A crisis in a relationship is a period when the previous relationship no longer suits you. When spouses no longer want to live the way they used to, and relationships cannot develop according to the old patterns. If the relationship was expensive, then the crisis is experienced painfully.
Your partner’s habits that you previously did not pay attention to are now constantly annoying. You don’t understand how you didn’t notice this about him (her) before? Your eyes seem to open wide, you get the feeling that you used to be in hibernation, in a fog, bewitched, and now you suddenly woke up and feel disappointed. It’s like you’ve been scammed!
The family is like a living organism and in its development goes through the traditional stages and stages, which can be called the levels of family development. This is a period of courtship, then a life together without children, then a family with a small child, a mature family and a family with adult children. Then the children leave their parents, leaving for an independent life. For many families, an additional turning point is retirement, when they have to rebuild their lives in a completely new way.
If people do not know how to cope with difficulties and now and then fall into crises, then their crisis in one area supports and provokes a crisis in another area. Then the crisis in the relationship begins to be fueled by age-related crises: a 3-year-old childhood crisis, a teenage crisis, a midlife crisis. Someone’s aunt came and began to live in a family or the family moved to the country — a new environment can easily provoke new outbreaks of difficulties in relationships. Experiencing the death of loved ones, failure with a project or loss of a job, long illnesses — all this, of course, tests the strength of a family.
Are there relationships without crises?
The fact that any family necessarily experiences crises, especially a series of predetermined and obligatory crises, is not true. It is a myth. However, there is some truth behind this myth. There are relationships without crises, but rarely and only among mature, wise people who think about the future, care about the future and know how to prevent future difficulties.
Are there many such families? Are there many fully mature and wise people among your friends and acquaintances, experts in the field of building family relationships? Hardly. Since there are few such people, it is more realistic to accept that normal people cannot develop good and lasting relationships without crises. Whether often, rarely, but at least difficult periods in a relationship happen in almost any family.
The question is not whether there are crises. The question is whether you are able to overcome these difficult moments in a relationship. How long the crisis will last and how it will end — that is the question, and this is definitely up to you.
In a good family, spouses treat the crisis philosophically: “Yes, it happens. Now the crisis. So what? We’ll decide everything anyway, after a while everything will definitely settle down. We’ll still be together!»
In other families, the crisis is more difficult: the relationship for a long time passes into a sluggish stage, when you don’t want to live together, and it’s difficult to break up. This is where betrayals, addictions, serious illnesses and other troubles begin. It happens that the crisis ends with the termination of relations. More often, however, the crisis is similar to a runny nose and does not last long, from several weeks to months.
The crisis destroys old relationships, and if you are interested, you can use the crisis to create new relationships that suit you more, move to a new stage in the development of relationships.
The main question in the crisis, divorce or not?
When a partner is annoying, you want to divorce him. And is it right? The only correct answer here is that this decision should not be made under the influence of emotions. On the contrary, the most responsible decisions need to be tested by situations where emotions contradict your possible choice.
Namely, the decision to create a family must be made when you are in a quarrel. That is, even if you quarreled, but you still want to live together, it means that the decision is rather correct. But the decision to end the relationship should be made only with a clear mind, when your relationship has somehow improved. If you seem to have reconciled, everything seems to be fine, but you don’t want to live together, this does not mean that you are getting a divorce correctly. This means something else: that you can think about divorce …