An unhappy marriage can produce a long-lasting negative impact on a spouse’s emotional and mental health, but unfortunately, a lot of couples have already been somewhat numb to their married life, and they choose to turn a blind eye to those problems that are damaging their marriages.
Of course, problems exist in every relationship, but not all relationships are deemed unhappy. So how to know if you are in an unhappy marriage?
You might pay attention to the 11 warning unhappy marriage signs:
(1) You are lack of effective communication in marriage:
Effective communication is essential to all healthy marital relationships. Ask yourself whether you would rather use various forms of non-verbal communication than verbal communication when you have to connect with your spouse. Do you attempt to avoid face-to-face interaction with your spouse? When you are in a conversation with your spouse about some critical or controversial issues, do you have a bad temper? Or do you still remain indifferent to him/her even though his/her statements about something are serious? Only you could answer these questions.
In general, a solid communication barrier exists between couples in an unhappy marriage – Usually, one spouse feels no need to communicate, as long as there is nothing important to say to the other one; even when an important incident occurs, probably one spouse would also not like to share with the other one until things get pretty bad.
(2) You are lack of sex drive:
Among a variety of unhappy marriage signs, a typical sign is that one or both parties become utterly sexless; lack of sex can be an outcome of lack of emotional connection; the deeper the mutual emotional connection is, the more willing a couple is to have sex; in a sexless marriage, the spouse with low sex drive doesn’t feel emotionally safe with the other one during sex; and hence, sex life tends to become less and less enjoyable for both spouses; even sometimes one spouse may straightforwardly reject sex; as a result, both spouses will feel hurt emotionally by sex apathy. The more a spouse shuts down during sex, the more hurt the other one feels in the relationship, and the more emotionally distant the couple are from each other.
As explained above, lack of sex should be thought of as a conspicuous early sign of an unhappy relationship; furthermore, for a person who has thought about moving out from a relationship, he/she will also purposely reduce or avoid sex in married life.
For married couples, a constant negative connection or constant disconnection is the main cause of low sexual drive; speaking simply, sex-avoidant or sexless couples feel like they are just living like roommates. And love relationships can hardly thrive under such a situation.
(3) You start to indulge in the fantasy of new life without your partner:
If you often cling to a fantasy of a happy life without your spouse, this can be a signal that something goes wrong with the current relationship and that you are emotionally detaching from the marriage relationship. You do this to make mental preparation for the possible separation in the future; the less you care about the current relationship, the less pain you will feel after separation.
(4) You always chase past things:
Normally, everyone can recall the past from time to time; but in the long-term relationship, if you always realize that things haven’t been what they used to be, especially those things are gone for good but you still desperately wish all the things could return to where they were before, then inevitably you will be unsatisfied with the current married life as well as the current relationship status. When one spouse dwells on the past instead of trying to live and enjoy the present, the marital happiness fades.
This can be an early sign of an unhappy marriage that tells you that your marriage is not on the right track. The frequent statements like “You are not so good/kind/patient as you used to be” can be viewed as a denial of your spouse’s state.
(5) You are snooping on your spouse:
Let’s consider the following scenario:
“Your spouse leaves the mobile phone on the desk. His/her text messages and phone logs could be easily accessed by sliding your finger across the phone. In this case, will you look? Or have you got used to doing so? “
Do you know how big the stakes of your snooping are? Abundant reports found that a big number of people tend to consider terminating the marriage relationship once they catch their partners’ snooping; on the other hand, when a spouse who is innocent notices that his/her significant half is snooping on him/her, he/she feels disappointed, and he/she must be confused as to why he/she still can not have enough trust in his/her spouse.
Snooping may be a final straw that ends a marriage because the mutual trust in marriage is bound to be destroyed after a suspicious spouse does so.
(6) You are often nagging your spouse:
Nagging a spouse seems like a cliché, but there is a lot more to it than meets the eye; it is also a leading cause of marital discord. When your spouse is not willing to do something but you continue to remind him/her of that, eventually, your requests will only be interpreted as nagging.
Your spouse may have already been sick of your nagging. The more you nag your spouse, the more your spouse will withdraw from you.
