Every once and a while, whatever the trigger may be, I pause and reflect on some of the marital interactions I have viewed over the years in my clinical practice. The elements of power, authoritative/demanding vs submissive/passively accepting, or passive-aggressive, play out to different degrees in all relationships.
There are constant power struggles in all marriages though they may be major or minor and handled very differently. While our society accepts equality between the sexes in today’s marriage, not all spouses handle relationships and marital tasks of household and offspring in an equal or shared fashion. Some of these imbalances are culturally dictated; some by the lack of assertiveness in one or the other, some in mimicking the only model the players have witnessed in the past marriages they observed, and some because neither partner has thought it out, negotiated, or agreed to the most critical expectations of the other...
When matters are quite off balance, one spouse might be physically or emotionally abused( in the perception of others or themselves). If the abused one has little sense of worth to begin with, the abuser continues to further the sense of worthlessness in his /her partner with enough occasional remorse to keep the other partner always hoping that their will sometime be approval shown for their forbearance, patience, caring and forgiveness.
If that fails to happen, there is little left but anger and disappointment. Add complexity to this interaction by including projection, displacement, fear of being left alone, anxiety about caring for children alone, shame, and the myriad of other possibilities. Marriages are often kept together that stumble along unhappily for both, who in their attempts to find some happiness may use totally inadequate or destructive coping mechanisms. Extra-marital liaisons are often an attempt to experience what a relationship with someone else might be like, in the often mistaken belief that the problems all rest in the partner, not one’s self.. When a decision is made and the marriage viewed as intolerable to one or the other, a no-fault divorce is fortuitously made easily possible in our present day. However, when the idealized version perceived as what the marriage could have been, is either mourned or made often failed attempts to return it to the track it was hoped to have been on in the first place…to the ‘lived-happily-forever-after’ route, the desired destination is rarely reached unless a proper balance is set. Usually, having been tried and failed before, it might be expected that it would fail again because it is not a script either can follow.
It is my impression that living with that false hope is probably one of the most painful routes anyone can take. It is doomed to constant disappointment and anger both at the spouse and at one’s self due to a perceived weakness for accepting such disappointment and abuse). Throughout my many clinical years I have often seen such marriages, though all with totally unique elements between each couple. I see these marriages as imbalanced because one person takes a position of power (or is enabled to take it by being given it). The enabler is frequently caught in this position out of fear. The fears may be totally unfounded to the eye of an objective beholder but are clearly real and terrifying to the person experiencing them. The perceived ‘strong one’ may secretly wish to be stopped because they feel themselves on a runaway of behavior but, sadly, have prevented that action by the strength of their demands and threats to their partner, who remains terrified and knows no other way but to remain distanced, fearful, and emotionally detached. One of the dances in this situation is that of a ‘distancer’ and a ‘pursuer’. Picture that the more one pursues someone that is trying to distance, the more the distancer has to fight to get away. If the pursuer is looking for closeness and comfort, it is easily seen how that won’t work. The roles of distancer and pursuer are interchangeable, given different circumstances, in most relationships.
There are two alternatives in such imbalances: divorce; or work to change the balance.. Because people have tried and failed for so long, they would do well to be in couples therapy for this work. The therapist should be equipped to take them ‘out of the box’ in which they have been stuck and help them see that there are other ways to behave and achieve more desirable and effective results.
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