Did You Hit PAUSE?
Did you hit PAUSE on your marriage?
There was a point in my career when any couple who wanted to get married in five local churches had to pass through my office for three sessions on the way to the altar. In those three sessions, I was supposed to make sure they were as ready as possible to be married.
Marriage is an important – many argue the most important – relationship in adult life. People pledge to spend the rest of their lives together “till death do us part.” Yet nearly half of marriages in the United States end in divorce. And each following attempt to find the “right person” has a declining rate of success.
A very important relationship of adulthood and it has close to a coin-toss of a chance of survival. Why?
Let’s go back to those couples coming into my office. Interestingly, not a single couple thought they would fall to the fail side of that coin toss. Every couple thought they had already beat the odds before they even said, “I do.”
There was one simple reason for this: they believed they possessed the love, the attraction, and the connection that would weather life. They thought they had discovered “true love,” while others had obviously failed in their quest.
And they were not wrong. They did have love. They did have connection. They were attracted to each other. But having spent 18 years as a therapist at that one location, I knew that many of those same marriages did not survive. Try as I might, I was not able to prepare them for a lifetime journey in three simple sessions. It broke my heart to watch, and I know their hearts were broken, too.
What happened?
It happened to “Linda,” who told me that she knew she had found her soulmate – and then it fell apart. She said, “We were so in love, so in sync. I thought we would grow old together, support each other, and stay in love. I was wrong.”
It happened to “John,” too, who told me, “It was so good in the beginning! I knew we were going to be okay, to make it through. I didn’t think there was anything that could get in the way. We would have great careers, great kids, a great life, and love would conquer all. I was wrong.”
As I noted earlier, I never met a couple who intended on heartbreak and divorce. They never intended to be struggling and disconnected. There was no malice, no intent.
And yet… that is the outcome nearly half the time.
What happened? And more importantly, can it be prevented? Can it be fixed?
If couples get married, deeply in love and connected, and there is no malice, there has to be some reason why marriages find themselves in such deep trouble and pain that they decide to end it, thinking divorce is the only solution to stop the hurt.
To be clear, divorce is not without hurt and pain. In fact, a recent study on mortality risk factors found that a history of divorce was the second highest mortality risk factor – only behind smoking in risk factoring for mortality.
The damage to the relationship starts benignly enough… in a way that many couples fall prey. In fact, to some degree, nearly all marriages fall into this trap, unknowingly and accidentally. Not half, but nearly all. It is not based in maliciousness or a lack of love.
It is far more subtle and accidental.
I call it the Pause Button Marriage. Couples hit Pause on their own relationship, to attend to other things. They reason that they will place their relationship “on hold,” take care of other things, then get back to their marriage down the road… when things “get back to normal.” Except that those reasons for pausing are partof normal. The reasons people hit pause is part of life. It’s not a temporary moment, a short abnormal pattern. It is two people living their normal adult lives. It just seems to be a disruption to the flow of marriage. Instead, it is just the flow of life.
Which causes a problem for the marriage.
People don’t know that marriages cannot be paused. They are either progressing or declining. They are either growing or receding. They can’t be placed in suspended animation. If you hit pause, your marriage recedes and declines for a specific reason.
The lifeblood of a relationship is connection. Feeling connected is what keeps us close. A relationship grows with more connection. When that lifeblood of connection is circulating, your relationship is nourished. But a relationship starves when connection is restricted.
Let’s stick with that circulation idea for a minute. Let’s say you wrap a belt around your arm and tighten it. If you cut down circulation to your hand, it will lose strength. The muscles don’t get the oxygen they need to operate. So, they are working in a weakened state. If you cut off circulation, your hand will go to sleep. Think about when you sleep on your arm wrong and you wake up with a numb, non-working hand. But since you don’t keep it closed off for long, it tingles as it comes back to life. Uncomfortable, but not horrible.
But put a tourniquet on your arm and keep it there. You are pausing the blood circulating to the hand. First, the hand goes numb. Then the hand starts to die, choked off from the lifeblood it needs. Restore circulation soon enough, and you may save the hand. But wait too long, and nothing can be done to save it. The only difference between hurting and dying is a matter of time and restriction. The longer the time and the tighter the restriction, the more the hand is at risk.
Many people treat their marriage more like I treat my laptop.
If I am not using it, I shut the lid of the laptop. The computer suspends activity, keeping things just as they were (if all works right) until I need the computer again. Then, I open the lid and jump right back to where I was (less just a little battery life).
In other words, many people treat their marriage as something they can attend to when they want to and have time, and then suspend it when busy. That is what the Pause Button Marriage is about.
Years ago, I was a young therapist and not married long. An older couple came into my office. Their kids had all left for their own lives, their careers were successful, and their lives had been full of activity. One day, sitting on the back deck with glasses of wine in hand, they looked at each other and both had the same thought, “Who are you?” Both had all along thought they would do their thing and come back to the marriage when life had been tended to. They hit the Pause Button.
But there they sat, on their back porch, staring out at all they had accomplished. With wine glasses in hand, they realized they had little to nothing to say to each other (other than updating each other on their schedules and commenting on the kids). Neither knew what the other really was thinking or believing. They were intimate strangers. Lost to each other, only connected by their intermingled life.
The path back is all about UN-pausing your marriage. But along the way, you do have to deal with the issues that come from that long pause. This is so important that I am working on a webinar for how to unpause your marriage. When it is ready, I’ll let you know!