You’re Going Round in Circles for a Reason

There is something I want you to think about because many clients are sharing these feelings with me.

“Why is being married so bloody difficult?“

I don’t mean when did the problems start.

I mean how have you ended up with resentments stacked sky high and little to no pleasure anymore.

When did being married become so boring, passionless, unsafe or just a big disappointment?

You could probably give me dates, events or a whole history of things your partner has done that have contributed to where you are today.

I mean when did the person you once chose to live with, become the person you now have to manage?

Because that’s what starts to happen to so many.

Both become careful around each other.

Both know there are certain conversations that aren’t worth having. They know there are subjects that will end badly. Sometimes they decide it’s easier to say nothing and get on with your day.

It feels like the sensible thing to do.

And for that day, it probably is.

You avoided another argument.

But something else happened that you probably didn’t notice.

You kept a little bit of yourself away from your partner.

Do that once and it means nothing.

Do it for years and it means everything.

It is rarely one enormous moment where all the love suddenly disappears.

I see couples lose each other through thousands of moments where separation is practiced.

It is two people slowly learning that being open with each other costs too much.

So they adapt.

And strangely, the better they become at avoiding the pain, the worse the marriage becomes.

That’s the part I really want you to understand.

Because you’re going round in circles for a reason.

And your marriage isn’t necessarily the reason.

We are here again and you already know how this ends

So here we are going round in circles again.

How boring.

You know how this starts. You know how this ends.

You’ll have the argument, both get upset, probably say things you don’t really mean and eventually find some distorted way to reconnect.

Deep down you know nothing has reparied or changed, but at least the upset has stopped.

Well, until the next time.

Both hope this is the last time but they know it won’t be.

So here is another resentment to add to the growing list.

Another thing neither of you has really forgotten about.

Another little piece of evidence that something between you isn’t right.

But on some level you function okay, I suppose.

Life carries on.

Work gets done. The bills get paid. The kids get where they need to be. You can probably still have a laugh together occasionally.

From the outside you may even look like a perfectly normal couple.

But God, this is hard work.

You do love your partner.

But sometimes you hate them too.

• You hate what happens to you when you are together.
• You hate having the same bloody conversation.
• You hate knowing exactly what they are going to say before they say it.
• You hate who you become when they press that button they know exists.

And deep down you know they are miserable too.

This isn’t fun anymore.

It’s exhausting.

And occasionally you find yourself wondering:

What the hell happened to us?

Because you weren’t always like this.

There was a time when being together was the easy part.

Now you’re managing each other.

Avoiding subjects.

Choosing your moments.

Working out whether something is worth mentioning because you already know where it will end up.

Then you look at the kids.

And that’s another problem.

Because what exactly are you teaching them?

You don’t want to split the family up.

But staying together like this doesn’t exactly feel like a great advert for marriage either.

So what do you do?

Mess the kids up by leaving?

Or mess them up by staying and teaching them that this is what love looks like?

And what about you?

Are you really supposed to spend the next twenty years feeling like this?

Do you genuinely have to have an affair just to feel alive again?

• You probably don’t want an affair.
• You want to feel something.
• You want to laugh again.
• You want to look forward to coming home.
• You want somebody to look at you in a way that makes you remember who you used to be.

And somewhere underneath all the frustration, resentment and exhaustion, you probably still want that person to be your husband or wife.

That’s what makes this so bloody difficult.

If you didn’t care, the decision would be easy.

But you do.

And so do they.

Yet somehow two people who care about each other have created a relationship neither particularly enjoys being in.

How?

Two people can be completely sincere and still create a disaster together

I remember one wife trying desperately to explain to her husband why she was so unhappy.

She wasn’t being deliberately difficult.

She wasn’t trying to attack him.

She wanted him to understand her because she still cared about the marriage.

The problem was he wasn’t hearing what she thought she was saying.

As she spoke, I watched him disappear.

Not physically.

He was still sitting there.

But emotionally he was leaving the room.

In her mind she was finally telling him the truth about what being married to him had felt like.

In his mind he was sitting through another explanation of why he had failed as a husband.

The more she needed him to understand, the worse he felt.

The worse he felt, the less he could give her.

And the less he gave her, the more convinced she became that he didn’t care.

Neither person was trying to destroy the marriage.

She was trying to solve her pain.

So was he.

She tried to escape feeling alone by reaching harder for him.

He tried to escape feeling like a failure by moving further away from her.

Her solution became his problem.

His solution became hers.

That’s their circle.

And this is where something incredibly important starts happening.

In fact both people begin protecting themselves and this felt justified.

So now you’re protecting yourself

If something hurts enough times, of course you start finding ways to stop it hurting.

That’s not madness.

It’s completely understandable.

You probably believe most of what you’re doing is a response to your partner.

And you’re right.

If they didn’t behave the way they do, you wouldn’t need to react the way you do.

At least that’s how it feels.

The problem is your partner probably has exactly the same argument about you.

That’s how the circle survives.

You both have a reason.

You both have history.

You both have evidence.

And if I sat with each of you separately, I suspect I could understand perfectly well why you have become the way you are with each other.

But understanding why you do something doesn’t mean it’s helping you.

Because your partner has to live with whatever you do to protect yourself.

And sometimes your protection becomes the very thing they need to protect themselves from.

You get hurt and protect yourself.

Your protection hurts them, so they protect themselves.

Their protection then hurts you and gives you even more reason to protect yourself.

Round you go again.

And because you’re both watching what the other person is doing, neither of you can see what the circle itself is doing to your marriage.

You have both become so focused on protecting yourselves from the marriage that neither of you has noticed you stopped protecting the marriage.

That’s the bit I want you to see.

