Kim and Sam have been married 5 years and it’s beginning to show. While they do a lot together as a family with their two children and rarely argue, their couple relationship is getting, well, a bit boring. Sex is down, downtime is filled with a lot of routine and going on auto-pilot.
While boredom may be occasionally part of everyday life, when it is life there's a problem: Enter the stale relationship.
Some of these relationships are like Kim and Sam’s, several years and kids under their belts, domestic life settling in in a big way. But you can also find this lag showing up in unmarried kid-less couples who have been dating or living together for a few years, and even more often in long-married older couples whose children have moved on. Whatever the scenario, here are some of the common interrelated dynamics that drive them:
They tend to be conflict avoidant. Like Kim and Sam often stale couples are “nice” people. They tend to be agreeable, are quick to compromise, sensitive to each other's feelings, and above all dislike the angst and anxiety that can come with strong differences of opinion.
They didn’t tackle the 7-year itch. For couples who have been together around that 5+ year mark, there is the natural shift in the relationship, the infamous 7-Year Itch (named after the average length of relationship of those who divorce or break up). This is where normal individual growth and change over the years begins to spill out of the rules and routines established at the beginning of the relationship, where your priorities have shifted, where what most attracted you to the other can now, on a bad day, drives you crazy.
Ideally this is the time to speak up, talk about what is and isn't working, update the relationship contract to better accommodate each partner’s needs. But if you’re conflict avoidant such potential conversations are too fraught with anxiety and don't happen.
They are work or child centered. Unable to tackle the relationship head on, such couples sweep the issues under the rug and distract by becoming more work or child focused – the 10 hour work days, the 3 days a week out of town, the new baby or the 20 soccer games a week. By throwing themselves into these arenas, the couple issues stay on the back burner, but unfortunately so does the relationship.
Routines and auto-pilot take over. Because of conflict avoidance, hurtful feelings are apologized for, but the underlying problems are never addressed and put to rest. They instead go on the big list of "Things we don't talk about" and over time that list gets pretty big. In a few years the couple is rapidly down to a few safe topics – the kids, office gossip, weather, politics, etc.
So they come home, get through dinner, clean up, and then one gets tied up with the kids while the other does work brought home from the office, or one drifts to the TV while the other goes on Facebook. At 11:00 they go to bed and repeat it all the next day. Everybody goes on auto-pilot, everybody starts to get bored. Distance replaces conflict, sex and affection drop, fantasies of affairs or busting out pop up.
This can all start to sound pretty dismal, but there’s a way out....
Time to speak up. Time to talk about the elephant in the room – that you’re both bored. Time to talk about old wounds, stop biting your tongues, advocate for what you want rather than automatically accommodating or barraging yourself with “shoulds”.
You need to learn to approach anxiety and conflict and use anger as information telling you and your partner what you need. This opening up of the system is the opening up of true intimacy, namely where you both stop walking on eggshells and speak honestly and from the heart. If not now, when?
If this seems a bit overwhelming consider a few sessions to couple therapy to have a safe place to get things on the table and begin to talk it out. Or write each other a letter and then discuss, or have a business meeting (see my article on business meetings for more info) or get couple exercise workbook and do the exercises. It doesn’t matter where you start, but start. You'll know you're breaking out and making progress if the conversation, whatever the topic, feels a bit awkward and tentative. Don't wait till you're fed up and ready to explode or walk. Baby steps allowed.
Work on finding common interests. Using work and kids as the only glue holding the relationship together eventually can become a pretty weak bond; adding more work or kid stuff isn't going to make it better, just busier. This is particularly the challenge for older couples who truly don’t have kids or even work to distract them and retreat into and suddenly discover there isn't much there, there.
Time to ramp it up -- try those golf or tango lessons, wine-tasting class, work together on a church committee or a political campaign. The key here is to try stuff. You can't discover new interests by sitting on the couch and just thinking about it. You need to have boots on the ground.
Talk about your vision of the future. This is part of renewing the contract, but also the antidote of coasting till kids are out of high school. Envision and talk about 2, 5 and 10 year plans (again intimate conversations). Be specific, most of all be honest. This gives you both something to look forward to, helps you both feel connected through common future goals to work together towards.
Put the relationship on the front burner. Here you get the babysitter, plan those date nights, schedule sex if you need to (yes it is not spontaneous, too bad) just to get some endorphins and oxytocin going and break out of the same-ole. Have 10 minute intimate conversation about your day after the kids are in bed or at dinner rather than watching reruns of NCIS.
The theme here is clear – acknowledge the state of the union, take acceptable risks, speak up, get up, get out.
Start anywhere, but start.
from Psychology Today - Relationships http://ift.tt/293xkUn
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