Modern Marriage, Part 4: When Marriage Doesn’t Match Expectations

Gentlemen, welcome back.

Today in Part 4 we are going to take a look at:

1. What can happen when marriage doesn’t meet your expectations,

2. What (if anything) you can and should do about it when this happens, and,

3. A couple of things you should never do.

Because, as we found out in Part 2, let’s face it: no marriages meet all of the expectations that are set for them.

The percentage of Americans who divorce has been above 40 percent even since 1970s. There are a lot of reasons that that number is what it is. Unarguably though, is the notion that the inability to reconcile differences is what eventually makes things come to a head and is why we divorce.

Is infidelity the reason you got divorced? Roundabout, perhaps, yes. But it was really more because a reconciliation couldn’t be reached.

How about a financial crisis? Can two people just become so poor that some crazy law says they have to get a divorce? No, it’s because they can’t agree on how to repair the problem (or they just don’t).

Your marriage is never going to be as fruitful and perfect as you think it will be, and you’re going to deal with a whole slew of life problems that affect one or the both of you. It’s not the problems themselves that cause divorce to happen, it’s the people not being able to deal with them that is the biggest issue.

So what exactly happens when you end up in an unfulfilling, dead-as-nails marriage that suffers from one (or a multitude!) of the more serious relationship-downers that we discovered in Part 3?

I found that when my marriage was getting to the point where it had seen better days that the toughest thing I had to deal with by far was the shift in the balance of power that occurred when I actually started to sense things beginning to go haywire in the first place, and started scrambling to make things “right” again.