Marital Talk

The reality is our insecurities are what eventually leads to divorce. We are taught an imbalanced mental perspective growing up and project that perspective onto our spouses. For example, if you are a woman and you didn’t have a balanced, affectionate relationship with your father then you get angry when your spouse doesn’t show you the affection that you expect, from your subjective perspective. Eventually you rationalize this issue in your marriage and jump over that wall of vulnerability where you decide you need a divorce.

The problem, though, is you have yet to overcome your insecurities so they are still present in your unconscious. And you bring those insecurities into your next marriage where you project them onto this spouse as well.

But one of the most important elements of life for each of us is as we get older we mature. Hopefully you are older in your second marriage and realize that the same thing is happening in this marriage that happened in the first, so this time you take a proper inventory of yourself to maybe look differently at the situation this time. After all, you already went through divorce once, one of the most gut-wrenching experiences any of us goes through as an adult.

The reality is it takes courage for you to face your demons and slay them and this is truly only possible when you have the motivation to look within yourself. Obviously the insecurities that lead to the first divorce where not overcome but with the choice of divorce or maturity, maybe the understanding of that pain will motivate you to approach the situation differently the second time around.

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Now here is an excellent question and really gets to the heart of what eventually causes marriages to fall apart. But the problem with this question and the reality of divorce is cheating isn’t the cause of problems in a marriage but the result. Unfortunately for our professional marriage therapists they still view cheating as the major cause of divorce, without delving into the problems from the past that set up the foundation for the infidelity.

The basic premise in a successful marriage is you have to be happy with yourself if you are going to build a marriage with your spouse. And the caveat here is your happiness as an individual has nothing to do with how much money you make or how good looking you are, but is achieved by understanding and appreciating your internal character traits, which are nothing but systems of beliefs that reside in the unconscious. The reality is your character traits are what cause your behavior.

So what eventually leads to a spouse cheating are problems in the marriage. I call intimacy the icing on the cake, but in negative relationships this is one of the first activities to go. After all, how are you supposed to come together and open yourself up to intimacy with your partner when you are fighting in the other elements of your marriage?

I was at a marriage conference about a year ago and attended one presentation where the topic was sex. The speaker summed up sex in a marriage when she said that “no” always wins.

The other element of marriages which eventually leads to cheating is jealousy. The funny aspect of the minds of people with insecurities is the notion that if you fear something happening it eventually does. If you fear your spouse cheating on you and get jealous in situations where you believe your spouse is thinking about doing that and the subject becomes a major cause of anger, then eventually your intimacy breaks down and either you cheat or your spouse cheats.

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Just five minutes away from my super conservative state, Iowa did something we liberal midwesterners thought could never happen.

They repealed a law limiting marriage to man/woman partnerships only. effectively legalizing gay marriage.

And how did they do it? They stated that to limit it was violating people’s constitutional right to “pursuit of happiness”.

In a nation where even hippies and Hollywood starlets can’t keep marriage for everyone, I was completely convinced Iowa wouldn’t be able to pull it off? For real, we make fun of our neighbors to the east, saving the best of our barbs for the city directly to the east of us (Council Bluffs, i love you so!). Now, however? I kind of want to pack up and move ten minutes away to a state that regularly shows up blue on the map, and recognizes all people are in fact created equal.

GO IOWA!!!

I keep running into some of my favorite blogs discussing marriage, and it seems The Simple Dollar is no exception.

The blog has been featuring a five-part series on the blessed event of marriage, covering such topics as courtship, engagement, the wedding itself, honeymoons, and having a reasonable marriage.

The final topic, on reasonable marriage, just went live last week, and after reading it I feel like I’ve learned a few things.

Remember to both talk and listen. Not only is it important to talk to each other often, but it’s also important to listen to what your partner is saying. I tend to like to be right, so this is a good reminder for me!

Plan big purchases together. We’re not in a place where we’re making big purchases yet, but when we do, I’ll keep the tips on this topic at the forefront of my mind.

Talk about long-term goals together. Not only making sure you’re both still on the same page with these goals, but also talking about how you can get closer to these long term goals today and tomorrow is such a good suggestion. We definitely need to be more intentional about this!

And my favorite? Reaffirm your love every single day. I try to look my husband in the eyes every day and tell him I love him, and I hope that as our marriage continues this will be a practice I keep up with. It’s so fun to see him light up when I tell him how much he means to me!

Now this is an excellent question and really gets to the heart of the problem, of course. The surface answer is an easy one, one that doesn’t even require an in depth study, not that any professional would want to simplify this question. The worst thing married couples do to each other is obviously infidelity. Nothing destroys that bond that developed when 2 people met, fell in love and decided to spend the rest of their lives together faster than infidelity.

And the reason for this is quite obvious too. One of the most significant characteristics of successful relationships is trust, the trust that you can depend on your partner for life. This trust will get you through anything. But once that trust is destroyed then it becomes extremely difficult to get back. There is nothing worse than realizing that your partner for life is actually working against your relationship instead of for it.
Can you imagine the bombshell that goes off when one discovers that the other has actually let someone else invade that most personal element of a relationship? Your heart immediately falls through your feet, straight to hell, where it begins descending. The unimaginable truth about infidelity is you get to view hell from below.

But the reality, and something never before explained, is infidelity is not usually the cause of problems in the relationship, but the result of those problems. People do not cheat on their spouse to cause the problems in marriage but as a result of problems in the marriage, as a result of an unhappy marriage. Actually the worst thing married couples can do to each other is the power struggle, where one tries to control the relationship.

The bottom line behind the causes of troubles in relationships is the way couples handle conflicts. The positive way is through disagreements, where the two different perspectives are discussed logically, even the emotional issues. The negative way is through arguments, where the emotional perspective is used so that one gets to utilize a subjective perspective to decide the solution to a conflict.

And the reason for this is the basis behind the subjective perspective are our insecurities, which are prejudices we have developed in our past that we use to justify our current perspective. I call this the “Hierarchy of the Argument”. We develop our emotional perspectives when we are the youngest, when we are children. If that perspective is based on the imbalance of those who taught us then we develop an insecurity, which is defined as best by fear and anxiety. The result is we develop a prejudice, which is a preconceived judgment or opinion, and the result is we become judgmental, the source behind our anger.

And as adults we use this insecurity behind our power struggles to get our way with conflicts on subjective issues. This is best described as when a simple truth becomes the truth or a minor mistake is equated with a fatal error. Have you ever gotten in trouble for not replacing the toilet paper? This is an example of a minor mistake being equated with a fatal error. Or has your spouse ever tried to convince you that the sky is brown, even with your continued futile attempts at explaining that no, the sky is really blue, even to the point of soliciting friends to justify the perspective that the sky is brown.

This prejudicial perspective is best summed up in one of the most poignant sections of the book, where I use the prejudice of Hitler to demonstrate how couples engaged in the power struggle do so by using their prejudices to slowly take away the individuality of their spouses. This is the story of a man and his wife who survived the horrors of Germany, and whose memoir gives us a fascinating glimpse into their lives. At the end I recite a joke they had heard. “A man in Berlin takes his wife to the hospital so that she can give birth. A picture of Christ hangs over the bed. The man: ‘Nurse, that picture must go, I don’t want the Jewboy to be the first thing my child sees.’ The nurse: She herself could not do anything about it, she will report it. In the evening he gets a telegram from the doctor. ‘You have a son. The picture did not need to be removed, the child is blind.’”

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