Are You Feeling Stuck in Your Marriage?
Are you feeling stuck in your marriage? This could stem from repeating similar conflicts with similar behavior. Your relationship when you were dating seemed carefree and comfortable. You quarreled sometimes and had your disagreements, but you respected each other as individuals. Then your wedding day was spectacular. You became two people bound in life together. It was terrific, and your honeymoon was even better because you felt new and rejuvenated as a couple.
However, as you set back into everyday life, there is this looming pressure to get a dog, buy a house, build a family, or find your forever job. All of a sudden, you seem to be on a fast track through all of these milestones. This pressure can become an elephant in the room that you do not want to talk about. This can cause you to act differently towards one another and you may even start piling the burden of it all onto your significant other. This feeling is expected but not accurately warranted. We will discuss ways to manage tension and strain in your marriage to keep you moving forward. You never need to feel stuck in your marriage with these tips to help you.
• Be Open with Your Feelings
• Take It Day by Day
• Find Fun Activities to Do Together
• Be There For Each Other
Be Open with Your Feelings
Get rid of the elephant in the room. It could be almost comical how similar your feelings may be if you talk about them. You should know your partner enough to understand how they express their emotions, how to find the balance, and how to keep the conversation light. Allow each other to realize that you do not have to continue to feel this way and instead lean on each other for advice. Your priorities are constantly changing along with your life. But, by getting married, you are promising to be constant for each other. Friends come and go, jobs change, your daily routine changes, and your preferences and feelings change too. But marriage says that at the end of the day, you still choose each other. Remember this and remind your partner often because you don’t know when they may need to hear it most. Just because you are married does not mean you can read each other’s mind, so you have to be vocal about telling each other the good and the bad and dealing with it calmly. If your partner tells you something that upsets you start by taking a deep breath. Then ask them for their resolution ideas, if they do not have any suggestions on possible resolutions then try to find one that works with both of you together. Anything can throw a wrench in your marriage. Whatever the disruption is, when you resort to anger immediately before talking through your problems this can seriously hurt your significant other. If too many problems are handled this way instead of level-headed communication between both of you, this creates a dysfunctional relationship. This could create the feeling of being stuck in your marriage.
Take It Day by Day
While life continues, you two do not have to have it always figured out. Almost no one does, and even if they do, life does not always comply with what you envisioned it to be. Life is unexpected and things happen! Often times life is made up of how you react to the unexpected. How you choose to react to problems or obstacles is completely up to you. By choosing to spend your life with another person, you are vowing to handle the unexpected together. Try not to overthink the unforeseen and be flexible in your expectation. The tighter your grip on your expectation of what your life should look like, the more challenging or explosive your reaction will be when your image does not pan out.
Find Fun Things to Do Together
There are always things you could be doing to progress your life and make it better. But if your life is all about work, you may find yourself not wanting to spend time with that person. Don’t turn the looming pressure into constant work for one another. This is what builds resentment. Your partner may rather have a dirty house than miss out on quality time with you. So try not to overwhelm yourself with making life perfect and focus on making life fun. If you do fun things together, it is easier to do the work together too. Plan new and fun things to do together. A night out for dinner and a movie helps you to feel more relaxed when you can just focus on each other.
Be There for Each Other
You are a team. Stop feeling like you are in a constant race with one another to be the one that does more. All that does is put the other down and keep you feeling stuck in your marriage by repeating the same pattern. If you are continually feeling the need to be better than your partner, then it may be time to look within yourself to find what makes you have to prove you are better. If you assume all responsibility, this is the role you have created for yourself, and you will be asked to carry this throughout your entire marriage. If this is not something you want, a pattern of outbursts will continue until you find the right balance. Be there for each other. Respect each other’s requests and ask each other often what you could do for them. Not only should you offer your help, but you should want to because you love each other.
Marriage is constant work. But you do not have to have solutions for everything, and you can go to couples therapy to find ways out of your unique repetitive patterns. Couple’s therapy seems like it is the end of your marriage, but we see it as the initiative to repair your marriage. We talk to couples every day, and we see similarities and behavioral trends. These trends allow us to develop techniques to help couples find ways out of their negative behavior towards one another. Stop battling the solution in your head and feeling overwhelmed when it does not solve the problem, which means you are stuck changing the resolution and getting the same behavioral result. This will only keep you feeling stuck in your marriage. Let us get you unstuck with an introductory session today.