Marriage is one of the most challenging of all human relationships. It can also be one of the most rewarding. True intimacy, including friendship, compassion, empathy, sharing and realizing dreams, advising, comforting and supporting each other through life, sexual satisfaction, and deep love and affection, are all possible β yet at times can be elusive and even feel like an impossibility.
Most marriages are characterized by highs and lows β times of joy and times of despair β tender intimate moments and periods fraught with conflict and emotional distance. What makes a marital relationship so complicated? To begin with, marriage is the most intimate of all human relationships. Emotional and sexual intimacy stirs up deeply felt and largely unconscious conflicts, feelings and fantasies. Dependence and independence, loyalty and betrayal, need satisfaction and disappointment, commitment and fears of abandonment, trust and mistrust, narcissistic love and mature love, freedom and self-sacrifice are just some of the contrasting and conflicting conscious and unconscious emotions that characterize any intimate relationship, and are most intensely experienced in a marriage.
Our relational experiences with our mothers and fathers, stemming from early childhood, become significant determinants in how these unconscious emotional issues are played out in a marriage. How our parents behaved in their own marriage are also influential factors. Later disappointments in the love affairs of adolescence and young adulthood also shape ones feelings and expectations in adult relationships, as can a prior divorce.
Not uncommonly, when a couple presents for marital therapy , there is a true feeling of crisis in the marriage, and fears that the marriage is over. What happened?
Not uncommonly, the marriage went off track and the couple did not become aware of this until much later. The pressures of careers, raising children, and finances often result in the marital relationship being relegated to second, third or fourth place in the hierarchy of what is attended to, cared for, and nurtured. This neglect, along with one or more unrecognized and unspoken major disappointments and emotional wounds, derails what had once been a stable and mutually satisfying marriage.
