By Tara

When the reality of marriage doesn’t meet our expectations, we tend to blame reality.

When it comes to marriage, we expect the fairy tale. Raised on Cinderella and Ozzie and Harriet, we’re convinced that marriage will solve all of our problems, our partner will meet all of our needs, and that we’ll live happily ever after.

But a great many of us don’t get the happily-ever-after part; we get divorced. So where did we go wrong?

Mary Laner thinks that we expect too much. A professor of sociology at Arizona State University, Laner says that when the marriage or the partner fails to live up to our ideals, we don’t recognize that our expectations were much too high. Instead, we blame our spouse or that particular relationship.

“We think that our partner can meet all our needs, know what we’re thinking, and love us even when we’re not terribly lovable. When those things don’t happen, then we blame our partner,” Laner says. “We think that maybe if we had a different spouse, it would be better.”

The ASU sociologist studied the marital expectations of unmarried college students. She compared their expectations with those of people who have been married for about 10 years. The significantly higher expectations held by the students, she says, come straight out of the “happily ever after” fantasy.

“Such irrationality can lead us to conclude that when the ‘thrill is gone,’ or when the marriage or partner doesn’t live up to our inflated ideals, divorce or abandonment of the marriage in some other form is the solution,”

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By Nancy Colier, LCSW

Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say. Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of relationships. We like to package our feelings as positive or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist. In approaching relationships, we use the word but to connect contradictory feelings, as if the positive should eliminate the negative and vice versa. In fact, for a relationship to succeed, “and,” NOT “but,” must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.

All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves? Unfortunately, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions.  One answer. “Is it good or bad?” “Is it true or false?” “Is it right or wrong?” We like simple, clean, straightforward answers. If it’s both, simultaneously, then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution.

We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and ambiguity. We are always trying to grasp certainty and avoid the unknown. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once. In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner. Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys and being deprived of others. This can be quite un-grounding.

People use two primary strategies to eradicate internal inconsistency in relationship. Either we make the other all good or we make him/her all bad. Both paths are attempts to right the inconsistency, to manipulate the experience in order to feel just one way.

To make our experience consistently positive, we disconnect from and deny our negative feelings, the parts of the relationship where we are not getting what we want. Having successfully removed the negative, we can remain in the relationship “pain-free.” Ironically, internal criticism can serve as a way of denying negative feelings. Telling ourselves that we are “ungrateful,” “overly demanding,” “impossible to please,” and thus somehow to blame for the deprivation that we are experiencing, is a strategy to reject our pain and thus eradicate the anxiety that contradiction arouses.

Making the experience consistently negative, on the other hand, requires rejecting the parts of the relationship that bring us joy. The “He’s a louse and I don’t know what I’m doing with him” brand of thinking. In this approach we focus only on the problems, not allowing ourselves to acknowledge or appreciate the reasons we are actually in the relationship.

The problem with denying a part of our internal experience is that it prevents us from being able to fully experience our lives, to authentically enjoy what is working in our relationship or to change what is not. We cannot cut off a part of our experience without damaging the other parts. We cannot put a blanket over the negative without blunting the positive. So too, when we bury our experience we create an underlying resentment. It is this buried resentment that will destroy the relationship, not the acknowledgment of our contradictory feelings.

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By Maria Bogdanos

Emotional abuse is elusive. Unlike physical abuse, the people doing it and receiving it may not even know it’s happening.

It can be more harmful than physical abuse because it can undermine what we think about ourselves. It can cripple all we are meant to be as we allow something untrue to define us. Emotional abuse can happen between parent and child, husband and wife, among relatives and between friends.

The abuser projects their words, attitudes or actions onto an unsuspecting victim usually because they themselves have not dealt with childhood wounds that are now causing them to harm others.

In the following areas, ask these questions to see if you are abusing or being abused:

1. Humiliation, degradation, discounting, negating. judging, criticizing:
   • Does anyone make fun of you or put you down in front of others?
   • Do they tease you, use sarcasm as a way to put you down or degrade you?
   • When you complain do they say that “it was just a joke” and that you are too sensitive?
   • Do they tell you that your opinion or feelings are “wrong?”
   • Does anyone regularly ridicule, dismiss, disregard your opinions, thoughts, suggestions, and feelings?
2. Domination, control, and shame:
   • Do you feel that the person treats you like a child?
   • Do they constantly correct or chastise you because your behavior is “inappropriate?”
   • Do you feel you must “get permission” before going somewhere or before making even small decisions?
   • Do they control your spending?
   • Do they treat you as though you are inferior to them?
   • Do they make you feel as though they are always right?
   • Do they remind you of your shortcomings?
   • Do they belittle your accomplishments, your aspirations, your plans or even who you are?
   • Do they give disapproving, dismissive, contemptuous, or condescending looks, comments, and behavior?
3. Accusing and blaming, trivial and unreasonable demands or expectations, denies own shortcomings:
   • Do they accuse you of something contrived in their own minds when you know it isn’t true?
   • Are they unable to laugh at themselves?
   • Are they extremely sensitive when it comes to others making fun of them or making any kind of comment that seems to show a lack of respect?
   • Do they have trouble apologizing?
   • Do they make excuses for their behavior or tend to blame others or circumstances for their mistakes?
   • Do they call you names or label you?
   • Do they blame you for their problems or unhappiness?
   • Do they continually have “boundary violations” and disrespect your valid requests?

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