5 Good Ideas That Are Bad For Your Marriage

Think you know how to stop your marriage from landing on the rocks? Not so fast, says relationships counsellor and author ANDREW G MARSHALL. The very things that you hope will salvage the relationship, may just be making things worse.

- Andrew G Marshall

We all think we know what to do if a relationship isn’t working – ‘Take a romantic holiday away’, we tell our friends who can’t stop fighting. Or, ‘Take some time apart’, we advise. Problem is, not only do these strategies normally fail, but in many cases they turn a bad situation into a crisis.

In fact, 90 per cent of the clients at my therapy office have just tried one of them. So why does all this potentially good advice go so easily off the rails? Firstly, instead of trying to understand the root causes of our misery, we want a quick fix. Indeed, many woman complain in counselling that their partner has splashed out on something expensive – like jewellery – as a way of ‘buying them off’, rather than truly listening to them. Secondly, most relationships tip from satisfactory to unhappy, not because of some monstrous piece of behaviour, but because of the accumulation of bad habits and poor communication.

Unfortunately, conventional wisdom suggests that big problems need big solutions. However, grand gestures – such as a dirty weekend away to solve sexual difficulties – only work short term. For a solution to really stick, it has to change our regular day-to-day life, or the problems just start building back up again.

Worse still, big changes are hard to pull off. We become quickly discouraged and suspect a fundamental flaw in our relationship. By the time couples arrive in my office, one partner has become defensive, claiming the other is trying to turn them into somebody else, and both will feel angry and defeated. Yet although they will say, ‘We’ve tried everything’, I normally discover that they’ve tried just one or maybe two of the top five conventional wisdoms.