However, marriages going bad can happen to anyone and it can sneak up on a loving and committed couple as quickly as it can for an incompatible and dysfunctional couple.
So that leads to three common questions for couples:
1. Why do marriages go bad?
2. When do marriages go bad?
3. Is there anything that can be done to either prevent or reverse the downfall of a relationship?
All three questions can be answered by examining the following Three Major Negative Benchmarks that can occur in a relationship:
1) Taking Each Other For Granted: A marriage can take a downwards turn when a couple starts taking each other for granted.
They get used to their routines and activities of daily life, they are busy, being pulled in many different directions as well as stressed and tired.
The couple doesn’t realize or have never been told about the importance of keeping each other’s relationship, love and respect for each other as the center focus and anchor of their lives together.
If they don’t put their relationship front and center they will get whisked off by external factors and lulled by the inertia of the familiar interactions between the two of them.
Eventually it is like being strangers living in the same home together who don’t even bother to think of the other person anymore.
So the easy solution is to start focusing on each other again. Start doing activities together alone that focus on one another, start going on full out dates, (flowers, gifts, dinner, leave the house and pick your spouse up even though you live together.)
Do things to show appreciation for your partner, in the ways that your partner would feel appreciated and don’t forget to be spontaneous – whether that is out of the blue for no reason telling your partner you love him/her or surprise him/her with a gift - just do something you normally don’t do to breathe some new life into the monotony of daily living.
2) Great Dividers of Love: In many of our books including our Counsellor in a Box Home Study Program (www.counsellorinabox.com ) we talk about what we call the Great Dividers of Love.
The Great Dividers of Love are a build-up of emotions such as resentment, judgment, disappointment and loss of respect that cause couples to shutdown their love towards their partner.
When love is shutdown in a relationship, a couple loses their connection, their intimacy and what holds their relationship together.
The result is you will get an emotionally shutdown couple who really doesn’t care for each other anymore and have nothing to inspire them to keep their relationship alive.
So as a couple or individually each partner needs to release and heal all the emotions that have built up so the love, which is still alive deep down underneath can resurface and breathe again.
3) Toxicity and Deficiency Overload: If a couple is not completely compatible and if they do not have relationship training or what we call at our LMC Relationship Centre “Relationship Mastery” as well as if each member of the couple has dysfunctional behaviors caused by unresolved past wounds and experiences – the relationship is going to be full of toxicities and deficiencies.
Simply put - toxicities are things in your relationship that you don’t want and deficiencies are things that you want and you are not getting in your relationship.
A relationship that has a lot of toxicities and deficiencies can only be resilient for so long, then they will become overloaded.
The couple will either then start to destruct the relationship, self-destruct or start to avoid each other because of all the negative conditioning built-up from all the toxicity and deficiency.
If a car hasn’t had an oil change for a long time, the build-up in the oil will cause the car to stop functioning properly and eventually break down.
If a car runs out of oil, the car will stop functioning.
When it comes to our car, we know or someone else will tell us that we have to deal with the “toxicities” (oil change) or deficiencies (need to put in more oil) or our car isn’t going to run.
Our relationships isn’t any different, eventually the relationship isn’t going to work anymore unless the toxicities and deficiencies are dealt with.
Unfortunately most people are not aware of that and no one tells them in such a straightforward manner as the attendant at the gas station who says “Hey would you like an oil change or would you like me to fill up your oil?
Systems have been developed to deal with oil in your car.
The goods news is that systems have also been developed for dealing with your toxicities and deficiencies in your relationship.
The first step is awareness.
The next step is finding these systems, such as our Counsellor in a Box Home Study Program (www.counsellorinabox.com ) that includes learning how to heal past wounds and release emotions, learning basic relationship mastery skills like how to have functional communication, conflict resolution and negotiation, as well as how to fill in compatibility gaps so everyone can get their needs met in the relationship.
So when you deal with these major benchmarks in your relationship, the turning point can be reversed - what was once a marriage in a negative downwards spiral will now be a marriage on a positive upwards spiral towards a functional, healthy and happy relationship.
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