If you’re married and don’t want to end up divorced, you really need to think about something. You know, there’s something holding a lot of people back from fixing their marriages (or their serious, long-term relationships).
It’s the idea that they’ve found the culprit for a bad relationship, solved it, and figure they don’t have to worry about it anymore.
For a HUGE number of people, that culprit (or scapegoat) is bad communication.
It almost seems like EVERYONE blames “bad communication” for any problems that come up in marriage and assume once the communication is fixed then everything goes back to being peachy.
It’s just not the case, sadly.
With that in mind, here are the 8 REAL problems that could easily end any marriage:
1. Change
People get married because they like each other, and they think that they’ll continue to like each other for the rest of their lives.
The problem is, people CHANGE. Everyone changes, no matter what. Instead of marrying someone for who they are, or who you want them to become, marry them for the person that THEY want to become.
You can’t stop a person from changing – count on that. The best thing you can do is to fall in love with someone who wants to change into someone you love just as much.
2. Loneliness
Once you get married, loneliness doesn’t just “go away”. It’s a part of being alive and being human.
No matter what, even if you’re married to the perfect person, there are still going to be times that you feel lonely. If you try to blame your partner when you feel lonely, all you’re doing is sabotaging your relationship.
Because the truth of the matter is, your partner can’t prevent you from being lonely all the time. You’re meant to share your loneliness with your partner, while they share theirs with you, and out of that create something beautiful.
3. Shame
We ALL carry around things inside of us that we’re ashamed of. Things that we feel terrible about. Things that we do everything we can to avoid acknowledging.
So when your partner inadvertently triggers something you’re ashamed of, your first reaction should NOT be to blame them – they didn’t create the shame, they just accidentally made you feel it.
Everyone needs to work through their baggage on their own. No one else can fix your baggage for you, it takes hard, individual work. What your partner can do is SUPPORT you while you deal with your own baggage.
4. Having An Ego
An ego serves people well in almost every aspect of life. When you’re growing up, you need one to defend yourself from jerky kids. Your ego is the wall you’ve built to stop other people from hurting you.
Of course, the downside of having that wall is that it prevents vulnerability, and it prevents intimacy. The same ego that served you so well earlier in life is now preventing you from connecting deeply with your spouse.
So leave the ego at the door, and be open with the person you love.
5. Thinking Everything Should Go Perfectly
A lot of people suffer the delusion that marriage is the capstone of a perfect life – once you get married, everything will be perfect and everyone lives happily ever after.
That, of course, is delusional. Once you get married life just goes on, the same way it did before you got married, and the same things are still going to be messy and imperfect.
Rather than expecting your spouse to make your life perfect, work on making life perfect WITH your spouse. Work together, not against one another.
6. Lack Of Empathy
Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you have to become a super empathetic person overnight.
Empathy is HARD. It’s scary to do! You can’t empathize with someone at the same time they’re empathizing with you – you have to take the plunge and go first, and hope that they’ll reciprocate later.
That takes guts… it takes the knowledge that you might be disappointed and hurt.
But it’s also worth it. Without empathy, true intimacy in a relationship can’t exist. Take the time, and the effort, and overcome the FEAR of empathizing with your partner, so you can build the intimacy and trust of the relationship from the inside out.
7. Kids
Kids are magical, incredible gifts that words simply cannot describe.
They also can be a huge drain on the successful dynamic of a relationship.
A common pitfall of a marriage is when one or both parents decide paying attention to the children is more important than paying attention to each other – when in fact, it’s important to BALANCE one’s attention so that the entire family unit doesn’t become disrupted.
Being a family together is about balancing everyone’s needs and reaching (some sort) of harmony with each other.
8. The Intimacy Struggle
In a lot of relationships and marriages, the woman wants way more intimacy and connectedness with her spouse than the man does. In other relationships, that dynamic is reversed.
Whichever way the direction flows, this conflict can be a huge source of tension in many relationships and marriages – and can even be enough to tear the marriage apart.
That’s why it’s so important to work WITH your partner and together, explicitly decide how close and intimate of a relationship you want with each other. This will always be a compromise, but if it’s not decided openly and with love – it will create tension and fights that undermine even the strongest relationship.