A relationship becomes toxic when one or both partners lack happiness. And it is possible that a spouse unconsciously slides into a toxic habit that damages his/her marriage, but he/she has taken it for granted and never realized it. A lot of toxic habits are subtle, easy to come by and do more damage than the imagination of them. Because of this, as a spouse, you should be alert to a series of common signals that indicate the bad health status of a relationship.
The following points out 5 warning signs of a toxic marriage:
(1) Spending too much time together:
If a couple always spends too much together, it may bring a bad change to the marital relationship – one or both sides will resent being dependent on the other. If you spend too much time together, you will not only find that you are struggling in the relationship but also realize that you are alienating your friends and family members. In such a codependent relationship, you two indeed become a couple but run the risk of losing many important people in your life.
However, for a lot of spouses who become too codependent, they do not think that they spend too much time together in their love relationships. After all, how much time couples should spend together is a dynamic, and it is also short-sighted to arbitrarily define the dynamic range. Anyway, you should also be wary of spending too much time together with your spouse.
Codependent couples live together, work together, and hold their families together, they indeed spend much time together; but they may never feel that spending so much time together is a kind of binding and confinement. So, to strictly determine whether too much together time is one of the signs of a toxic marriage, you should not only measure the amount of time you spend together but also figure out how you feel once you get some separation. For example, if you or your spouse feels insecure, unstable, depressed, or lost when you are apart, that can be a symptom of codependency in marriage.
To prevent falling in this trap, you should firmly grasp one point – you two should have adequate interdependence, resilience, and self-boundaries. For example, you may make some time for personal hobbies (e.g. fishing, hiking, painting, etc); it is not bad to regularly or occasionally spend some time doing your things without your spouse, and it may help enhance intimacy with your spouse to some extent – the temporary separation may remind you how much you love your spouse as well as your kids (if you have). When you return home, you will become more present and engaged in the relationship; on the other side, your spouse may also feel about you as well as the relationship in this way.
(2) Keeping a scorecard:
Conflict in a marriage is unavoidable. However, things will only get worse if a couple constantly keeps a tally of who’s supposed to do what and who has done what. Relationship scorecards can exist in multiple forms. Some spouses get accustomed to keeping scores of tasks completed. For example, when they and their spouses need to work together to share a heavy load of household chores but they just want to do something (e.g. taking a break, playing computer games, and hanging out with friends) to relax, they leverage their scorecards at that time. In some cases, some spouses keep score to gain a misplaced sense of self-righteousness and power. For instance, a spouse may justify his/her harsh actions towards the other spouse, with an excuse like “Yes, I did call you some bad names just now, but have you forgotten what you said about me last week?”
Anyway, scorekeeping is an act that can be toxic to a relationship. In married life, keeping score turns things into a competition with boundaries, unnecessary rules, and winners and losers. And it is an endless game because one side will not stop competing with the other for keeping ahead of the game. In this game, there are no real winners. Even if one side wins at some point, the two sides lose in the long term.
It seems very common for couples to keep the score at an early stage of their marriages. But as a marital relationship develops deeply, a couple increasingly feels the need to embrace their marriages as a team; and it is imperative to break the habit of keeping score. When a marriage comes into a stable and mature stage, spouses will also be aware of a truth about maintaining a marriage – mutual tolerance and mutual understanding makes much more sense than haggling over every ounce of each other.
For more tips, you might go on to read the post below:
7 basic tips on how to stop keeping score in marriage.
(3) Being passive-aggressive:
Passive-aggressive behavior involves acting indirectly aggressive, and there is personal distress attributable to it. And it is another common but toxic pattern that can easily spill over into a marital relationship. It can show up in implicit ways, such as withdrawal, apathy, refusal to communicate, backhanded compliments, and sulking. Passive-aggressiveness harms not only the passive-aggressive person but also a relationship that he/she meant to cultivate.
Here explains why being passive-aggressive is toxic to a marriage:
- A passive-aggressive spouse is dishonest about his/her feelings and emotions:
This point can be better understood by taking the example below:
Andrew and Laura is a young couple. Two weeks ago, Andrew missed his wife Laura’s birthday, he didn’t mean that, but Laura took it to heart. Because of this, she deliberately found things to slap him from time to time, although something (e.g. not emptying the trash, and not cleaning the dinner table) was insignificant. Laura never mentioned that she got upset just because Andrew missed her birthday; and in Andrew’s mind, it was quite baffling that she scolded him endlessly. Eventually, a fierce fight occurred.
So, don’t overlook the damage of lying about emotions; it gradually erodes transparency and mutual trust in a relationship; if a couple mutually distrusts each other and can not be open to each other, the marital relationship will be bound to deteriorate.
- Passive-aggressiveness causes an unfair blame game:
In a lot of counseling sessions, people admit that they often have an urge to blame their spouses for their feelings and emotions, even though they do not have good reasons to do so. Generally, they do not timely recognize such a behavioral pattern as one of the signs of a toxic marriage, and then allow it to wreak havoc on their marriages until their marriages hit the rocks.
When a person is constantly passive-aggressive towards his/her spouse, a series of relationship-related questions inevitably flows through his/her mind, like “Why does my life suck?”, “Why is my marital life different from the past?”, and “Who makes me sad?”. When you are confronted with this type of broad questions, you can hardly get exact answers. And what is worse, those frustrating questions easily trigger your negative emotions; the more you think about them, the more likely that you will become emotional.
