The Most Overlooked Threats to a Marriage these days! Term Limits.....

I feel BAD for marital "communication," because it gets blamed for everything, when it is not working. For generations, in survey after survey, couples have rated marital communication as the number one problem in marriage. It's not!

Marital communication is getting a BAD rap. It's like the kid who fights back on the playground (I can relate because this was my youngest son's biggest problem in school for years). The playground supervisors hear a commotion and turn their heads just in time to see his retaliation. He didn't create the problem; he was just reacting to the problem. But he's the one who gets caught, so he's sent off to the principal's office.

Or, in the case of marital communication, the therapist's office.

I feel bad for marital communication, because everyone gangs up on him, when the truth is, on the playground of marriage, he's just reacting to one of the other troublemakers who started the fight:

Term limit 1. Some Marry a person because they like who they are. People change. you can  Plan on it. Don't marry someone because of who they are when you marry them , or who you want them to become after you marry.Marry them because of who they are determined to become. And then spend a lifetime joining them in their becoming, as they join you in yours.

Term limit 2. Marriage doesn't take away our loneliness. To be alive is to be lonely. It's the human condition. Marriage doesn't change the human condition. It can't make us completely un-lonely. And when it doesn't, we blame our partner for doing something wrong, or we go searching for companionship elsewhere. Marriage is intended to be a place where two humans share the experience of loneliness and, in the sharing, create moments in which the loneliness dissipates. For a little while.

term limit 3. Shame baggage. Yes, we all carry it around We spend most of our adolescence and early adulthood trying to pretend our shame doesn't exist so, when the person we love triggers it in us, we blame them for creating it. And then we demand they fix it. But the truth is, they didn't create it and they can't fix it. Sometimes the best marital therapy is individual therapy, in which we work to heal our own shame. So we can stop transferring it to the ones we love.

Term limit 4. Ego wins almost every time. We've all got one. We came by it honestly. Probably sometime around the fourth grade when kids started to be jerks to us. Maybe earlier if our family members were jerks first. The ego was a good thing. It kept us safe from the emotional slings and arrows. But now that we're grown and married, the ego is a wall that separates us from each other. It's time for it to come down. By practicing openness instead of defensiveness, forgiveness instead of vengeance, apology instead of blame,vulnerability instead of   strength, and grace instead of power.

term limit 5. Life is messy and marriage is life. So marriage is messy, too. But when things stop working perfectly, we start blaming our partner for the snags. We add unnecessary mess to the already inescapable mess of life and love. We must stop pointing fingers and start intertwining them. And then we can we walk into, and  through, the mess of life together. Blameless and shameless.

Term limit 6. Empathy is hard. By its very nature, empathy cannot happen simultaneously between two people. One partner must always go first, and there's no guarantee of reciprocation. It takes risk. It's a sacrifice. So most of us wait for our partner to go first.A lifelong empathy standoff. And when one partner actually does take the empathy plunge, it's almost always a belly flop. The truth is, the people we love are fallible human beings and they will never be the perfect mirror we desire. Can we love them anyway, by taking the empathy plunge ourselves?

Term limit 7. We care more about our children than about the one who helped us make them. Our kids should never be more important than our marriage, and they should never be less important. If they're more important, the little rascals will sense it and use it and drive wedges. If they're less important, they'll act out until they are given priority. Family is about the constant, on-going work of finding the balance.

Term limit 8. The hidden power struggle. Most conflict in marriage is at least in part a negotiation around the level of inter-connectivity  between lovers. Men usually want and need  less. Women usually want  and often demand  more. Sometimes, those roles are reversed. Regardless, when you read between the lines of most fights, this is the question you find: Who gets to decide how much distance we keep between us? If we don't ask that question explicitly, we'll fight about it implicitly. Forever.
I will quote Chris Rock: " Folks argue to create distance and irritation"

term limit 9. We don't know how to maintain interest in one thing or one person anymore. We live in a world pulling our attention in a million different directions. The practice of meditation--attending to one thing and then returning our attention to it when we become distracted, over and over and over again--is an essential art. When we are constantly encouraged to attend to the shiny surface of things and to move on when we get a little bored, making our life a meditation upon the person we love is a revolutionary act. And it is absolutely essential if any marriage is to survive and thrive.

I'm not a therapist, I can't teach a couple how to communicate in an hour. It's not complicated but resistance makes it damn near impossible. By identifying and  dealing with the troublemakers who started the fight we ac overcome some of the biggest problems in marriages. Well, that takes a lifetime for most. 

It's a lifetime that forms us into people who are becoming ever more loving versions of ourselves, who can bear the weight of loneliness, who have released the weight of shame, who have traded in walls for bridges, who have embraced the mess of being alive, who risk empathy and forgive disappointments, who love everyone with equal fervor, who give and take and compromise, and who have dedicated themselves to a lifetime of presence and awareness and attentiveness.

And that's a lifetime worth fighting for.