If family life has cracked, feelings have faded and it seems that you are bound only by obligations, is there only a divorce left? Or is it better to keep the appearance of family? Psychoanalyst Grant Brenner offers to honestly answer the question: why stay together? Perhaps it makes sense to take a fresh look at the relationship and do everything so that the marriage finally becomes happy. Or… say goodbye forever.
Life often throws puzzles at us. How many times have we faced difficult choices: who to become, where to live and work, whether to follow a plan or trust intuition, act or go with the flow, how to cope with illness or loss.
Love and marriage is one of the most difficult choices. According to a long tradition, we give a life partner a solemn oath to stay with him until the end of his days, in sorrow and in joy. In fact, religious canons forced the spouses to keep the family at all costs, or at least to create its appearance.
Why maintain the status quo and look for compromises if the current cultural context does not forbid or even encourage divorce?
Today, the traditional concept of marriage is crumbling before our eyes: the chances of a modern couple staying together are about 50/50. Heads or tails. Public morality still says: “Be patient!” But it is much easier to run away, especially when both agree to release each other from vows and are not afraid of heavenly punishment for the destruction of sacred bonds.
It is understandable why so many marriages fail. Why maintain the status quo and look for compromises if the current cultural context does not forbid or even encourage divorce? Why figure out your feelings when you think it’s great to be free from the shackles of marriage? So it turns out that there is no point in wasting time on a serious conversation with yourself, without which, alas, relationships will never move to a new level.
I hate but love
Let’s try to complicate the task: there is a lot of good in a relationship, but arguments in favor of living together are equivalent to arguments in favor of a break. Of course, there are also unhealthy reasons: distorted parental attitudes, sadomasochistic inclinations and codependency, violence (one partner keeps the other with threats), anxiety disorders, or purely mercantile interests.
But what if there is still love between the spouses, real, not pathological, but creative, which can and should be saved? In order for it to come to life, you will have to face hidden fears, face oppressive experiences. Family relationships are a good school. The best and worst qualities are manifested in how we deal with the people closest to us. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to look at themselves in this mirror.
Even with so many opportunities to meet, it’s rare to find a truly unique treasure.
We have all heard that the ideal marriage is to live in harmony, support each other in difficult times, learn wisdom together and tirelessly nourish the source of love. Indeed, sometimes there really are mature couples who have become one, like two trees that have intertwined trunks since they were young seedlings.
Social media is celebrating these exemplary unions, but finding your one and only love isn’t easy. Even in today’s globalized world, with so many opportunities for dating, it’s rare to find a truly unique treasure.
One is a sad number
Many of us meet those who could be our only one. Instead of looking for the perfect, ready-to-use model, we create it. In adolescence, when we still do not really know ourselves, we begin to idealize first love. As we age, it begins to seem that we finally understand what we want, we are good at understanding people and we will never fall into the trap of destructive relationships.
We do not like to bother with introspection, and, due to difficult previous experiences, and sometimes unprocessed parental trauma, we continue to attract the wrong ones. In this case, we unconsciously look for potentially dangerous qualities in another person and, as a result, find ourselves in a relationship that psychologists call “traumatic attachment.”
Fortunately, it’s the other way around. If you try to return your thoughts to the moment of the meeting, remember the brightest period of the relationship and create in your imagination the image of the couple that we could become, it will turn out to love each other again.
When the fear of risk is greater than the risk itself
In traumatic attachment, one of the partners is always characterized by increased vulnerability. It is difficult to decide on a frank conversation when you are afraid to say an extra word so as not to harm yourself, and even more so if you have no idea how you can overcome the crisis together.
It would seem that in healthy couples everything should be easier. But even if we are ripe for the first step, we are ready to look for common ground and gradually establish a constructive dialogue, we still have to work on ourselves, and this is also hard. Unwillingness to take responsibility is the main obstacle to a successful relationship and the main obstacle to any change.
Often, though not always, working on yourself involves talking to a psychologist or family therapist. When a relationship cracks, both need to change, but you need to start with yourself. It is important to make an effort to understand why you are hesitant to speak. What stops you – unwillingness to hear the bitter truth, the desire to close yourself from problems in this way? Or the need to preserve the “holy union” at all costs, even if it is hopeless or toxic?
Traveling deep into yourself is necessary in order to take a fresh look at your spouse and finally understand what to do next.
By and large, you can do without psychotherapy. But when a joint future is at stake and there is only one alternative – to lose a partner, you will have to face your unsightly “I” one way or another, think over and reconsider a lot.
A journey deep into oneself is necessary in order to take a fresh look at the spouse and finally understand how to proceed further – to put up or part. Other partners may appear on the horizon, but it is better to be alone than to find yourself in a relationship again, which will be built according to the same destructive scenario. A period of abstinence is necessary so that the noisy whirlpool of endless unsuccessful novels does not drown out the quiet voice of self-knowledge, otherwise we will not understand that we are ready for a new meeting.
About the Author: Hilary Brenner Grant is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, affective and anxiety specialist, and author of How to Create and Maintain Healthy Relationships.