Midlife Marriage Woes: How to Know When to Let
It Go
and When to Work Harder to Keep It Alive
By Jed Diamond©
2007
I see many people in my practice and have many
friends in my life who are in turmoil. They are at midlife or
beyond, have been married for a significant amount of time, have had
their ups and downs with their relationship, but now face a major
dilemma. Should I leave my marriage and move on with my life or
should I try harder to make it work? Some people are afraid of
leaving too soon. “I love this person and don’t want to let that go
if there is any hope we can re-vitalize our marriage. Others are
afraid of staying too long. “What if I stay and things continue to
go down hill. I’m afraid it will be too late to start over.” All
are in pain and all desperately want answers that are helpful.
I’ve found that having a successful later-life
marriage is never easy, but it can be the most satisfying and
gratifying relationship we can have in our lives. Based on my
personal experiences (I’ve been married three times), listening to
my friends and neighbors, and getting feedback from nearly 50,000
people I have counseled over the last 40 years I would like to share
these thoughts with you.
1. Let go of the myth of “happily ever
after.”
Most of us, I’ve found, have a very unrealistic
view of marriage in general and mid-life marriage in particular.
Many of believe that once we find the right person, everything else
will take care of itself. When we had “young marriages,” we
expected love to conquer all. For “mature marriages” we believe
we’ve learned how to make things work so we can coast into a joyous
old age together. In truth, it isn’t easy. Happiness can be
illusive.
2. Stop trying to “work on your marriage.”
It does seem to be a characteristic of our
generation that we grew up believing that a successful marriage had
to be worked on. Just as we have rather magical views of success
(Build It and They Will Come), we also have an interesting
worker-bee mentality about marriage. We are sure that if we don’t
continually work on it, our marriage will crumble and die. The
problem is that most people are working their butts off in other
areas of their lives. The thought of coming home and “working on
our relationship” has about as much appeal as pulling out our
fingernails with a pair of pliers.
3. Fight the evolutionary forces that
destroy marriages.
Although we would like to think otherwise,
our brains (and the rest of what makes us human) were formed during
the millennia we lived as hunter-gatherers on the savannas of
Africa. The evolutionary blueprint that was developed then (and
which is still deeply embedded in our psyches) went like this: Find
a mate, have children, raise them to maturity, say goodbye to the
world. As recently as the early 1900s, the average life-span in the
U.S. was well under 50 years. At best evolution doesn’t care
anything about us after we’ve done our reproductive duty and passed
on our genes. At worst it programs women to become confused about
their mid-life marriages and programs men to become restless and to
look outside for a younger partner. If you want your marriage to
succeed you have to resist these feelings.
4. Don’t try to change your partner.
Change your attitude about them.
When things are going poorly in a
relationship, we go over in our mind all the things that we wish our
partner would change. I often think that things would be so much
better if only Carlin would…..Then I think of a list of things
including, “Listen better to my needs, appreciate me more, let me
know she loves me, touch me more, be more interested in sex, etc.
etc.” That kind of thinking often leads to judgment and criticism
or comparing what I have to other relationships from the past or my
imagined future where I have a woman will do all those things that I
like and doesn’t do any of the things I dislike. A better solution
is to change our attitude. Rather than seeing the other person as
withholding their love or causing us grief, see them as human beings
doing their best to love us under difficult circumstances.
5. Learn to fall in love all over again.
One of phrases I hear over and over is “I
love…(him/her), but I’m not in love with him/her.”
Most of us remember the wonderful feeling we’ve had when we fell in
love. It’s a crazy rush that is better than the best drug high (in
fact the neurochemicals we produce in our brain when we fall in love
are closely related to drugs like cocaine).
The emotional elements
present when we fall in love include fantasy, romantic projection,
and ego desire.
I tell people when they fall deeply in love
they are connecting with a person whose personality is made up of
one part ideal mother, one part ideal father, one part sexual god or
goddess who was in vogue when you were 11 to 15 years old (For me it
was Brigitte Bardot. For others it was Annette Funicello, Steve
McQueen, Tab Hunter, Tony Curtis, or Marilyn Monroe. Who was it for
you?), and one part the positive aspects you don’t recognize in
yourself and project on to your lover.
