Sometimes marriage is susceptible to stress. And in your marriage, you also inevitably encounter stress from all facets of life that challenge the status quo or erodes your happiness, such as bringing up a new baby, losing a regular job, and injuries/illness of a family member. Although something makes you stressed out in your marriage, you are sure you still want to maintain the marriage.
If you wonder how to survive a stressful marriage, here are 6 tips:
1 Open up to your spouse:
In times of high stress, it is easy for you to withdraw from your spouse and hole up with yourself as a means of conserving your mental and emotional energies. And hence, there can be a tendency that everything is bottled up inside and then conflict explodes unexpectedly even at a slight disagreement. It is toxic to your marriage. If you sincerely want your relationship to survive and thrive, do not emotionally pull away from your spouse. Instead, the more stressful your marriage is, the more necessary it is to keep emotional intimacy alive. In happy marriages, couples usually feel free to talk about various issues rather than speak to each other with a heavy heart.
Open communication is an essential part of any healthy marital relationship. To maintain open communication with your spouse, it is worthwhile to note the tips below:
- Make sure to have regular talk sessions with your spouse.
- Share with your spouse your opinion about everything in a peaceful manner, whether it is good or bad.
- Make a point to hear what your spouse talks to you with an attitude of acceptance.
- In daily life, make sure to be your spouse’s best friend based on your total trust, complete honesty, and unconditional support.
For more tips on how to better communicate with your spouse, you might go on to read the post below:
How to have effective communication in marriage
2 Approach financial challenges with teamwork:
Money makes a mess of a huge number of marriages. In the US, the research found that about 20% of divorces are associated with money.
Typically, financial stress occurs when couples are introducing children into their marriages, bearing the brunt of unemployment. As we all know, if couples can’t work together well to overcome financial challenges and stress in their married life, they can hardly live together for a life long time. When facing an intolerable financial burden on a family, the majority of people hold a very realistic and pragmatic position – if the financial stress is too much and always can’t be handled appropriately, divorce should be considered.
Probably, you can also remember the moment when you feel like you can’t take the financial stress anymore. If financial stress is taking a toll on your marriage, it is important to work together on a new family budget that works. And if you always manage your family budget alone or you do most of this work, don’t go on doing so, because that will only wear you down; besides that, when your family’s finances become constant stress for you, it is also a time to make substantial efforts to enhance teamwork.
When you are working together on your family fiancés, you should be aware of the following points:
- Don’t rush to make a major purchase without discussing with your spouse. If your spouse is not there, you had better sleep on it.
- Don’t let unpaid bills or debt bills slip by unnoticed. After marriage, debt not only can be damaging to only one person but also can be a double threat, because two sides are responsible for paying the money back.
- To work together as a team properly, you should have the same goals in your mind. So work together to look for and pursue common goals as many as possible.
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For more tips on how to manage finances in your marriage, you may go on to read the post below:
How to manage finances in a marriage – Couples’ financial management.
Actually, in a marriage, good teamwork effectively reduces all kinds of stress, not merely financial stress; and it empowers a couple to face severe challenges. Therefore, when you are confused about how to survive a stressful marriage, grasp this basic point firmly.
For more tips about how to develop teamwork in your marriage, you may go on to read the post below:
How to be a team with your spouse – Develop teamwork in marriage.
3 Stop blaming each other:
There are always times when things get tough. And it is easy for couples to get caught in a blame game when stress wrecks havoc on their moods – it is a natural tendency that people in tough times are tempted to blame their partners for their collective stress and misfortune.
A blame game is toxic or destructive to a relationship; in your marriage, neither of you can win in the blame game; and both of you feel unloved and unwanted in the blame game; eventually, it only makes stress worse. And in happy marriages, couples are more cognizant of this negative communication pattern, hence they consciously resist the impulse to chastise, castigate, or blame each other in challenging times.
When you try to stop playing the blame game, some principles like below should be grasped:
- Treat your spouse with love and respect, no matter how you feel about a critical issue.
