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Living together is not easy. You need to love not only your partner, but also your “tandem”, be proud of him, take care of him, invest time and effort in him, while remaining yourself … And what place does your couple occupy in your own life? To understand, answer the questions of psychoanalyst Robert Neuburger.
4 questions for yourself
1. What is the place of my relationship with him (her) in my life?
2. How do I perceive our couple?
3. What am I more attached to (a) – to our couple or to my partner?
4. Has marriage helped change my relationship with my family of origin?
What do the answers say?
1. Of course, marital relations occupy an important place in my life, but their importance is relative, and their place changes. A couple is not only a concrete realization of love relationships, it is also a social construct. So ask yourself how vital it is for you to live in a marriage. Or is it important for you to live with this partner, and not in general as a couple? Ask yourself if marriage is your priority: for some, the couple takes second place to other commitments and other relationships. Ask yourself if you are investing too much in your union or not enough.
2. Each of us needs to belong to different groups that define us: family, country, profession, circle of friends … A couple is a group with which we identify ourselves especially strongly. Like any other means of identifying a person, belonging to this couple can be a source of pride, joy, confidence, comfort. But it can also cause a feeling of infringement, helplessness, anxiety.
About it
“Marriage and Its Alternatives” by Carl RogersCouples in despair and in search of harmony, successful and failed marriages, the path to true partnership and a good life in the understanding of the founder of humanistic psychology (Eterna, 2006).
3. Experience shows that relationships are especially important in the first years of marriage, later in most cases the love for the union prevails in us over the love for the partner. Often a kind of balance is established: love justifies the existence of the couple, and the couple justifies the efforts to maintain love. When analyzing relationships, it is important to understand what prevails in them – the love dimension or the marital dimension. Or perhaps they both complement each other harmoniously.
4. Parental family (including grandparents, brothers, sisters) is a family that knows your personal history and is part of your psychogenealogy. Her view of your couple can be both benevolent and aggressive … A couple can be built in opposition to relatives, and a partner can be both a source of tension in relations with them and an instrument of liberation.
4 questions for two
1. Are we the most important people in our emotional lives to each other?
2. Are we satisfied with the space of intimacy that our couple gives us? Is it enough, are we cramped in it, or, on the contrary, do we feel defenseless?
3. Do we spend enough time with our couple?
4. Are we a good couple?
What do the answers say?
1. Each of the two has already asked himself the question of what place in his life is the spouse (a). Now it’s time to find out what place the other gives us in his life. By thinking about it together, we get the opportunity to say more to each other. Perhaps we sometimes think that our partner in the first place children. Or we feel that his (her) mother, sister, friend (girlfriend) is often more important to him (her) than we are or than the common life of our couple. This situation can be a source of suffering, or it can be perceived as normal.
2. A couple exists only where there is intimacy. A commonality of values, tastes, space, time, thoughts – here a balance is needed. Such closeness is expressed in the most banal things: is there a joint budget, sharing of household duties, the distribution of care for children … If we discuss from time to time how we feel about this, we can ease the tension and avoid misunderstandings.
3. The question of how much time we devote to our couple, how much we put ourselves at her disposal, often becomes the subject of discussion. Either the reproach is that the partner does not devote enough time to the couple (due to children, work, friends …), or, conversely, we reproach the partner for being “too much”, that his presence suffocates us.
4. There are no standards for what a “good couple” is, just as there are no instructions for creating one. Everyone should come up with their own ideal, asking, for example, what words best describe such a union: “intimacy”, “generosity”, “parenthood”, “companionship” … Sometimes it is useful to look for a couple in our environment that we would like to be like.
Elizabeth, 37 years old, fifteen years in union with Victor, 42 years old
“The main thing for us now should be ourselves”
“It all started with the fact that we could not start the test in any way: neither Victor nor I had a single free minute to calmly talk … about ourselves. Only a week later we finally managed to find time and answer questions! And this somehow puzzled me right away … But when we focused and the work began, encouraging results appeared: after all, we coincide in basic concepts. True, we are more attached to each other than to the concept of “couple”, we even manage to maintain our unregistered union, and this is a rarity in our very conservative environment. On the other hand, a rather painful point was also revealed – the way we relate to each other. Victor doesn’t like it at all… He is more attached to me as a woman, but I see him less and less as a man. I love him as the father of our children and is much more focused on our family than he is. With each new test question, this became more and more obvious. I tried to explain to my husband that my love is easy to detect in completely ordinary deeds and deeds: I try to cook deliciously, I make sure that everyone at home is happy, comfortable and calm … And yet I had to agree that he had been trying to me for a long time prove: children grow up, and our relationship must change. They should be our priority. I know it. It will probably not be easy, but now we are both ready for it a little more.
Recorded by Elena Shevchenko