– Learning to Grow with Your Marriage

Last Updated on October 5, 2015 by Chris Roberts

UNDERSTANDING HOW EACH PARTNER CHANGES DURING THE MARRIAGE THROUGH MARRIAGE COUNSELING IN NASHVILLE, TN

Marriage counseling in Nashville, TN can be a productive place to help each partner learn how they have changed throughout the course of the marriage and how that might have impacted their relationship. The hope is that each spouse continues to grow and mature and transform individually throughout the years they are together. This is a good thing! Change and transformation is necessary to assuage boredom and keep things interesting. The difficulty is that as each partners changes, so will the patterns of the relational bond. For example, at some point the husband may have worked lots of hours and not been emotionally present at home. As the husband realizes this is not how he wants to live his life and misses out on the opportunities to connect with his family, he decides to work less and be more present around the house. This sounds like a great thing! However, what also happens is that the husband is around more and will affect decisions like when the kids eat, where they go the grocery store, how often they go out to eat, and how the kids are dressed. The wife is no longer in a position to make all these decisions on her own. It will take some serious adjustment on her part, along with a lot more conversations about who is going to determine the outcome of these situations. Situations like this can lead to a lot of conflict between partners, even though the original intent was to foster more family time.

This is where marriage counseling can be so helpful, because both partners need the space to step back and talk about what’s going on and how they ended up in this scenario. Continuing from this example above, the husband may have had some powerful revelations and understandings that has allowed him to want to spend more time with his wife and children. The husband may have started out this new journey on cloud nine with his ideas and hopes for more connection and relational fulfillment. As his wife became more frustrated with the husband’s involvement in everyday matters, the husband could become quite resentful of her unawareness of his intentions. This matter will only intensify unless each partner can step back and remember how they got into this situation in the first place. The wife may have also built up some serious resentment for all the years the husband wasn’t involved and may need some time to process her feelings.

Very rarely does one partner’s change automatically lead to better and greater things in the marriage. As we have described above, when one person changes the relational patterns that may have been established for many years will also have to change. These changes always take conversation and shifting and adjustment. Part of the beauty of long-term committed relationships is you get to grow WITH another person. Part of the intimacy that is shared between the couple is how they have each grown individually, all the while being in relationship with one another. This takes tremendous work and commitment and creativity. This is a concept not talked about often concerning marriages. A marriage is not supposed to stay the same. The electricity and excitement between a couple can never match the same intensity that was there in the beginning. It’s impossible for that to happen. Yet many couples go around feeling and believing there is something seriously wrong with their marriage because they don’t feel the same things they did when they first starting dating. The electricity experienced during the first couple years of the relationship can’t be sustained, but it also can’t represent the strength and commitment that is forged through examples like above. The electricity experienced during the first years is created by insecurity and fear and original connection. These are things that shouldn’t exist many years into a marriage.

Marriage counseling is a place to help couples set better expectations for what should and shouldn’t be happening at different stages throughout their relationship. Marriage counseling gives each partner a space to talk about their experience of what has happened throughout the course of their relationship and can oftentimes lead to a deeper sense of compassion and connection.

If you are looking for better ways to understand how you and your marriage have changed, then marriage counseling in Nashville, Tennessee could be a productive place for each of you to learn what has happened. There are many quality marriage therapists in Nashville that can help you get more out of the love you have already deposited into your relationship.

 

photo courtesy of: Alex Krevic via Unsplash