“What’s the worst thing married couples can do to each other?”
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.’”
guest post from Tim Kellis
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:14 am
Great post, Tim! Before you answered, I was going to say lose the trust they have for one another. Once that’s gone, there isn’t much left if you want my honest opinion. You can pretend you’ve forgiven and go about your days loving each other but there’s always going to be that nagging “if he/she did it one time, would they do it again?” question. Great post…looking forward to hearing more.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Excellent point about the loss of trust from infidelity. It wasn’t my first thought, though. Perhaps because infidelity is so far off my radar screen that it’s not something I even think about.
My first thought was that the worst thing you can do in a marriage is not listening to each other. I mean, really listening to each other and caring enough to pay attention to and respect what the other has to say. Once you stop the communication lines, the relationship goes downhill from there. I guess from that point, infidelity might be an easy jump. Personally, I’d exit the relationship before committing adultery.