When does marriage become an endurance contest, rather than an enduring opportunity? That’s a question that seems to be becoming of greater and, unfortunately, more pervasive importance. Is that a relevant question for you in your marriage/partnership? If you don’t know, you’re already at risk of finding out the hard way.
Somewhere along the line in your life, beginning in childhood, you were inundated with all kinds of images, stories, movies, songs, etc. that all seemed to point to the notion that marriage is an essential part of a “successful” life, but the main thing I remember being taught was that the biggest sign of a “successful” marriage was longevity. Somehow, if you saw a couple make it more than x number of years, they had a “good marriage.” Yet, it’s painfully obvious that this is not only hooey, but it’s dangerous hooey that has caused immeasurable amounts of suffering for couples and children alike.
If you were to take a look at your relationship (if you’re not currently in one, take a good look at your most significant past ones), do you even know anymore what the criteria for “good” or “successful” is (if you ever did)? One thing’s for sure, as I’ve come to see in most of the relationships I’ve helped couples with: longevity isn’t the right linchpin to hang your relationship’s merit on. That’s not to say that longevity is meaningless; it’s just to say that quality will trump quantity anytime when it comes to relationships, in general. Having said that, though, there’s a double-edged, paradoxical sword when it comes to this. That paradox is the fact that, while longevity is not a reliable measure of how great your marriage is, it takes longevity to have a great marriage/partnership.
You’ve seen other articles in this eZine about what commitment really means. Without commitment, you have nothing upon which to hang your hat or to help you move through challenges. When it comes to marriages, commitment can be the glue that gets you through the roughest times. However, given the long lasting trend towards disposable marriages over the last 20 years or so (a trend that statistics are beginning to show is slowing down, incidentally), it is wise to be clear on what your committed to. [Thus that paradox just mentioned: commitment alone doesn’t insure a healthy marriage, but without some clearly stated and mutually agreed upon commitments, your relationship can’t stay healthy and vital.] If longevity becomes a central criterion for how you evaluate the condition of your commitment and your relationship, it can lead to some blind spots that can bite you on the fanny later. One of those blind spots is staying in a relationship that has become irreparably toxic, just to honor the commitment or “for the kids’ sake.”
So, what is a wise and healthy mix and intersection of commitment and longevity? I would suggest the following possibilities:
- Firstly, get clear with yourself and your partner about what “Quality” really means to you…not just in terms of your relationship, but in terms of your life as a whole. What is a quality life to you? If each of you are clear on that, then you can have truly intimate and meaningful discussions with each other on how your relationship can serve that happening. It will also give you a metric to regularly evaluate how “on-track” your relationship is at any given time.
- Remove your parents’ relationships as a measure against which to evaluate yours, unless they truly had/have a fully functional, dynamic, vibrant, and consistently loving relationship. If I were to just use longevity as a yardstick, my parents’ 34-year marriage (the 2nd time) would seem something to emulate…but, they were miserable for most of that time. Come January, my wife and I will have been together for 4 years less than my parents were, and our marriage couldn’t be more like night and day. Why? Partly because I didn’t want it to be, but also because we’ve chosen to focus on who WE are, and what WE want/need.
- Don’t be committed to misery and suffering, just because you have a commitment…if you’re doing everything you can to try to make it work. If you are making that assessment of “all we can do” on your own…that’s a mistake, particularly if you’re both noticing escalating conflict levels. The road, and my workshops, have been littered with the shells of what could’ve grown to greatness, but are shells/”corpses” now, because the idea that “we’ve been together for so long means we must be doing ok” has been so inappropriately comforting. That’s not the only reason, of course. But, if you and your partner are really suffering, and you’re trying to strategize and work on it all by yourself (and have been doing that for awhile with the continued undesireable results), you will very likely see continued erosion to a place where the relationship goes past the point of no return.
Remember that the best of relationships are marathons, not sprints. All relationships have challenges and trials. Framing your marriage/partnership as the best vehicle for not only for learning more about yourself, but also for expanding the breadth and depth of who you are getting expressed in the world inside and around you, may give you the necessary breathing room when things are pretty bad to, hopefully, remember you’re both bigger than the conflict…and, so is the purpose and value of your relationship.- Remember that conflict MAY not just be a sign of real “trouble.” If you use it early on to really get vulnerable with honest communications with each other, the conflict could also be a sign that your relationship has finally reached a place where you’re both ready to take a quantum leap in your growth…which scares your egos enough that fear comes up to try to temper the leap. Don’t let it.
- Stay Awake! Again, my office has been sadly over-populated with people coming in, trying to avoid divorce, who say some variation or another of, “I didn’t know s/he was so unhappy…that things were that bad!” This happens for many reasons, but one of the chief ones for you will be that you aren’t telling the truth to your partner (and/or to yourself) and being real with them in the moment about what you’re needing and feeling. “I don’t want to upset them right now” will eventually lead to “I didn’t know things were that bad.”
One final quick tip to use if you’re struggling, but wanting your relationship to be an enduring opportunity: if you have any kind of commitment to sacredness and sacred living, remember that your relationship isn’t the source of the sacred, but is a reflection of it; treating it as such, and relating to your partner as just another (albeit unique) expression of the Divine in you, may also help you use tough issues as a growth opportunity to get closer to the Divine that your relationship could be…if you’d only allow it.
“It is with the interior eye that truth is seen. Our whole business, therefore in this life, is to restore to health the Eye Of The Heart whereby God may be seen.” – St. Augustine
