So much of your time in being a twosome is spend taking care of things and being busy. You both have schedules of your own and one with your partner and children if you have any. You know when family chores have to be done, when bills need to be paid and when anyone is unwell or sick. You strive to have a healthy home and family. But in these efforts to live a family life, you often overlook the glue that holds your family together. The intimacy in your relationship that makes you a couple. Everything around you may be nice but your relationship is suffering and needs tending and care. What are the telltale signs that your relationship is struggling?
1. Fear & Resentment
You know there are things you should be doing to help your relationship thrive, but you avoid them because they make you uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t seem interesting or naturally compelling or you believe in “following your joy”. You feel less confident about speaking up about issues that are important to you and put them on the back burner. You may choose the path of least resistance, least risk and least learning or effort until it is a crisis. With the added pressure and stress of a crisis, it is hard to do anything effectively or authentically when driven by fear. It’s a vicious cycle and waste of time and peace of mind.
2. Avoiding Issues in Your Relationship
Your relationship with your partner is unpredictable and wearing thin. You don’t have a clear sense of what is expected of you or what you expect yourself in each moment. You love your home, your children, your community, but at times you put your head in the sand when it comes to really knowing “where things are at” between you and your partner. You don’t know how to develop intimacy in your relationship. You have had more than your share of lost opportunities to be valued by your partner or to value them. The ego loves ambiguity and uses it to create stress and worry, robbing you of joy in your relationship.
3. When Meaning is Missing from Your Relationship
When you have put aside your faith or life philosophy for the relationship and if it is not the inner source for your actions it creates a compartmentalized life. Cut off from intention and source of what motivates you, your relationship can start to feel devoid of inspiration and purpose, resulting in depressed daily functions. This is often when partners say they feel alone in their relationship, with heavy burdens on their shoulders, contributing to relationships burnout.
4. Walking in the Disconnected Relationship
This is when relationships feels like work and as though there is no purpose. Your marriage can feel like there is no mutuality and that there is no point of connection. It is not easy and you feel like it takes huge effort just to get the smallest thing done. You feel resentment when considering how much effort, time and energy your relationship requires. You may secretly wish you could cancel your marriage. You have lost the memory of the positive aspects of what you once loved in being a couple. This is relationship burnout.
5. You Feel Abandoned and Alone
You don’t know where to turn or how to start. You feel frustrated at putting effort into this, or the efforts you are making are not yielding results. You feel discomfort, concern or fear when you and your partner move farther apart or disagree. In the absence of a thriving relationship in your marriage you begin to feel like anyone else would be a better match for you. You have lost track of you and the integrity of your commitment. You secretly hope that a new partner will have the qualities that you feel are lacking in your current relationship. You believe you should be enough and that you deserve to be loved and feel the affection that has been lost and that you will find this in a new partner. Sadly, we know that is not the case.
6. Current Communication Sucks
You are angry and hurt that your partner is not fulfilling your needs and that your relationship does not show your true self. You don’t care if your partner is getting their needs met in your relationships or not, yet you do care about what they are doing. You may begin to control everything to try and find the support you need without considering what they need or even to consider if they want to take part. Physical intimacy is a source of guilt and anxiety. If you haven’t had successful moments of intimacy in your communication experiences you may have become restrictive with your affection towards one another. Things are beginning to fall apart and you can’t keep on top of it. You may come up with ideas to fix things, such as replacing furniture, changing your address, increasing your family in some way, seeking therapy all the while hoping it will work this time! You may feel like circumstances are working against you more than they are working for you. Good news is, this is a pretty easy fix if you are ready, willing and committed.
7. Bad Communication
You tend to seek help when you realize that you are about to separate, maybe become divorced and lose everything you have worked for. Your goals have only ever considered your financial future and where you want to be financially in the future, where you will live, where your children will go to college and your retirement. You have never had clear relationships goals and no planning has gone into what make your relationship harmonious and one that equally values each person. There are no clearly established agreements that support what is meaningful for each partner. Somewhere an unspoken assumption is that one partner has to do what the other wants and give up their dream as we have been taught there is a winner and a looser. We have never experienced two winners in a relationship before so how would we know how to create this in our own relationships? Without the skills to create a relationship that each partner equally matters, you feel frustrated at the reality that learning how to do this is actually an ongoing process of building trust so that you can experience intimacy and rapport. It will need constant nurturing and attention for most of the life of your relationship.
As a fellow human being who loves being in relationships, I have had times in my life when I have experienced relationships when they were not in balance, resulted in separation and divorce. On a daily basis, clients come for support to regain wellness and balance. Most times it is the end of their relationship and not at the beginning or middle when it would be time to seek support to create wellness in the relationships now for future sustainability. If your marriage is in the spirit of who you are, what you do is the relationship. You need wellness in both to create thriving intimate relationship.
At getting Intouch Coaching, I specialize in helping partners in relationships move into healthy balance to create thriving and intimate relationships mentally, emotionally and physically. Connect with me at Inside Awareness for Healthy Living to find out how to increase the vitality in your relationship. Isn’t now the time to begin to take the steps and make the effort where it really matters? In the center point from which all your experiences start from? Contact info is renee (at) insideawareness (dot) com or two,five,zero-three,six,one-seven,five,zero,eight.
Dialogue series for couples wrapped up last night for the summer. It ended on an honest note of expressing how this experience was for people in the group and how to move forward with options for practice and future connection. We focused on how if you don’t use it you lose it! This means if you are shifting your conscious awareness one sentence at a time, you need a tribe to practice with for support to stay in connection and develop different speaking habits. This begs the question, do you have a practice tribe that is committed to expressing honestly and listening with empathy in a way that provides the witnessing and acceptance that is needed for a shift in behavior to happen?
Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning 