It’s a lifetime that forms us into people who are becoming ever more loving versions of ourselves, who can bear the weight of loneliness, who have released the weight of shame, who have traded in walls for bridges, who have embraced the mess of being alive, who risk empathy and forgive disappointments, who love everyone with equal fervor, who give and take and compromise, and who have dedicated themselves to a lifetime of presence and awareness and attentiveness.

Marital communication is getting a bad rap. It’s like the kid who fights back on the playground. The playground supervisors hear a commotion and turn their heads just in time to see his retaliation. He didn’t create the problem; he was reacting to the problem. But he’s the one who gets caught, so he’s sent off to the principal’s office.

Or, in the case of marital communication, the therapist’s office.

I feel bad for marital communication, because everyone gangs up on him, when the truth is, on the playground of marriage, he’s just reacting to one of the other troublemakers who started the fight:

1. We marry people because we like who they are. People change. Plan on it. Don’t marry someone because of who they are, or who youwant them to become….
2. Marriage doesn’t take away our loneliness. To be alive is to be lonely. It’s the human condition. Marriage doesn’t change the human condition….
3. Shame baggage. Yes, we all carry it it.We spend most of our adolescence and early adulthood trying to pretend our shame doesn’t exist so, when the person we love triggers it in us, we blame them for creating it….
4. Ego wins.We’ve all got one….
5. Life is messy and marriage is life. So marriage is messy, too….
6. Empathy is hard.By its very nature, empathy cannot happen simultaneously between two people….
7. We care more about our children than about the one who helped us make them. Our kids should never be more important than our marriage, and they should never be less important….
8. The hidden power struggle.Most conflict in marriage is at least in part a negotiation around the level of interconnectedness between lovers….
9. We don’t know how to maintain interest in one thing or one personanymore.We live in a world pulling our attention in a million different directions….

As a therapist, I can teach a couple how to communicate in an hour. It’s not complicated. But dealing with the troublemakers who started the fight? Well, that takes a lifetime.

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