What real behaviors do you refer to when you say you seem to get closer to divorce every day?
What would a good marriage look like to you? Do you know what a good marriage looks like to him? How do you know he loves you? What does he complain about? Do you fight? If so, what about?
Relationships go through different stages. The first part—I don’t know how long it lasts—maybe six months to three years—is when you are in love. You adore your partner. Nothing can come between you. No problem matters.
I guess things can cut short this honeymoon phase. Things like a death in the family, or money problems, or a hospitalization, or having a baby. When you have a baby, your focus changes. You can no longer do that focus on your partner with adoration thing. You have to take care of your child.
When the honeymoon ends, you have to learn to transition to a different kind of love. In this kind there are fewer moments of adoration, and those are of a different tenor—more fondness and gladness than adoration, although some people keep the adoration.
What takes over here is a sense of being a team. A loving team. You work together to achieve your goals. Part of that is having fun—bedtime fun. Some couple have that kind of fun all day long, stealing a moment in the laundry room for…. well, whatever. It’s not so hard when the baby is a baby, as long as you have energy for it.
But in many couples, each partner has a different libido level than the other. That doesn’t help. And if you husband feels like you don’t take care of him any more (because of the baby) and he’s always sniping at you and bugging you, then you won’t like that, and you’ll draw away. And if he doesn’t help you with your work, you might get even more resentful. I’m just making this stuff up—your marriage will be different.
But you have to understand what is going wrong—what is missing that you had before if you want to fix it. You have to identify these things, and then make plans and agreements about what each of you will do to give each other more of what you want. If you do give it, both of you, I mean, you will start to see results in a month or three or more. You will still have a long way to go.
It’s work. Hard work for some of us. It’s about honest communication, and people can be very afraid to say what they want. That’s where a counselor comes in. But clearly you weren’t ready for that. Most people who don’t like therapy…well, there are a lot of reasons, but one that sticks out for me is that people don’t want to share their dirty laundry with anyone, not even a professional. And in small communities, they don’t want anyone seeing them going in the counselor’s office. I asked a question about why people don’t like counselors a while back. It’s interesting reading.
I can’t tell you to do this one thing and everything will snap into place. I have given you suggestions about how to get started (finding out both what you want and what you don’t want, then problem solving together). I can tell you it will be difficult and even if you work hard, it may not work and you may find it devolving into an exist strategy. My counselor told me that maybe 25 percent of his clients stay together at most. Those are long odds. I wish you luck. You’re going to need it.
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