Even friends Marx and Engels wrote that quantity turns into quality, and this transition can be painful. For society, this is a revolution, for the family, a crisis in relationships.
Do not revive!
It happens that the basis is lame, and not the add-on, or, as a colleague-IT specialist explained his divorce to me, this is a bug, not a feature. Talking can solve a lot, but everything. Compromises cannot go on ad infinitum.
My friend, whose marriage seemed almost perfect, suddenly broke up with her husband. Of course, I knew that she had some rough edges in her relationship with her husband, but who doesn’t? Moreover, she said that her husband, this wonderful person, always readily responds to all her proposals to discuss what infuriates her in family life. And there were reasons to be angry.
He preferred to spend his free time with friends rather than with children. He constantly forgot his promises to do something for the family, such as finishing work early so he could take his family to the zoo. And a friend with two kids sat like fools with washed necks and waited for daddy, but they didn’t wait. Or, when she and her husband went out to visit and cast lots in advance, who would drive on the way back, he quickly drank the first glass at a party – and that was all. He forgot about his lot, sorry dear, tem-them, I love you.
But he was always, always ready to discuss everything and promise to meet halfway. And my girlfriend has always been an all-understanding wife.
“And then,” she says, “suddenly I realized that it was not about agreements and compromises, but about priorities. For a husband, everything that is outside the concept of “family” is really more important. Of course, he loves us, but so, from afar and slightly. And I don’t need to.
And then her beautiful husband became a wonderful ex-husband. Their relationship improved – a clear visiting schedule for the incoming dad is very disciplined, as it turned out. In the eyes of those around them, they again became ideal spouses, only former ones.
I think that the sluggish crisis in family relations can be regarded as a subtle allusion to thick circumstances – it’s just that the marriage has come to an end, it happens. There is no need to revive what is no longer there.
Good conflict?
It is a completely different situation when the patient, that is, the marriage, is more alive than dead. In this case, it makes sense to fight.
It is known that psychologists divide family life into several stages, delimited by crises in family relationships. There are those lucky people who live through difficult times without even noticing them. Who are these people? Some simply have such wonderful character traits that allow them not to dwell on the negative, let the unpleasant go past their ears and through their fingers, and take what cannot be changed as a given. And others, and most of them, ended up at the very end of the line when the universe was handing out all the bonuses listed. They should not wait for favors from nature, they will have to build happiness with their own hands and head, armed with the idea that a crisis of family relations experienced correctly is a natural stage that can bring them to a new level if the participants have enough patience, love, and desire to stay together.
Crisis of the first year
Its cause is most often – life. Young people are still so young, no one wants to give in to each other, everyone has their own principles, ambition, personal opinion. “Why should I/should I?” – the main leitmotif of clarifying the relationship. If the idea that they are together, and not one against the other, does not occur to anyone, write wasted.
Crisis 3-5 years
Children have already been born, parental roles have been added to the roles of wife and husband, plus housing, career issues. All this requires serious nervous tension and even more attention to each other. Mutual attention, otherwise it is difficult to successfully overcome the crisis. But if it works out, then the spouses will enter the next stage as friends-comrades-in-arms.
Crisis 7-9 years
A few years later, a new crisis rolls in, the emergence of which seems to provoke all the good that the family has managed to create. It’s an addiction crisis. When everything is in order, you begin to compare whether everything is as good as you once wanted. And you find out that, of course, firstly, everything is not so, and secondly, will everything really remain so ?! Some are drawn to the search for adventure, others manage to find new interesting facets in the existing family life.
Crisis 18-22 years
They just raised their children, they just exhaled after their teenage crises, and new ones are on the threshold – midlife crises. Men are more worried about them, but women also have to be nervous, especially when you find that gray hair now has to be painted over weekly, and not once a month. The feeling that everything has already been achieved, and what has not been achieved, that cannot be achieved, is very unpleasant and hard to experience. Here, except to pull myself together and get down to business, and there is nothing to advise. Hobbies, changing the scope of activities, volunteering in social projects. It may sound boring, but it actually works.
Green scandal
In general, there are not so many tips on how to survive crisis times in relationships, and there is nothing complicated about them. Yes, and they always work, and not only in especially difficult cases. They are just eco-friendly.
- It is necessary to completely avoid “you-messages”, that is, not to say “but you ..”, “you always …”, “because of you …”.
- Use exclusively “I-messages”: “I feel sad and hurt to spend Saturday night alone”, “I get upset when I see untidy things”
- Do not wash dirty linen in public: a husband and wife will quarrel ten times and forgive each other, but the mother-in-law and mother-in-law will remember everything, and it will not be easy to change their attitude.
- Try to see the situation through the eyes of a partner. Ask him about his vision of the problem, do not immediately reject, take time out if necessary, and try to understand and accept.
- Do not accumulate resentment and irritation, but immediately report them.
- “Keep thesis” – when discussing one problem, do not drag in examples of other unpleasant misunderstandings as arguments.
- If all else fails, it makes sense to contact a family psychologist.
- If nothing comes out of a psychologist either, stop torturing each other and remain just friends.
And I want to end the article with a wonderful quote from Lewis Carroll’s book “Alice in Wonderland”
“Don’t be sad,” said Alice. “Sooner or later, everything will become clear, everything will fall into place and line up in a single beautiful scheme, like lace. It will become clear why everything was needed, because everything will be right.
