These 5 Things Are Indicative of Much Bigger Relationship Problems
They happened in my marriage and in way too many others
We get into cycles in relationships. Our behavior becomes unconscious because we tend to focus on the one we love. We miss our own unhealthy patterns.
I’ve spent more than a decade in the counseling and research of love and relationships. It was born out of necessity. As a marketer and PR consultant turned freelance journalist and business columnist I was struggling in my marriage.
I would go to counseling and for that hour I was all in.
I absorbed and respected every word our marriage counselor told me.
But then I left and I reverted back to who I had been my whole life.
I wanted to change my own behavior especially since my husband made it clear he was unwilling to change his behavior. I was willing to do anything to save my relationship.
But it had become terribly unhealthy.
And the longer I remained in it, the more unhealthy I became.
Those hour-long marriage counseling sessions were my only sanity.
If my husband was still attending couples therapy with me that might have been okay. But he had refused early on and I continued to go by myself. My own personal oxymoron…marriage counseling for one.
We weren’t working on our marriage together.
I couldn’t save my relationship alone.
In remaining, I was taking myself down, not building the two of us up.
These 5 things are indicative of much bigger relationship problems.
1. Begging someone to care
When you have to ask somebody to care about you…
They’re already telling you they don’t.
Relationships end the moment one person begins caring less than the other. But we don’t believe that when our relationships become broken. If our spouse refuses to work at mending our marriage, we beg them to.
We tell ourselves lies.
They love us they are just going through a hard time. If they really didn’t care about us they would have left us already. They aren’t in touch with their feelings. They just don’t believe in counseling.
Relationships end the moment one person begins caring less than the other.
We shouldn’t beg anyone to care about us.
2. Yelling and/or raising your voice
If your spouse isn’t listening, then your spouse isn’t listening.
No amount of yelling or raising your voice will get their attention. It only takes you down. It’s the result of letting another person’s bad behavior create unhealthy and unattractive behavior within yourself.
I never yelled until I was in my forties.
I hate thinking back on the terrible choices I made. The more my husband acted out and behaved badly and drank and scared us, the more I yelled. I was reacting badly to his bad behavior.
It didn’t stop him.
It reinforced his non-realistic version of me as someone who was overreacting. My husband didn’t care about my feelings or what I had to say. My pain, anger, or volume were never going to change that. No amount of ugly words or yelling would impact him. It just made me ashamed of my own actions.
If your spouse isn’t listening, your spouse isn’t listening.
If your spouse can’t hear you, stop wasting your breath.
3. Begging someone to be responsible
If you are begging someone to grow up it was never your job.
You didn’t marry someone to become their mother or their father.
I always say, “I’m tired of watching children walking around masquerading as adults.” It was never my job to tell my husband to stop drinking and upsetting our home. He was an adult. It was up to him to address what was bothering him and why he was suddenly behaving this way.
I signed up to marry my equal, my partner, and my best friend.
I would have held his hand through anything.
But there’s a reason there’s a parenting adage saying, “We aren’t raising children, we are raising adults.” I vowed to get him through the good times and the bad times.
I didn’t sign up to be traumatized by an unsafe and unpredictable situation being inflicted by someone who wouldn’t take responsibility for his own actions.
In lesser situations, it wasn’t my job to remind him to occasionally remember to buy diapers or milk. He was a big boy. He was a husband and a father. This was a dynamic where I had become the mommy reminding him of the responsibilities he signed up for.
In that respect, it wasn’t shocking it became more extreme one day.
You shouldn’t have to beg another adult to be responsible.
This is a dynamic that shifts from the parent and a child to the person that child marries. They now assume the role of reminding a child to be responsible. Because that child never completely grew up.
4. You spend a lot of time crying
If you are consistently crying, you’ve aligned yourself with a bully.
A confident person would never make a woman cry.
They certainly wouldn’t do it as a motif Operandi. There’s nothing healthy about being with an individual who inflicts pain. It says more about them than anything else.
As I’ve always told my children, “You better be confident enough to never need to make another person feel bad to make yourself feel good.”
This is a form of manipulation and control. It’s insecurity and control. It’s unhealthy. It’s abusive.
If someone makes you repeatedly cry they don’t have the confidence to love you.
It’s tearing someone down to reinforce a bully’s position and power.
5. Making too many excuses for bad behavior
Making excuses for repeatedly bad behavior is not loyalty, it’s enabling.
One of the most clarifying comments about enabling came from my marriage counselor who is a psychologist. I told him I thought I was being kind and being loyal while making excuses for my husband’s uncharacteristically bad drinking behavior.
I would tell my friends my husband was a good person going through a bad time. I would say he didn’t have a history of behaving this way. I would say he must be going through a mid-life crisis.
My marriage counselor said, “Kindness is forgiving bad behavior once or twice. Enabling is forgiving bad behavior over and over again.”
This comment gave me much-needed clarity.
I was giving my husband a license to continue his poor actions and it was keeping me in an incredibly unhealthy relationship. This is what overly caring enablers do. It muddies our relationship waters.
It is unhealthy to make excuses for repeatedly bad behavior.
There’s a difference between kindness and loyalty and enabling.
These 5 things are indicative of much bigger relationship problems.
Ironically, when our marriages and relationships feel out of control, they are more within our control than we believe. I felt like my world was out of control while I was struggling to save my marriage.
I felt this way because my husband wouldn’t work with me.
He was working against me.
But I made a choice with each of these five things.
I had more control over my life than I thought I did. These five things were my reactions and my responses to being with someone who didn’t deserve the love and effort I expended.
A man who didn’t deserve a woman who was so unwilling to give up on him…
That she temporarily destroyed herself.
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