If You’re Struggling in Your Marriage, There is Hope
I write today to you, the person struggling in your marriage, as one who was once in your shoes. I know personally the excruciating suffering that often accompanies difficulties in marriage. But I also know that there is hope, because my marriage was healed. It grew, transformed, and is now a peaceful sanctuary of mutual respect, love, and support. This is no short of a miracle–but the answer to our healing is not a mystery. There are certain things that my husband and I learned and did that made this change possible. I’d like to share some of these.
Choose Humility
The most important thing you can do for your relationship is to choose humility. Own your part in the relationship challenges. Soften your heart and accept that your happiness is your responsibility, not your spouse’s. They are responsible for themself, and you are responsible for yourself. People in relationships are notoriously bad at this. The natural way that we think as humans is cause-and-effect thinking. We see others as causing our problems, unaware of our own influence on others. We fail to use more systemic thinking, which invites a higher ground view and helps us to see that not only are we influenced by others in our relationships with them, but we also influence others.
Truly, relationship patterns between two spouses are cocreated–it takes two to tango. Therefore, blaming your spouse for a relationship pattern that you also contributed to doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t help. It only tends to make your spouse defensive, feeding their emotional reactivity, and you are likely to invite more emotionally immature reactions back from them. But if you understand that you also have an influence in the relationship, you can put your energy into changing your part in things. You can choose to be humble, learn about the role you played in the relationship falling apart, and seek to relate in a mature way that invites greater mutual respect.
Choose Boundaries
The next vital step is to choose boundaries. Relationships fall apart, most of the time, because they lack a healthy balance of individuality and togetherness. They become overly tilted toward togetherness, with each person exerting togetherness pressures on the other. This stems from each person’s excessive needs for togetherness (needs for agreement, sameness, support, connection, attention, involvement, etc.) This excessive focus on getting one’s togetherness needs met stems from people’s under-developed identities. They are incomplete, unable to take responsibility for their own happiness. They expect others to make them happy, and this can result in controlling behaviors.
This threatens the individuality of the other person, thus leading to the imbalance of togetherness and individuality I mentioned. The result is that people usually distance themselves or become conflictual. If the togetherness needs of those involved are very intense, this can create an extremely anxious and threatening relationship, that can feel very chaotic, traumatic, and painful to those involved, as they end up always threatening one another’s individuality and togetherness needs. The result is that the relationship that once completed them and gave them blissful “happiness” now is the cause of their misery.
People tend to blame the relationship problems on each other, failing to see how their own contributions also fed into the imbalance of togetherness and individuality. To get things more balanced, each person truly does need to humble themself and stop blaming everything on their spouse. They need to start to respect their spouse’s boundaries, taking more responsiblity for their own happiness. They also need to uphold their own boundaries, which takes courage. It takes growing more of your own identity, as it comes with the inherent risk of losing acceptance. It is often easier to let others intrude on your boundaries (or respond conflictually) than to communicate your principles openly, calmly, and respectfully.
Become a Responsible Individual
The next step is to become a responsible individual. It is very difficult to uphold your own boundaries and respect the boundaries of another person if you lack a strong identity of your own. Like I mentioned previously, if you base your worth on the other person’s acceptance, it will feel very risky to uphold your boundaries. And, if you need someone else to always connect with you, agree with you, give you attention, etc. to feel complete, then it will be very difficult to better respect their boundaries. You can make it easier to choose boundaries by growing your individuality.
For me, this meant that I had to let go of the selfish need to get someone else to make me happy, and accept that truly, I was responsible for my own happiness. When I made this initial, very difficult change to myself, the rest seemed to follow naturally. I discovered that there were many more interesting things to life than getting someone else’s constant attention, approval, and “love.” This started a process of discovery and helped me to develop a love of learning and growing. I loved spending time getting to know who I was–what my interests were, what brought me joy, and who I wanted to become.
I came to discover that I was fascinated by relationships, and ended up going back to school, and majored in marriage and family studies. This eventually led to me becoming a marriage and family therapist. I experienced quite a difference in my educational journey this time around, as when I was first attending college, I had a lack of direction. I didn’t have much of my own identity, because much of my energy went into being impressive to and acceptable to others. But this time, I was seeking an education because I truly wanted to. I had my own interests and I was hungry for knowledge. I had purpose, I had passion, and I had drive.
Pursuing my interests in this way was one of the key ingredients to helping my marriage to balance out. I was finally living a more complete and balanced life, no longer always feeling empty and yearning for someone else to fill me up. I was filling myself up. I was choosing to do the things that brought me joy. And as a result, I had much more capacity to respect my husband’s autonomy. I had much more flexibility–I wanted to spend time with him and enjoyed times of connection, but if he was busy and needed to focus on other things, then I wouldn’t need to try to control him to get what I wanted. I could respect his boundaries.
And, if he was not respecting my boundaries, I felt more confident about upholding them because I could risk small rejections by him–I had a strong relationship with myself to fall back on, and I knew that I would be okay. I also came to learn from experience that the short-term discomfort of having boundaries and temporarily losing his acceptance resulted in long-term improvements in our relationship and helped us to feel more genuinely connected to each other, which was well worth it.
The Magic of a Mutual Respect for Autonomy
Having my own boundaries and respecting my husband’s boundaries really has been the key to our success. Even now, when we sometimes fight, I can usually trace this back to some sort of boundary issue. There’s usually a lot of other stuff that we think we are fighting about, but ultimately, it tends to come down to the fact that one of us felt that our autonomy wasn’t respected. Once we change this, the other stuff that once felt so important no longer seems to matter.
This is because, when our relationship has a mutual respect for autonomy, it creates a calm, non-threatening emotional environment that allows natural affection and genuine connection to emerge. We end up liking each other again, and naturally feel more connected to one another. We stop feeling threatened by each other and no longer see each other as enemies. And when you feel connected to your spouse, its easier to let things go, to overcome issues, and to communicate without everything becoming an issue.
There is less anxiety in the air making everything feel like an attack, and therefore, there is less defensiveness. You don’t feel the constant need to protect yourself, but feel that you are on good terms with this person. You feel respected by them, and you respect them. This mutual respect is, in my opinion, really what couples need to strive for. The connection comes as a natural result of striving for mutual respect–not the other way around.
Striving for connection and ignoring the need for mutual respect tends to only make the relationship more imbalanced and threatening, therefore creating an anxious emotional enviornment that creates distance and conflict–the very things you were hoping to overcome. Truly, the focus needs to be on respecting boundaries and upholding your own–this is how people can create the conditions needed for connection to emerge.
Once you make these small changes–choosing humility, choosing boundaries, and growing to be a more responsible individual–you will find that life is much better. Your relationship will be calm and connected, and your individual life will be purposeful and fulfilling. You will have a balanced, joyful life. Life doesn’t have to be so hard–there really is hope.