Most people believe they can’t fall in love
with the same person. They are too familiar, too predictable, not
“strange” enough. And it’s true, falling in love requires a certain
kind of blindness, a willingness to suspend all judgments of who
someone really is and live for a time in a wonderful fantasy world.
Well, why not create such a world with the partner you already
have. Dress up in your best and pretend to meet this exotic
“stranger” at a bar. Fight off the competition and pick him up and
bring him home. What fun.
6. Practice being in love again and again.
There’s a story about a man and a woman who
had been married for 65 years. By all accounts they had a very
successful marriage. The woman knew he loved her, but she told her
friends that she just wished he would tell her more often. “I need
to hear the words, and he just never tells me that he loves me.
Without hearing the words, I come to doubt whether he really does
love me. Well, I know he loves me, but I wonder if he really love
loves me. Do you understand?”
One of their mutual friends asked the man
who he never told his wife that he loved her. He seemed taken
aback. “Of course I love her. I told her that the first time I
ever laid eyes on her. If I should ever change my mind I’ll her
know.”
I know too many men (and women) who have come
to take their love for granted. They see it as something that is
static and once formed never needs tending. I’ve found that in our
busy world, one of the best things we can do for ourselves and our
partner is to practice loving them again and again and again.
Being in love
is different from falling in love. As William B. Stewart says in
his book Deep Medicine, being
in love requires commitment, loyalty, and development and nurturing
of shared goals. These things don’t have to be
“worked” on. How about thinking of them as games of joy.
7. Staying in love involves change.
One of the things I’ve learned about staying in love is that it
involves risk-taking. The longer we are together, the more we have
invested and often the more fearful we are of rocking the boat.
Many of us fall into the trap of playing it safe. We don’t tell our
truth or challenge old patterns because we want to keep a peaceful
partnership. Yet, the very stability that we long for can also
smother the changes that need to occur if a marriage is to grow and
deepen. I’ve found over and over again, when I’ve got something
important to say to Carlin, something I know will shake her up, it
feels like I’m putting the relationship on the line. Although my
head says we’re committed to each other and our relationship is
solid, it feels like I’m on the edge of an abyss looking into the
void.
Just as we have to take risks in our personal lives if we
are to grow and change, we have to take risks in our relationship
life if our love is going to have the novelty the relationship needs
to transform and deepen. If there isn’t a certain amount of fear in
speaking out our truth, we’re probably not taking enough risk to
stretch ourselves in the relationship.
Staying in love requires risk-taking, growth,
and joy in partnership.
8. We never leave for the reason we think.
Most people who leave a relationship, leave because they
think they can’t get their needs met with the person they are with
and life has become too painful for them. They hope there will be
relief in leaving and they fantasize finding a new partner that will
meet their needs more fully. As a counselor I’ve seen more people
than not, leave one relationship only to find themselves dealing
with the same issues in the next relationship. Looking for that
“magic someone” is usually a futile search.
I think there are two hidden reasons why relationships
fail. The first is that for most of human history, we only lived
long to learn how to fall in love. It’s all that’s required to get
too people together to make babies. We learned only enough about
being in love to hang on until the kids were grown. Most of us died
well before we learned the skills for staying in love. If we want
to have a complete relationship, we have to deepen our understanding
of being in love and learn the tools for staying in love. That
takes time. We now are living long enough to have the time for it,
but we don’t know how to do it. We are seduced by what we know.
Falling in love with someone new gives us a rush of neurochemicals
that is very powerful. Falling in love with someone we’ve been in
relationship with for 30 years takes a lot more skill and nuance.
It’s a different kind of rush, reserved for those who are ready for
the mature love of soul partners.
The second hidden reason why relationships fail is that most
of us who are trained therapists never learned the skills necessary
to help our clients be in love and stay in love. We are very good
at teaching people how to change themselves, but not so good and
helping people accept themselves as they are. We’re good at
teaching people how to communicate in ways that facilitate growth,
but not so good at teaching people how to listen with open hearts to
a language beyond words. The truth is we are all new at learning
the deeper aspects of love.
Whether we leave or stay, relationship is about learning to
love. We need more support in learning how to love ourselves more
fully, how to love our partners more deeply, and how to love the
earth we all share more wisely.
