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Some relationships start crappy, others take years to reach this level. The really sad thing is that sometimes individuals don’t want to stop the bad, comfortable habits until it’s too late. Most don’t seek professional help until the next step is calling a lawyer.
If you found your soul mate—or a very close fit—you happily snuggle in and set about building a life together. For some people this means unmarried cohabitation, for others a wedding is involved. In the beginning, you can’t imagine living your life apart from this person. You hurry home to see him or her. Your mate is the first person you turn to for comfort when you’re upset.
Then, you set about killing the relationship. You fail to deal with conflicts or find a way to reach resolution. There are lots of distractions in relationship-land. Jobs, school, kids. Heck, even buying a house or the car you always wanted can be a distraction from the trouble sprouting up in the relationship. If you try hard enough, you can manage to ignore relationship issues until they are large and almost insurmountable.
Love within a relationship is killed in small, daily disappointments. Frustration that builds up like corrosion on exposed metal. You tell yourself that you “got over” being mad; you are sure your mate’s forgotten the argument you had last week. After all, the two of you had sex several days after the big blow up. You’re fine. Everything is back to normal and on we go.
Couples dealing with "small" relationship conflicts frequently fail to recognize the road they’re heading down. Big change in how you talk and interact takes big effort and most people don’t want to make these changes if they don’t absolutely have to. It’s not that big a problem, you tell yourself. But if you have conflicts that come up over and over, you have trouble brewing.
Frequently, individuals will say that the conflicts in their relationship are unsolvable. There’s just no fix to it, they often say. So, they soldier on, disconnecting from the issues that make them mad…and disconnecting from one another.
If this goes on long enough, it can lead to estrangement and even to the kind of physical or emotional infidelity that ends many relationships. Cheating is bad for relationships and bad for you personally, but more people cheat than ever before. This doesn’t happen because you’re just basically a bad person. Even good people find themselves in bad situations. If the conduit of emotional connection between two people in a relationship is clogged, feelings get diverted, like water in a broken pipe. In this kind of situation, your need for warmth and fun, for close emotional connection, can lead you into an involvement with a person to whom you’re not married. You can get into an affair before you realize it.
This is a reality for many relationships, but as much massive damage as an affair can cause, it’s really a symptom of the problems between committed couples. Infidelity doesn’t happen like catching the flu—someone breathes bad “cheating” germs on you and suddenly you’ve got to engage in a mattress tango with someone other than your spouse. Infidelity only happens when the emotional connection between spouses is broken. This kind of break typically occurs when individuals aren’t working through their issues.
Of course, not everyone who's relationship is in trouble cheats, but relationships still die when trouble isn't resolved.
Deal with the conflicts. Talk about what makes you mad. Listen—really hard—to your mate. And if you don’t feel like you’re making progress(actually, BOTH of you need to feel like you’re making progress), get into a therapist’s office and get some lessons on working out the conflicts.
Don’t kill your marriage for the lack of attending to the problems soon enough.
