How to Make Your Marriage Worse (And How to Stop)

If you find yourself feeling lonely in your relationship with your husband or wife, you feel that you're not seen, you feel that you're not fully respected, that your views, your perspectives, your opinions are just not landing, and because of that, you don't really look forward to coming home. You're living parallel lives like roommates and conversations just become uncomfortable like you're walking on eggshells. Here's my advice to you. We may be tempted to identify why this is happening. What is the cause? And what we think we're doing is looking for a solution. If I know what the problem is, I could solve it. Right? What we're actually doing is giving attention to the problem. I'm not saying you should ignore the problem, but when you give attention to the problem, one of two things are likely to happen and they are both going to make your relationship worse. God forbid. Number one, you might misdiagnose the problem. Even if that's your field, if that's your wheelhouse, you're not looking from the outside, you're looking from the inside. There's human biasness. It's very likely that one may misattribute what the issue actually is. That's number one. Number two, even if you happen to have gotten the issue correct and you feel that you've diagnosed the issue correctly, there's another issue which is that once you put too much attention on what you believe the issue is, right or wrong, that becomes your lens. That becomes your perspective. You know exactly why your husband isn't responding and why he'sn't paying attention or why he's guarded. You know exactly why you and your wife are going through the same arguments again and again. and you become an expert in what your problem is and that becomes the lens by which you see each other. That becomes the lens uh with which you experience each other. You start experiencing each other from a negative lens. And now you're more of an expert in what's wrong with your marriage, what's wrong with your wife, what's wrong with your husband than why you actually want to be married to them, which is a much more valuable question. That's not a problem-solving question, which just puts more attention on the problem and ironically exacerbates it. That's an identity question. An identity question asks, "What kind of marriage do we want to actually live together?" It removes attention from what is wrong with you or what is wrong with me, which creates a negative lens, which makes things worse. And it now puts focus on who do we need to be? What kind of person do I need to be? And when I am that person, when I am the more patient, when I am the more kind, when I'm the more gentle person, when I am the kind of person that enjoys this relationship, what is different about how I view you? What is different about how you see me? If you want to take your relationship out of this rut, out of this feeling of we're just lonely. We're we're dancing in circles here, living parallel lives, going through the same arguments. Stop trying to figure out what's wrong with each other or what's wrong with your relationship. Not because that's not valid, but because the more productive thing to do is to discover what you want the identity of your relationship to actually look like. As you begin living up to that identity, your conversations are going to be much more respectful because you're going to be the kind of people that actually want to communicate with each