You’re not really going round in circles

Once you have been around this circle enough times, something changes.

You stop expecting anything different.

You already know how the conversation will end before it starts.

That’s why you’re bored by it.

That’s why you’re exhausted.

And that’s why resentment starts replacing hope.

But there is something else happening that is much harder to see.

Every time you go around the circle, you don’t actually come back to the same place.

It only feels like you do.

You have the row.

You calm down.

Life returns to normal.

Maybe you reconnect.

But something has changed.

There is another little resentment added to the stack sitting there.

A little less trust.

A little less willingness to be vulnerable next time.

A little more reason to protect yourself.

So you’re not really going round in circles at all.

You’re spiralling downwards.

And neither of you knows it.

That’s why this matters.

Because the things you are doing to stop yourself getting hurt today may be slowly creating the marriage you will want to escape from tomorrow.

Protection can feel surprisingly good

This is what makes the problem so difficult to spot.

The behaviours damaging your marriage don’t necessarily feel destructive while you’re doing them.

Sometimes they feel like relief.

• You finally stop explaining yourself and get some peace.
• You stop expecting affection, and rejection can’t hurt you.
• You stop asking your partner to understand because you’ve decided they never will.
• You stop sharing certain parts of yourself because experience tells you it isn’t worth it.
• You throw yourself into work because at least there you feel successful.
• You stop initiating sex because you don’t want to be rejected again.
• You become less interested in what your partner thinks because caring has become painful.

Life can actually feel easier.

That’s why protection is so seductive.

It works.

At least in the short term.

It can reduce the pain.

But there is a cost.

Every time you protect yourself by withdrawing something from the relationship, the relationship has less to work with.

And slowly the marriage begins to starve.

You don’t necessarily stop loving your partner.

You stop believing being close to them feels good.

I think that’s a much more dangerous place than most couples realise.

Because once closeness starts hurting, distance starts feeling better.

And when distance feels better, you naturally create more of it.

That’s how two people who don’t particularly want to lose each other can slowly build separate emotional lives while still sharing the same house.

Nobody decided to do it.

It just felt easier.

Eventually the feelings start to change

This is where couples can make some enormous conclusions about their marriage.

Because every time protection wins, the marriage loses something it needs to stay alive.

Over time you both invest less because investing has become risky.

When investment falls, needs stop being met.

When needs aren’t met, connection weakens.

When connection weakens, attraction can disappear.

Intimacy becomes harder.

Fun disappears.

You stop feeling important to each other.

And eventually, the feelings themselves begin to change.

Then one of you starts asking much bigger questions.

• Do I still love them?
• Am I actually happy?
• Have we simply grown apart?
• Are we incompatible?
• Would I be happier with somebody else?

Is this really how I want to spend the rest of my life?

And perhaps the most dangerous question:

What’s the point of us anymore?

Now the future starts disappearing.

The holidays you once imagined.

Growing old together.

Watching the kids build their lives.

All those things you once assumed would contain the two of you suddenly become uncertain.

And eventually one person can look at what the marriage has become and conclude:

“This isn’t working.”

They may be right.

But there is something I would want them to understand before making that decision.

What exactly are you judging?

Imagine becoming so good at protecting yourself from your partner that eventually you can no longer experience why you chose them.

Then looking at what remains and concluding:

Maybe this is just who we are together.

I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude that.

Because what you’re looking at may not be the relationship you are capable of having.

You may be looking at what years of protection have done to it.

That’s a very different thing.

The relationship you’re judging today may be the relationship that two frightened, hurt, frustrated people have unknowingly created while trying not to get hurt anymore.

That doesn’t mean every marriage should be saved.

It doesn’t mean your partner hasn’t done things that genuinely need to change.

It doesn’t mean you haven’t.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you should tolerate behaviours that are unacceptable.

It means something much simpler.

Before you decide what your marriage means, understand what created the marriage you currently have.

Because there is an enormous difference between discovering you are genuinely wrong for each other and discovering you have spent years practising a dynamic that makes it mechanically impossible for either of you to experience the best of the other.

Those two situations can feel exactly the same from inside the marriage.

But they are not the same problem.

And they do not necessarily have the same outcome.

So perhaps you’re asking the wrong question

Most people arrive at this point asking:

Can this marriage be saved?

I understand why.

When you’re exhausted, frightened and running out of hope, you want an answer.

Stay or go?

Fight for it or accept it’s over?

But I think there is something we need to understand before we can answer that.

What has actually been happening between the two of you that keeps bringing you back here?

• What are you protecting yourself from?
• What does that protection make your partner experience?
• What are they protecting themselves from?
• And what does their protection make you experience?

Because somewhere inside those answers is the circle you’ve both been trapped in.

And once you can finally see the circle, something changes.

For perhaps the first time, you can stop seeing your partner as the entire problem.

And you can stop seeing yourself as the entire problem.

You can start seeing the pattern between you.

• A pattern neither of you deliberately created.
• A pattern both of you have probably contributed to.
• A pattern that may have been running for years without either of you understanding what it was doing.
• And only then can you begin to discover the truth.

Maybe the marriage really is over.

Maybe there are things that cannot or should not be repaired.

But perhaps what feels like incompatibility today is something very different.

Perhaps two people who once loved each other became hurt.

They protected themselves.

Their protection hurt each other.

So they protected themselves even more.

They went around that circle hundreds of times until eventually they could barely recognise the relationship they had created.

And then they mistook the result of that process for the truth about their marriage.

Before you make a life-changing decision based on what your marriage has become, understand what created it.

Because you are going round in circles for a reason.

And until you understand that reason, you don’t yet know what your marriage is truly capable of.