How Healthy Is Your Marriage?

Do you sometimes wonder whether your marriage is on the right track? Like physical fitness, it takes work to keep a marriage healthy and fit.

Protecting your marriage

At the center of a strong marriage is trust (and trustworthiness).  The little things that chip away at trust are the same things that destroy marriages over time:

  • Secrets and lies
  • Ugly behaviors
  • Neglect

Screening for risk factors

I put together a simple, free Marriage Fitness Test to help couples screen for the most common factors that place marriages at risk for divorce, affairs, abuse, and other relational trauma. Consider asking your spouse to take the test, too, so that you can talk about your results together. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

More about risk factors

Preventing Divorce

Leading marriage researcher John Gottman can observe a 15-minute conflict between newlyweds and predict with over 90% accuracy whether they will divorce. According to the research detailed in his book Principia Amoris, the following negative pattern of fighting predicts divorce in an average of 5.6 years:

  • a harsh start to the conversation
  • a nearly equal (5:4) ratio of negativity to positivity
  • behaviors such as criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling
  • an inability to exit the negative spiral

According to Gottman, the other major factor that predicts divorce is the couple’s emotional disengagement. Couples who failed to respond to each other’s pain ended up divorcing in an average of 16.2 years.

Avoiding emotional and physical affairs

Gottman’s research also identified a “betrayal metric” which predicts a couple’s vulnerability to affairs. This is simply the degree to which the partners treat conflict with a win-lose attitude, feeling victorious when one’s partner loses and feeling defeated when one’s partner wins. Surprisingly, Gottman’s longitudinal study also found that husbands in these couples actually ended up dying earlier than husbands in couples without a win-lose attitude. He surmised that this may point to how physiologically stressful it is to live in a marriage with a win-lose mindset.

In her seminal book NOT “Just Friends,” Shirley Glass was one of the first to present research on affairs and to offer concrete tools for prevention and recovery. She notes that affairs can happen even in marriages that are relatively happy, simply because attraction is biological and genders are much less segregated than in previous times. One of the most powerful tools to protect marriages from temptation is what Glass calls “walls and windows,” keeping an intimate, open “window” of connection between spouses and building “walls” against attractive others by not sharing vulnerable details with them and not keeping even minor secrets from one’s spouse. The more the windows of intimacy and connection close between spouses and the more the walls lower around attractive others, the more the marriage is at risk of affairs.

An emotional affair is one example of a reversal of “walls and windows.” It occurs when one partner shares private, intimate communication with someone whom s/he finds attractive, while keeping the level of intimacy or full details of the interactions a secret from her/his spouse. Even if it does not escalate into sexual intimacy, an emotional affair often can feel just as hurtful to a spouse who is kept in the dark.

Safeguarding Against Abuse

At the root of abusive behavior is a disrespect of your partner’s physical and/or psychological boundaries, either from ignorance or willful disregard. To respect someone’s physical boundaries is to respect his/her physical separateness as a person–his/her body, personal space, and physical belongings. To respect someone’s psychological boundaries is to respect his/her internal dignity and autonomy–his/her feelings, thoughts, needs, desires, rights, and choices.

In his book The New Rules of Marriage, master couples therapist Terry Real defines emotional abuse as behaviors that intrude upon a person’s psychological boundaries. According to Terry Real, these include the following:

  • Degrading your partner
    • Yelling
    • Name-calling
    • Shaming
  • Acting superior
    • Telling an adult what to think, feel, or do (unless one’s opinion is explicitly asked)
    • Breaking your word
  • Withholding the truth to keep your relationship unequal
    • Lying
    • Using exaggeration or dishonesty to manipulate your partner

Disrespect also is at the root of spousal rape and domestic violence. As the #MeToo movement has highlighted, unlike how sex is portrayed in pornography, healthy sex demands that both partners feel respected and in full consent, every time. In his book Why Does He Do That?, Lundy Bancroft, a counselor specializing in the treatment of abusive men, identifies three basic beliefs that lead abusers to engage in physical violence:

  • Control – believing that it’s OK to force my parter to meet my needs
  • Entitlement – believing that my needs are more important than my partner’s needs (especially when my needs feel overwhelming inside)
  • Ownership – believing that my partner belongs to me on some level

Protecting your marriage from abuse starts with developing a deep respect for your own boundaries as well as those of your partner. If a respect for boundaries was not modeled for you when you were growing up, you may not realize when you are abusing your partner or when you are suffering abuse, until the build up of the pain becomes too much to bear. Boundaries by Christian therapists Henry Cloud and John Townsend may be a place to start learning how to act safely toward yourself and others. Of course, personal therapy can be very helpful toward this goal as well.

Escaping Stagnation

It’s impossible for a relationship to flourish when there are “third wheels” draining the relationship of its vitality. Terry Real calls these “misery stabilizers,” unhealthy behaviors that prevent partners from being fully engaged in the marriage and able to grow. These include untreated mental health disorders, addictions, secrets, and any other behaviors that relegate your marriage to a second-tier priority.

In his book Wired for Love, leading couples therapist Stan Tatkin explains that we are physiologically wired for creating a secure, primary attachment with our marriage partner. The safety and security of this primary attachment has physiological benefits, decreasing the stress response in the body and even serving as a natural pain killer. To keep this relationship safe, both partners must feel confident that the marriage comes first to both of them, and that no “third wheels” take priority–whether they be negative habits such as those mentioned above or even positive others such as kids, in-laws, or friends.

Shielding from Trauma

Relational trauma is real and profound.  If risk factors are allowed to nibble away at the relationship, there can come a point in time when trust is so deeply eroded that memory rewrites itself and all interactions between partners (even well-meaning gestures!) lead only to pain.  Marriage researcher John Gottman calls this state “Negative Sentiment Override,” the last stage of a dying relationship when the rose-colored glasses of romantic idealism have been replaced by smoky lenses that color everything with suspicion, bitterness, and contempt.

In the book Your Sexually Addicted Spouse, authors Barbara Steffens and Marsha Means present their groundbreaking research to show that partners who have experienced relational trauma can exhibit symptoms similar to those of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  The lack of emotional safety in their own homes, with the person they once trusted most intimately, can lead to symptoms such as lack of appetite, fatigue, sleeplessness, panic attacks, depression, dissociation, flashbacks, and problems with the immune and endocrine systems.

Marriage has the incredible power to heal some of our deepest wounds.  We enter marriage longing to be loved in all the ways we were not loved before.  We hope our marriage partner will accept all our rejected parts and nurture our broken hearts back to wholeness.  Indeed, love at its best partners with God’s love to break the power of shame, to orient our identities in the full truth of who we are in the eyes of God, and to spur us to become all we are created to be.

Because of the immense potential of marriage to heal and nurture our souls, it also wields the power for unbelievable harm.  In marriage, we entrust to our partners our most vulnerable selves, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Rejections, criticisms, denials, and deceptions from our partners carry much greater weight than those that come from others.  To borrow a metaphor from Rev. Timothy Keller in his book The Meaning of Marriage, we think we are just dishing out minor blows, when actually our nasty behaviors damage our partners like the blast of a bazooka.

As children we learned patterns of intimate love from our parents, and these helped us survive in our families. We also may have put up with many hurtful behaviors from our parents, because we were small and vulnerable and literally could not live without them. As adults, we have an opportunity to decide differently. We can learn new ways of loving and new ways of being so that we can be intentional agents of healing in our partners’ lives, rather than inadvertent agents of harm.

May you live deeply and love deeply, friend!

Related posts

If you’d like to learn more healthy marriages, please check out my post about the four promises that help you build a healthy love relationship.