Marriage Crisis: 3 Tips to Help You Overcome It
Overcoming a marriage crisis isn’t easy. Love stories, happy people, and seemingly perfect relationships are all around us. So, when there’s something wrong with our relationship, we tend to feel really bad and worry.
However, having a marriage crisis isn’t the end of the world. Marriage problems may be a wonderful opportunity to get to know what’s important to each of you, renew your commitment to each other, and improve your relationship.
Overcoming a marriage crisis: 3 ways to do it
Most tips to improve a relationship say almost the same things: communicate with your partner, do nice things for them, rekindle your passion. But now, couples have more problems than ever before.
Facing a marriage crisis isn’t as simple as it seems. It requires courage, determination, and the ability to take action. We have compiled three of the best tips to help you overcome a marriage crisis. Let’s begin!
1. Remember why you’re with your partner
When we’re in the midst of a marriage crisis, most of us only focus on what’s going wrong and begin to think that everything’s terrible. However, if we’ve been in a relationship for a long time, we’re there for a reason.
Several psychology studies reveal that our partner usually offers us three things: security, trust, and status. Depending on the person, one of those three things may be more important than others.
Knowing what our most important needs are may help us discover how to improve our relationship. If, for example, we need a lot of trust, is our partner contributing? And if they’re not, what can we do to have more trust?
2. Don’t be afraid to hurt your partner’s feelings
When we’re in love, we avoid doing or saying something that will make our partner feel bad. We usually keep our opinions to ourselves and don’t express our hurt feelings.
Although not saying what we think in the beginning may avoid conflicts, it will do us more harm than good in the long run. Constantly sacrificing our needs may lead to a serious marriage crisis. Complaining often may not be the solution either. What can we do?
The solution is learning to assert our needs without blaming our partner. If, for example, we feel very lonely because of our partner’s nightly visits to the bar with his friends, you could say something like: “Honey, when you go out every night, I feel a bit lonely and I worry because I feel that you don’t care. I know that going out with your friends is important to you, but is there anything we can do to meet half-way?”
3. Don’t be scared if you’re attracted to someone new
This is probably the biggest cause of a marital crisis. When we’re in a relationship, we feel that our love is so strong that we’ll no longer be attracted to other people. That’s why when that co-worker makes us feel like teenagers flirting for the first time, we get scared.
Human sexuality is based, in large part, on variety. Both men and women are programmed to feel attracted to other people when they’re already in a relationship and the falling in love stage has ended.
The next time you feel attracted to another person, take a deep breath. It’s normal. In fact, there’s no problem with your relationship. This is only a normal bodily reaction. The important thing in these kinds of situations is not the attraction in and of itself, but what you do or don’t do about it.
A relationship is based on commitment between two people. Even if you’re attracted to someone else, you should definitely think about what will bring you more long-term happiness: following your impulses or acting in a way that can make you feel proud of yourself.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- González, I. (2000). Las crisis familiares. Revista cubana de medicina general integral, 16(3), 270-276.
- Loving, R. D., & Aragón, R. S. (2002). Psicología del amor: una visión integral de la relación de pareja. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Psicología.
- Montesinos, R. (2010). El mito del amor y la crisis de pareja. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa.
- Morfa, J. D. (2003). Prevención de los conflictos de pareja. Desclée de Brouwer.
- Willi, J. (2002). La pareja humana: relación y conflicto. Ediciones Morata.