When your mind is dominated by negative emotions towards your spouse, probably you fail to recognize the responsibilities of each other for relationship problems, and you are prone to dwelling on your spouse’s wrongdoings; therefore, you refuse to take responsibility for your mistakes/faults, and you tend to make a biased conclusion: your spouse should be mainly to blame for the deterioration of the relationship. If so, your spouse will become a kind of scapegoat.
(4) Living like roommates:
After you have your kids, most likely the person who is the center of your world starts to change – your kids will take your spouse’s place in your heart. And your role as wife/husband may get shelved accordingly. Gradually, in your family, you may start to feel like a lunch packer, taxi driver, and homework checker.
Surely, you and your spouse both have to work harder than before to maintain the enlarged family. After having kids, the family internal division of labor becomes more clear-cut. That makes you two concentrate more on each other’s things, thereby significantly reducing the time to care about each other, although your kids act as a new intersection between you two. However, while you pay more and more attention to one thing/person, you are bound to pay less attention to the other things/persons. The same applies to your marital relationship. And hence, it is no wonder that a long-term relationship may drift apart due to a lack of regular concerns.
It is quite common that a couple comes into a dread roommate phase at some point for some reason. And raising kids is just one of the most typical reasons. There can be other personal issues that can cause couples to get stuck in a loveless marriage; even some of them may be unfounded or unreasonable, and they may have nothing to do with the current relationship itself, such as a spouse’s previous marriage, and childhood trauma, career failure.
And it is also understandable for a spouse that the thought of ending a relationship can spontaneously arise from his/her brain when romance and intimacy are gone in the relationship. Anytime, spouses should be more of lovers and partners than roommates. Therefore, if you feel that you and your spouse are living like roommates, take it as one of the warning signs of a toxic marriage, and try to dig up the real cause behind this relationship problem and then take further action to fix it.
Related posts:
And you might also go on to read the related posts below to improve the loveless marriage:
What causes a sexless marriage – Why does a marriage become sexless.
How to survive in a sexless marriage – Is a sexless relationship doomed?
Should you stay in a loveless marriage – How to survive a loveless marriage.
How to survive in a sexless marriage – Is a sexless relationship doomed?
(5) Not respecting your spouse like before:
You must still remember the first date with your spouse, you and your spouse both had an affinity for each other at that time. But as the marriage develops, you discover more and more his/her weaknesses, flaws, and even totally random stuff that makes you disappointed. Then, you may no longer admire and respect your spouse like before, and your spouse may also feel that your overall sense of satisfaction about the relationship decreases. Gradually, your behavior and speech start to display a disrespectful attitude towards your spouse.
The loss of respect can significantly ruin a marriage; over time, it leads to a stressful, painful and unhappy marital life. To keep your marriage alive, you need to respect your spouse enough anytime. After all, no one is perfect (you must also have more or less bad personal traits that can revolt your spouse, and you might ask yourself whether he/she treats you in the way that you are treating him/her). And a stronger relationship can be built after a spouse fully accepts the other spouse’s flaws, faults, and weaknesses.
Contempt in marriage:
Another point to be made is that men and women have fundamentally different personalities and orientation towards marriage; this explains why you think your spouse is weird when it comes to discussion about some relationship issues. However, it is difficult to change the modes of thinking, whether for you or your spouse. And there is also no need to resort to a condescending or disrespectful tone when you are not getting your way during a conversation with your spouse. As we all know, contentment is the worst among the 4 horsemen (the other three are criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness) in a relationship. When you speak to your spouse with a demeaning, sarcastic, or contemptuous tone, he/she instantly feels like an alien from your world.
When you express contempt in the presence of your spouse, you become truly mean and disrespectful towards him/her. And the more your spouse feels that he/she has been treated in a contemptuous manner, the more likely he/she is to think about pulling away from you and even exiting the relationship. Your contempt just prompts a bad thought in your spouse’s head – “Now that you don’t want me, then I don’t want you too”.
Contempt eats away at a relationship painfully and rapidly. If you wonder how to avoid contempt in your marriage, here are some suggestions;
- Try to avoid a knee-jerk reaction while your spouse is kicking at your opinion; instead, try to describe your own needs and feelings using neutral words.
- Prefer to use “I” statements rather than “You” statements.
- Attentively listen to the points that your spouse brings up during an argument.
- Try to finish an argument quickly, rather than use diversions and distractions to prolong an intense argument.
- Intentionally lower the tone of your voice when you get into an argument with your spouse.
- Avoid using exaggerated body language in the heat of the moment.
If you are a wife, you might go on to read the related post below:
5 tips on how to make your husband feel loved and respected.
The final word:
It is tough to build a long-lasting marriage if certain toxic relationship patterns can not be ended in time; the built-up toxicity can turn a marriage into a breeding ground for bitterness. So, the earlier you spot those unhealthy patterns that may damage your marriage, the better for it.
Surely, signs of a toxic marriage are more than the above; and if you want to recognize more signs of a problematic marriage, you might go on to read posts below:
Don’t miss these subtle signs you are in a loveless marriage.
7 easily unnoticed signs of emotional detachment in marriage.
Unhappy marriage signs – How to know if you are in an unhappy marriage.
6 signs that your marriage is failing.
And for your current marital status, there may be still many places that need to be improved. If you want to learn more about how to save a failing marriage, you might go on to watch the presentation below; inside it, Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience, shares a powerful approach to dealing with a wide range of marital issues:
Maybe, you are also interested in the posts below:
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
Is your marriage worth saving – Is there hope for your marriage?
How to survive a stressful marriage – Deal with marital stress.
4 basic tips on how to get through a rough patch in a marriage.
Why you feel bored in your marriage – How to overcome boredom.