How To Save My Marriage

Is such a question plaguing you? Are you worried that your marriage is moving towards the point of no return? Then it is time for some heavy introspection – first about yourself and the demands of the marriage upon you and then your spouse.

1. Establish communication – continuous dialogue between the spouses is one golden prerequisite for a healthy marriage. Spouses in any happy marriage talk about everything – how their day went at work, what they did at home, whom they met, what they felt, what they are planning, what they feel – everything.

Nothing is too insignificant for sharing with your spouse. From this a feeling of ‘I know everything about him/ her’ comes which is very important in a marriage. It makes the spouse bond together; it makes one spouse special to the other. Hence, try to restore the level of communication and do share what you expect of each other in a calm and non-critical way.

2. Control anger – you would observe that when the marriage flounders you would feel anger and sometimes even rage against your spouse on seemingly small things. This happens because your unhappiness about the marriage highlights the negativity of any incident. The same incident would have been laughed off if you and your spouse were on your best terms.

Learn to control that anger. Do not fly of the handle at the smallest provocation. Learn to step back from the issue and analyze your own reaction. If you do need to comment or attract attention to any lapse – do so by expressing your disappointment/ expectation about the behavior pattern and not the spouse. Never say, “you are so-an-so” rather say, “I feel that …”. This defuses the situation and brings the focus on the action. When you attack the person instead, a defensive argument would ensue which invariably would bring out all the previous lapses that the hapless spouse had done in the past and the argument would end into bitterness.

3. Work out solutions together – one of the most common fallacies in a floundering marriage is the belief of one spouse that he/ she can fix what is wrong alone. There is no such thing. Whatever is the problem in your marriage, it has to be discussed, thrashed for all the possible solutions and “repaired” with the help of a consensus. Hence, you would need to establish and renew the “partnership contract” just as you would if you had a business contract. Each spouse should know clearly what it is expected from them and what they would expect from the other. Solutions for any problem should be a participatory exercise.

Marriage is hard work. You could compare it to a sapling. In order to have the sapling grow into a might tree, you need to constantly work to nurture it and protect it from any harm. If things are done well in the beginning, the effort of maintaining it healthy would be lesser and lesser because the tree would grow stronger with every year that passes.