- Most of the time when things get bad, do not waste your time blaming each other. And the matter of the uttermost urgency is to figure out what contributed to the present situation and how to do differently in the future.
- As you work together to find a solution to your problems, make sure to give full consideration to your spouse’s opinion.
4 Don’t wallow in self-pity:
Self-pity is a common response to stressful situations. And it is an extremely a destructive element for a marital relationship – if you wallow in self-pity for a long period of time, things will only get worse – by victimizing yourself for unfortunate things happening in your married life, it can lead you to feel vulnerable, overwhelmed, and helpless; in the long run, your marriage tends to go downhill. So you must be aware that self-pity only drains your energy. When you are in a constant state of self-pity, you not only can’t help yourself but also can’t help your spouse get out of stressful situations.
As explained above, don’t dwell in self-pity when your marriage is stressful; instead, you need the strength of mind to stand up for yourself and channel your emotions more productively; if you don’t know how to overcome self-pity, and here are some ideas:
- Stop apologizing constantly for yourself:
If you apologize for yourself all the time, this act is a signal to your spouse that you are weak and you are wrong. For a self-pitying person, stopping apologizing constantly can provide him/her with a series of psychological benefits, including confidence, empowerment, feelings of self-respect and integrity.
Surely, it doesn’t mean you should never apologize. When you did something legitimately wrong, you still ought to own up to it and learn from it.
- Break a big plan into steps as little goals:
As you accomplish each step, celebrate your success. Feeling like you are moving forward in the right direction helps overcome self-pity.
- Practice gratitude:
It is almost impossible to feel gratitude and self-pity at the same time. Gratitude is about thinking “I have got more than I need, it is enough for me!” By contrast, self-pity is about thinking, “Why? I should deserve more!” Mentally strong people know well that they should be grateful in their life instead of wallowing in self-pity.
5 Update your love maps:
How do you define a love map? It should be the part of your brain that stores the blueprint of your spouse’s personal information, such as his/her goals, dreams, fears and favorites, successes, and stressors. The research found that couples who keep clear love maps of their spouses can better weather difficult times, and hence they are more likely to have happier marriages.
To some extent, stressful events can change your spouse’s view of their world. Therefore, when stress is badly hurting your marriage, updating your love map can be considered as an option of reducing stress. So, ask your spouse about how his/her stressors have changed how he/she feels about his/her job, security, life, future, and relationships… As long as doing so can help revive a dormant romance, or cultivate emotional closeness and intimacy, you do not have to be conservative and reluctant to change.
6 Give each other plenty of alone time:
Our lives are so hectic that we are often in need of alone time. Especially under stress, it is more likely that one or both of you may not have enough time to process what lies ahead, or that things become a complete mess. So the extra efforts and time (it is more about alone time) are needed to organize things. And the more time you have to organize and prepare for your marital life, the less stressful it can be. Even though you do not intend to make any change, just sparing some time to relax is also helpful to reduce levels of stress.
When it comes to how to survive a stressful marriage, allowing each other to have more alone time is a practical way to relieve marital stress.
So make a point to allow extra time to be alone with each other’s thoughts; in doing so, you can better engage in meaningful communication with each other afterward. After refreshing your spirit and mind with enough alone time, the quality of communication can be enhanced. Remember, before you belong to your spouse, you need to belong to yourself, and vice versa. So when your marriage becomes stressful, probably you both need more alone time to re-charge yourselves.
The final word on a stressful marriage:
Anyway, stress is a part of life. And every marriage has its own twits and turns. Even though you choose to end the current stressful marriage, you have to learn to deal with stress from different sources after you get married again in the future. Therefore, rather than escape from stress in your marriage, it is better to manage to deal with it in a positive way. Furthermore, as you two successfully go through tough times one after another, a lot of similar stress can be reduced or avoided in the future.
If you want to learn more expert advice on how to survive a stressful marriage, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
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How to have a long lasting happy marriage – Marriage-saving tips.
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