And the following gives more reasons why you should stop nagging:
- Even if your gripes are valid, your spouse may also feel resentful about your nagging.
- Your nagging can put your spouse on the defensive.
- There is a kind of subtext implying in your nagging – “You are an idiot’, “You are inadequate”. Your nagging can make your spouse feel like in a parent-child relationship instead of an equal relationship between husband and wife.
- Nagging often develops into criticism; therefore your spouse will probably tune you out and react emotionally.
(7) You are having an emotional affair:
There is a general misunderstanding that infidelity only takes place when a spouse has physical sex with someone else outside the marital relationship. But in fact, emotional infidelity is also an often-neglected type of infidelity. Among all the mentioned unhappy marriage signs, this should be considered as the most serious one due to its devastating impact on a long-term relationship. Even sometimes an emotional affair is more harmful than a physical affair.
So what can be regarded as emotional infidelity? Emotional infidelity comes in many forms, but it essentially maintains a stable emotional connection with a third party on an emotional level. It starts when a spouse engages in intimate contact with someone else whom the spouse is attracted to, as they spend time interacting, the spouse and the third party go out from friend zone and start to communicate with each other like a couple; and generally, the emotional infidelity can occur via chat rooms, cell phones, or social media through texting or sexting. No doubt, emotional infidelity opens the door to advance in flirting and having a physical affair.
(8) Not putting your spouse first anymore:
When your spouse asks you to do something and if you always blurt out the words like “I will” or ”I do”, that means you make it a top priority to do what your spouse wants. No doubt, prioritizing each other is an essential part of marriage. As long as one of you does not want to make the other one’s needs a priority anymore, you two can hardly stay focused and united in the relationship. In other words, you neglect the premise of maintaining a happy marriage – Marriage must be a unity of two complementary parts.
(9) You are too controlling:
As we all know, controlling behavior can lead to severe physical and emotional abuse; control freaks often don’t recognize this unhappy marriage sign, even they do not know they were controlling until the relationship ends, and few of control freaks are willing to admit that their controlling behavior was provoking a marriage crisis.
So how to identify whether you are a controlling spouse? Here is a simple way to examine yourself – When you differ from your spouse in how to deal with an issue, if your emotion suddenly becomes intense and your behavior feels bossy or possessive (e.g. raging at your spouse), it is highly likely that you are too controlling in your marriage.
If you feel that you are kind of controlling in the relationship and you want to change the behavioral pattern, you might go on to read the post below:
Controlling behavior causes – How to stop being controlling in your marriage.
(10) You expect too much:
If you expect too much from the relationship or you always compare other persons’ marriages with yours, you will stress your spouse out. It is understandable that you just want to use this trick to encourage your spouse to work harder for the better marriage life, but probably it will be counterproductive – Such expectations based on comparisons are offensive to your spouse; in particular, when compared with another husband/wife who is much more excellent than him/her, your spouse feels that he/she is never good enough although he/she has strived to be the best version of himself/herself.
(11) You two often disagree with each other on various issues:
Having sharply different perspectives towards married life is another obvious one of unhappy marriage signs. Normally, couples may want different things out of married life at some point, but such a situation should not last for too long, a long-running disagreement can exacerbate a growing rift between spouses. Marriage life requires both parties to move in the same direction by giving up something that only one party needs or wants, and that inevitably involves compromise, forgiveness, and sacrifice. If both parties always fail to agree on planning the same future life, staying in that relationship will only make a lot of regret, resentment, and heartbreaks, eventually, such a relationship will come to an end.
What should you do if you find you are in an unhappy marriage?
No one’s marriage is perfect. An unhappy marriage should not be simply resolved with divorce; it is possible to thrive in an unhappy marriage again; before considering the last option – divorce, you should try your best to fix your marriage even only you are the only one who wants to work. If you wonder how to save your failing marriage step by step, 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:
5 warning signs of a toxic marriage – Toxic relationship patterns.
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
How to save a failing marriage alone – Try to save your marriage.
How to stop divorce and save your marriage – 7 marriage saving tips.