Our marriage is in trouble

What’s happening

Marriages don’t usually fail in a single moment. They fail in small daily decisions that, repeated for years, produce two people living next to each other instead of with each other. The conversations got functional. The sex got infrequent. The fights got predictable. You can probably name the day you started to notice. You can’t name the day it became this.

The marriage you used to have hasn’t disappeared. It’s been buried under the daily responses you’ve both been making to manage what’s missing.

Which version of this is yours?

• We don’t have sex anymore. The asking became part of the problem. → We don’t have sex anymore

• We’re roommates not partners. Functional, polite, no friction, no contact. → We’re roommates not partners

• We can’t communicate. Every conversation is a minefield. → We can’t communicate

• We fight about money. Same fight, different month. → We fight about money

• We fight about the kids. Different parenting styles became the surface for everything else. → We fight about the kids

• We fight about chores. Who does what, who notices what, who appreciates what. → We fight about chores

• I want a divorce but I’m scared. Of the kids, the money, being alone, being wrong. → I want a divorce but I’m scared

• My partner is controlling. And it didn’t start this way. → My partner is controlling

• I’m controlling and I know it. I see myself doing it and I do it anyway. → I’m controlling and I know it

• One of us wants kids the other doesn’t. And the deadline is getting closer. → One of us wants kids the other doesn’t

• We had an affair and we’re trying to recover. Or we say we are. → We had an affair and we’re trying to recover

Is the love still there, or is it the habit?

Why marriage counselling probably didn’t help

Standard couples therapy treats marriage as a communication problem. Most marriages aren’t failing because the partners can’t talk. They’re failing because each partner is doing things, in good faith, that produce exactly the response they don’t want from the other. Better communication on the same pattern produces the same pattern in friendlier language.

The marriage isn’t broken because of what you say. It’s broken because of what you both keep doing in response to what the other does.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy reorganizes the daily responses each of you is making that are keeping the system stuck, the dozen small reactions per day that add up to the marriage you’re now in. We change those responses one by one, starting with the ones that have the most weight on the rest. The marriage reorganizes because the reactions each of you was counting on from the other stop arriving the way they used to.

The marriage stops drifting because the drift was being produced by what you’ve both been doing.