Love at first sight? The perfect couple? A union of two hearts? A match made in heaven? This list of idiomatic expressions and common metaphors about the relationship between two people can be continued further, but people who have at least a little experience in building long-term relationships are likely to agree that these lofty expressions are actually pathos phrases.
Unfortunately, not everyone succeeds in maintaining strong family relations based on mutual trust, respect, and love in the true sense of this concept. Romantic relationships, as a rule, are able to turn your head and provide the happiest moments of life, but they have their own rules and exist only for a very specific period of time.
The so-called puppy love or honeymoon period eventually ends, and the romantic mood and attraction to your companion becomes blended with a daily routine that exposes some pressing domestic problems. It is this fact that often causes your rose-colored glasses to crack, and the illusions of an ideal relationship are destroyed.
This is not a reason to despair. No one is safe from mistakes when choosing a partner to love for the rest of your life. Knowledge about building relationships between adults, as well as many other important factors in life, cannot come to us simply by reading an article in a popular journal or a paragraph in a scientific book. Life’s biggest lessons are taught to us through experience.
Your own understanding of how you see your married life and your family model is shaped by your personal life experience. The empirical method of understanding the world is your only assistant in creating your happiness! However, from time to time there are crisis situations in relationships between partners that do not happen overnight because every phenomenon has a cause and effect.
Theory of cyclical relations and a crisis of seven years
Modern family and personality psychologists agree that there is a certain cyclical nature to relations between spouses. According to researchers, crises in relationships that occur in intervals of approximate every 7 years are a generally accepted norm that should not be overlooked. It can be argued that crises in any family are inevitable, and the task of partners in a harmonious marriage is to be able to prevent tipping points and respond in time to alarming signals in a relationship.
When spouses do not cope with the crisis that has arisen within the family, the matter can take a tragic turn with disappointing consequences. Divorce statistics in the United States have been disappointingly high in recent decades, and this indicates that the trend of failed marriages is taking on signs of a pandemic.
Of course, there are situations when it is obvious that divorce is the only way out of a protracted toxic relationship, such as when the spouses continue to poison each other’s lives and living together destructively affects both. If the circumstances in your family have developed in such a way that you have at least contemplated the possibility of a divorce – this is an occasion to analyze your relationship with your partner now!
How do you avoid making hasty conclusions and not become a hostage of your own emotions during difficult times in your marriage? How do you make a U-turn from a dead end and get yourself back on the bright highway of a happy family life? How do you find a glimmer of hope in your personal story if everything seems hopeless?
This may be a partial list of questions that you recently asked yourself if you became interested in this article. So let’s take a closer look at those points that most need attention if you want to save your marriage, which is on the verge of a divorce for any reason!
“Hard reboot” and a complete “reinstallation of the system”, as an effective remedy for a tired romance
Everyday routine and endless daily problems destroy romance! Of course, you have probably heard such a statement and can confirm its truth in your personal life. But try to look at this phenomenon from a different angle! If not for small trials along the way, be it a career, education, or building a happy family, your achievements in life would be less rewarding.
Often the greatest value of our family, friends, relatives and loved ones is sharing support and jointly overcoming difficulties. If this is not happening in your relationship, then an unfortunate error has crept into the system which needs to be identified and fixed. And if it seems to you that you and your partner have already passed enough tests and do not want to continue on this path, simulate or recreate the situation you would like to be in, returning to the stage of your relationship that is ideal for you.
Imagine that your relationship is the operating system of your personal computer. To get a computer back to functioning better, a complete reboot is required. Probably now is the time to press the reset button and temporarily move your current relationship to slightly different coordinates and circumstances in which you and your partner will unconsciously want to express your relationship in a different way.
Make a pleasant emotional test for your marriage: marvel at this world together!
In order to translate the recipe for reanimating the romantic component of your relationship described in the previous paragraph into reality, you will need two main ingredients – your imagination and your assertive initiative. If at the beginning of your joint story you and your partner loved to travel, go on a trip. The format and direction can be anything, the important thing is to change the situation surrounding the usual way of life for a while.
Often, the feeling that you and your partner are becoming more isolated and more self-contained can manifest into a dying passion and the death of love in your relationship. You may need a strong emotional shake to light the fire in your marriage again.
Diving, trekking in the mountains, kayaking and even banal camping in the open air can be a great refresher for you. The more extreme the new circumstances and more radical the change of scenery is, the better the chance that you can find the true qualities that will give you the right answers to the questions about the current state of your relationship.
Back to the future: start the Delorean car of your love again
It is not necessary to be Doc and Marty McFly in order to move back into the past. Of course, we are talking about a mental journey to the beginning of your relationship, which is now in a difficult place. The secret of such a psychological exercise is that you are trying to analyze in detail the origin of your relationship, no matter how long it has been.
Your task is to understand what exactly attracted you to your partner during the early stages of your acquaintance, what personal qualities caught your attention, and what ultimately became the catalyst that led to the development of your relationship. It is said that we fall in love with people not for their outward beauty, but because they are the person who we want to be the parent of our future children. We are always looking for some kind of metaphysical kinship of souls!
If your journey into the past was successful, and you saw the start of your mutual feelings, compare the psychological portraits of your partner then and now. Try to find the very amazing features that caused you to fall in love with your spouse. Have any of them survived to this day? If your answer is yes, you are halfway to success!
Talk, talk, talk! Listen, listen, listen!
This is a fact that must be taken on faith if you are not aware of its obviousness. The main medication in complex relationships between people is the ability to hear and understand each other! For spouses who are on different radio frequencies, it is almost impossible to hear each other and understand what is hurting your loved one.
The first step to healing is communication, which is based on mutual respect for each other’s interests. Refusal to communicate and control one’s own emotions is just as harmful as egoism. After all, no matter how deep the current crisis situation would seem to you, there are always points of contact and something in common between two people who voluntarily spent so much time together.
So, talk, talk, talk! Then listen, listen, listen! And then repeat! Yes, perhaps you have a good reason to file for divorce, but at the same time, you may have a million other reasons to save your marriage. Do not make hasty and impulsive decisions, maintain sobriety and prudence, and be tuned to a positive outcome!
