Don't Go Breaking My Heart

Woohoo Nobody knows it... Anyway, now that I've gotten that song stuck in your head, what do you think we are going to talk about this week? We're going to talk about how to not break another's heart once you are married. Something I have noticed throughout my life has been that a lot of marriages are not staying together. Divorce is a very common thing or you don't even get married at all. This is something that is kind of terrifying. How do I ensure that my marriage will stay together after I have gone through all the trouble of creating the relationship? How do I make sure that I do not hurt and am not hurt? While there is no possible way that I could go through all of the avenues one can strengthen and help a relationship to thrive in this blog, I will try to go over one major thing which I feel could help any relationship to grow closer together.

One major problem that can cause marriages to end is an affair. An affair is when a spouse goes behind the other spouse's back and has intimate relationships with someone else. It is a tragic thing. It betrays the trust of the person whom you were supposed to be loyal to your whole life. Once it is done it cannot be undone and it takes a lot of work to regain the trust that you lost in the marriage afterwards. Now how does one get to the point where they feel like having an affair is okay? I mean at the beginning of the marriage they must have loved the person they married otherwise they would not be marrying them. It's not like they just suddenly stopped loving them one day and up and decided to have an affair out of the blue. At least I would hope that this is not how it generally happens. Our big mistakes don't usually happen all of the sudden. We slowly move down a dangerous slope until we slip and can't stop ourselves when we get to the very edge. We end up falling off.  This is what happens when there is an affair. There are a series of bad decisions which lead us to being intimate with someone other than our spouse. So what is one of those small dangerous steps? I think that one of them could be not defining how former relationships relate to this new union which you have just made. Meaning, how do we interact with others we have a close relationship with after we are married? Are you still hanging out alone with an ex-boyfriend? Are you constantly confiding in your mom or friends about how the relationship is going rather than discussing it with your spouse? Are you getting close to people who work with, and looking forward to your interactions with them more than you look forward to interactions with your spouse? Can you see how this might create problems?  Dr. John Van Epp created a diagram that explains how close relationships are formed. In this model he explains that a relationship will grow as you go about doing these five things, when you get to know a person more, when you start to trust someone, when you start to rely on someone, when you start to commit to someone, and finally when you start to touch someone. As you do these things you will become more attached to people. Given these methods, when you are confiding or trusting someone outside of your marriage about your marriage, you are not relying on your spouse to work things out. Your level of trust increases with the outside relationship and decreases with your spouse and you become attached to the other person. Which can potentially lead to an affair. You didn't start out with the intention of having an affair, but because you did not have standards in place for how you interacted with other people you were able to grow distant from your spouse and eventually end up hurting someone you once loved. We can stop this from happening by creating firm expectations for how we will treat people who we were close to. Communicating with your spouse can help you avoid potential problems in a marriage. Maybe you will have to avoid being as close to some friends you once had. In any case, if having these standards could help save your marriage I would say that they are worth establishing. Anyways I hope this all makes sense if you have any questions or comments please leave them below! :)