fellow male comrades, please don’t bail from this post just yet. I know that we’re the tough guys, conquerors of all things, but we get a bit squeamish when people start talking about feelings, emotions, etc. Feels like weakness.

Most of us struggle here, and need to understand: trauma, when it’s not faced, will suck the life out of life, and marriage, like nothing else. If this is the first time you’ve entertained the idea that this might apply to you, following are a few symptoms to help you dig deeper:

• • Fear of confrontation
  • Chronic anxiety
  • Anger problems
  • Self worth problems
  • Substance abuse problems
  • A need to be in control of everything
  • Problems taking responsibility for wrongdoing
  • A chronic sense that you’re being cheated
  • Fear of criticism
  • Anger when someone confronts you
  • A chronic feeling that others aren’t meeting your needs

As you can guess, things like this wreak havoc on a relationship, especially one where two people are living under the same roof, sharing the same financial resources, planning for the future, and raising kids.

If you’re an adult, well into your 30’s, you’ve experienced the dark side of humanity multiple times. People have mishandled you, betrayed you, hurt you. We like to believe that we’re strong, that we’re “over it,” but that’s rarely the case. Only those who’ve come to grips with their wounds, and who’ve taken couragous steps to heal, can claim to have moved on.

Not many of us are in that boat.

For most of us, we’ve stuffed it, what psychotherapeutical professionals call “repression,” a common practice that makes our emotional problems much more powerful. We bury our personal difficulties deep inside, failing to realize that they thrive there.

Then we get married, and this other person rubs their finger in our wounds like nothing else, digging up all the negative emotions that come part and parcel to the things we’ve been hiding from for so long. We feel anxiety, shame, fear, guilt, etc. like never before. And in our quest for a simple solution that absolves us from the pain of personal responsibility, we blame our spouse.

I have a friend who’s now divorced because her husband got tired of the anxiety in their relationship, little realizing that her anxiety was well placed before she ever met her ex-husband.

Whatever broken things we carry into our marriage will be brought to the surface by the rigors of a good relationship. But that’s a good thing. The closer we get to people, the harder it is to hide from the things we need to deal with.

But blaming the other person for the pain that we’re feeling is an easy way out, and the most common approach to a difficult relationship.

I’m tempted to try and offer some tactics for dealing with the stuff I’ve written above, but it’s best to leave you with this brief introduction, and invite you to consider the idea that the problems you’re having in your relationship might have been problems long before you got married.

Photo Credit: Asaf R