At some point, a spouse may feel unhappy in their marriage. All marriages have ups and downs, agreements and disagreements, happy seasons, and difficult seasons. Most married couples have to admit that maintaining their marriages is harder than they ever anticipated; inevitably they raise questions about how to deal with their unhappy marriages, and some of those questions may always puzzle them;
And let’s talk about married couples’ common questions related to unhappy marriages:
(1) “Why do I feel so unhappy”?
As we all know, in our daily life, there are four primary emotions: fear, anger, happiness, and sadness; with regard to your current marriage, probably you feel the intense emotions of sadness, fear, or anger. So why do you feel unhappy?
First, you need to be aware that your emotions are very valuable sources of information. They tell you clearly what you dislike or like, what is important to you, and what you care about. Probably, like a lot of spouses, you need help with accepting, understanding and engaging with your inner emotional world.
Pay attention to all your emotions, whether those emotions are positive or negative. You need to clarify what has been missing in your married life; for example, if you suddenly feel angry/sad/resentful/uncomfortable when you think about something your spouse did to you, you do not have to neglect those bad feelings, and you do not have to attempt to put the feelings out of your mind; instead, you should take more time to ponder about the relationship problems behind those bad feelings.
Probably, it is quite easy for you to complain about what your spouse has not done; but you feel so hard to ask him/her do to something for you; then the negative emotions breed in your heart; in this case, you need to learn to better express your needs in front of your spouse.
(2) “Does he/she knows why I feel the way?”
More often than not, numerous married couples hold the erroneous belief that their spouses have already known very well what they want; probably, the same applies to you and your spouse. Surely, if your spouse was always very aware of what you wanted, it would be wonderful; but he/she rarely does. Even in a lot of healthy marriages, couples can hardly do this well. So if your spouse doesn’t understand what you want from him/her, how is he/she supposed to meet your emotional needs or help you do something beneficial.
At this stage, you need to realize that probably your spouse still does not know well how you are feeling, although he/she may have sensed some part of it. On the other hand, he/she may also desire to understand your feelings and emotional needs, you need to learn how to let him/her clearly hear them from you; you might prepare for a productive conversation with your spouse; remember, if your spouse is just hastily invited into a conversation with you, he/she may not be able to figure out what you would like to say. Moreover, during the productive conversation, make sure to put your inner feelings at the forefront, and meanwhile don’t blame your spouse regardless of the situation.
And you might think about some formulas for launching a meaningful conversation, like “My concern is…”, “I feel …”, and “how do you feel about that…”
(3) “Do I know how my spouse feels?”
If you start to feel unhappy in your marriage, odds are that your spouse has some areas in which you experience changes. A long-term relationship is adaptive; marital problems are not cause-and-effect, and they are just circular in nature – each spouse’s behavior pulls or influences the other one’s behavior. For example, if your spouse is always unhappy in the married life, you may also be stuck in some way of relating with your spouse: organizing/processing/regulating your negative emotions in a similarly unproductive way. Then you two fall into vicious patterns during the interaction. Surely, to get yourself unstuck in that kind of interaction pattern, you and your spouse need to enhance your mutual understanding.
You must be aware that your spouse’s mind and feelings may change as the married life goes on. Related research found that the best shot of relationship change happens when a partner proactively gets to know how the other one feels. On the other hand, you should not directly ask your spouse to better understand how you feel, it will be easily interpreted as a compulsion; thus, that will only be counter-productive.
When you feel unhappy in your marriage, probably you need to reflect on yourself – if you were your spouse, how would you feel and act in the context of the current relationship status; simply put, you might try to build more empathy for your spouse.
(4) “How should I change myself to fix the relationship?”
When something makes us feel unhappy, one of our common knee-jerk reactions is to blame something or someone related to the cause. This is just human nature; you are also not exceptional; but in this case, you might ask yourself a question, “are you also part of the problem?”If you say no, probably you have made the “fundamental attribution error”(a cognitive bias that causes us to overestimate/underestimate the influence of personality-based dispositional factors) – you have over-emphasized yourself (you think that you have made consistent attempts to understand your spouse’s emotions and opinions), you tend to be less forgiving of your spouse and more forgiving of your own mistakes/faults; maybe you feel embarrassed to admit what you have done wrong, this calls for a lot more of courage and humidity. The following example can make this point clear:
Andy and Lucy were a married couple; they agreed to wash dishes in turn; one day Lucy forgot to clean the dishes because she was too focused on looking after the kids; Andy tended to think that this task is fundamental to Lucy, and he did not think that it is just “situational”. Then at the kitchen sink, dirty dishes piled up. They quarreled about this thing – Andy complained Lucy just did not clean dishes in time; but Lucy complained that Andy did not care about her, she thought that when he noticed that she was too busy looking after their kids, he should have given her a hand rather than stand idly by.
In unhappy marriages, too many spouses just take for granted things that their significant halves do for them and their family members. From the example above, you should also be aware of this point – if a spouse can take a more humble and compatible attitude to proactively share responsibility in the married life, the other one is far more likely to favorably respond. No doubt, one of the efficient approaches to influencing the change in your significant half is to change yourself positively.
For more tips, you might go on to read the post below:
How to change yourself to save your marriage – Be your best.
(5) “I am willing to wait for the relationship to change, but how long should I wait?”
Sometimes, a marriage inevitably gets to a breaking point in which one or both sides run out of steam, get fed up, and lack the energy and motivation to care about each other. This is a difficult mental place where a married couple may reach. If you are also in such a situation and you are willing to improve the relationship, you may also have the question, “how long should I wait for the relationship to change?”In your married life, such a line of thinking inevitably calls into question what you are ultimately responsible for and what commitment means to you
To help you reflect on this topic thoughtfully, you might also ask yourself some clarifying questions like the below:
- What exactly do I wait for?
- What is my breaking point in this long-term relationship?
- For the sake of my marriage, what am I willing to do now?
- If I have made a lot of changes to myself but he/she is still not willing to change, then what?
- What else am I willing to do so that I can ensure that I have tried my best to maintain the marriage?
Sometimes, some spouses may wait years for their spouses to move toward them again, while some spouses may just wait several months or weeks. In general, a broken marriage can be fixed, but it requires hard work and both sides must be willing to work together for the marriage; no doubt, one of the crucial factors in relational repair lies in the motivational levels of both sides.
(6) “In this unhappy relationship, what am I willing to wait for?”
A word of caution: you should not compromise your mental health and personal safety for the sake of salvaging the marriage. Some circumstances demand professional help and immediate action; in that case, you should be aware of what you can allow and what you can not allow with your spouse, and your boundaries for how you should deserve to be treated, and how to deal with the situation if your spouse violates or disregards those serious boundaries again and again.
The following points out three cases where you may consider leaving instead of staying in the relationship:
- If your spouse has a serious mental illness and this has posed significantly negative impacts on the relationship, you might consider quitting.
- If your spouse is very verbally or physically abusive and you are fearful about your safety, you should consider leaving.
- Your spouse has promised to end his/her affairs, but later you still caught him/her having multiple affairs.
The final word:
As with most marital issues, there is a common 3-step process for helping a spouse get to the root of the problems:
- Practice deep and thoughtful self-reflection, where you should try to better understand the way you feel.
- During the communication with your spouse, make sure to express how you feel and why you feel that way.
- Send a loving invitation to your spouse, into a conversation where you can express your most important points, such as what the relationship means for you, and how you want to move forward with the relationship.
For more marriage-saving tips, 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:
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
Unhappy marriage signs – How to know if you are in an unhappy marriage.
8 tips on marriage reconciliation after separation – survive the separation.