When we think of marriage, we often have these visions of a perfect merge. Where one side always fulfills all the needs of the other side. You can expect your wife to make you happy and your wife expects you to make her happy. You both succeeded emphatically. Sex happens at a frequency that you both love. You have beautiful children and excellent financial status. Your in-laws do not interfere and it is rainbows and unicorn farts for the next 80 years.
Sadly, as relationships and marriages fail, and sadly end up in divorce people will often ask what went wrong. And one person at the party often says they weren’t making me happy.
You also hear many people on social media today stating that they deserve to be happy. Many people often come across with an entitled attitude that they should be able to have a happy marriage. The sad thing about that claim is it only covers half of their life. What about the other half? Just because the fireworks aren’t as bright, should we tear the whole thing down? Because you and your wife didn’t see eye to eye, does that mean, y’all can never be happy? If you think that you are seriously limiting your life and the choices you get to have in it.
Even if you voted for Trump and your wife voted for Kamala Harris, you can still have a wonderful marriage. Just because you don’t see an idle eye on everything doesn’t mean the marriage is destined to fail. Doesn’t even mean that you have a bad marriage. Yet when someone in the relationship stops around and believes that they are entitled to something, that is when the marriage is going to be in true Dire Straits.
We are not entitled to that perfect marriage.
There are many stressors that happen in a marriage. There are many times you will have a thought, and your wife will have a completely opposite thought about the same circumstance. Because we do not see either eye because we have arguments or even because we’ve had differing thoughts if we just run from that problem instead of turning and facing it, we start opening the doors for other problems in our relationship.
The hard thing for many people to understand is that you’re not entitled to having a happy marriage. The second obstacle married people need to realize is what they in reality want from their marriage.
So many people sadly want to blame their wives for the lack of fulfillment in their marriage. They want their wife to make them happy. They want their wife to freely give sex without having to earn that ability. We want the reward without the work. Going out to work and then coming home at the end of the day is a very small portion of the work that is needed to have that happy marriage, but there’s a lot more value you have to apply to be rewarded with a happy marriage.
An example of the level of work you have to do is how hard you work to attract your wife’s attention when you are dating. After you get married, you want to continue to date your wife. Continue to treat her as a girlfriend not as the mother of your child. But the most important woman in your life. The person you wanna race home to at the end of the day.
Now I get it’s tough five years in to keep that spark going. It is a challenge because we’ve had fights. We’ve had disagreements. We’ve had assorted thoughts that have driven wedges between the relationship we want and the relationship we have right now. We didn’t realize five years ago that your thoughts create your results.
So through the actions of unintentional life, we find ourselves mired in the difficulty of living with roommate syndrome. This is you and your wife are just in getting-by mode. Neither of you tries anything out of the ordinary because you’re just trying to maintain peace. You don’t wanna ruffle the feathers of your wife you don’t wanna do something that might cause a fight and so you don’t try. As you sit on the couch, and you don’t try to grow, you buy the very action of inaction drives a wedge between you and the marriage you want. Simply because you do not want to see your wife have emotions beyond what you’re comfortable with.
Marriage is a series of compromises.
Hearing that marriage is a series of compromises you’re probably thinking, “Well duh, no kidding!” If I had my way we’d be having sex three times a day and she wouldn’t be complaining that Junior wouldn’t take a nap. It would be your say, and she didn’t have a say. Because if there was no compromise, someone would always be the winner and someone wouldn’t get the option.
Yet we avoid compromise in our day-to-day lives. We don’t want to upset our wife by asking her for sex, but she says no we may ask why but we never try to come to a compromise.
You see, compromising doesn’t mean one person wins and the other person loses. A compromise is where you come to a win-win result. But to have that win-win result you have to have disagreements. There is going to be conflict in your marriage. And you’re not going to grow and have the marriage you want unless you and your wife are willing to find a resolution. Yes, it will be scary. Yes, it is going to be uncomfortable, because you don’t know where the disagreement is going to go.
We wanna make disagreements and arguments mean something personal. We want our wife yelling to mean that we ourselves have failed at being a husband. We take our son not getting good grades to mean that we are failing as a father. We take our wife complaining about the car to mean that we have failed to provide transportation. None of that is true. That is just the story we’re telling ourselves while we’re in a means of conflict.
So to resolve the discomfort of that conflict, we have to find a compromise. We have to come to a reasonable resolution, and that resolution is not always going to stick. You or your wife may agree at first, but then realize that it wasn’t a very good deal. Therefore you both have to go back to the bargaining table.
When it comes to compromise, you’re going to give up some stuff she is going to give up some stuff. You’re gonna get some of the things that you want and she is going to get some of the stuff she wants. But the key to getting through the conflict and finding a resolution is to pay attention to the stories you tell yourself about why she wants what she wants and why you want what you want. These are all again just thoughts that you’re having about the circumstance.
Roommate syndrome is the symptom.
Now I mentioned roommate syndrome a bit earlier. And I talked about what created roommate syndrome. The cause is you playing it small. The reason why you play it small is a topic you want to examine.
You see roommate syndrome is a symptom of the problem at hand. We often want to blame our wife for her lack of action. The root of the problem is actually in your control. This is because you can only control your thoughts and your actions. Roommate syndrome shows up when you need to grow. Not necessarily growing up, but you need to get out of the stage of your life that you’re in. There’s something about your life that needs to improve, and you are the one who has to change that.
Where your needs aren’t met
A good place to look is, where you feel your needs are not being met. Why are your needs not being met?
Again, it is really easy to just point a finger at her wife and say it because she wouldn’t do anything. But that is not the case. How many times have you actually advocated for your needs? And when I say advocate not just state I want to have this thing done. Also, state why this activity needs to be done. Yet also have to be OK with the fact that your wife may see that need as not being important and when that happens know that you still have to continue to advocate for yourself.
This means you have to get uncomfortable and talk about what you want out of the marriage. Talk about what you want and expect from your wife. That means you have to talk about the uncomfortable aspects of living together and respecting each other enough to listen to what the other person is saying.
Part of the change that you have to take is taking responsibility for yourself. Know that any type of feeling you have about the marriage and whether it is being fulfilled or not is a feeling only you can generate. So if you’re feeling like you are being let down or neglected, you have to examine that and admit that the feeling is yours. And then talk to your wife about what you’re feeling. And they understand that you’re actually providing a manual to your wife. She can choose to follow that manual, or she can choose not to. This is where a lot of the compromise comes into play.
But when you can take responsibility for the emotions you feel, and you start understanding that you can change the meaning of those emotions you can start having a better life because you’re no longer dependent upon your wife for your happiness.
What are you struggling with?
What is the bachelor marriage that you’re struggling with? Seems like an easy question but the answer takes a bit of work. Because our brain wants to protect us. It comes up with wonderful reasons that have nothing to do with what we’re struggling with. The best answer it normally comes up with is I do not know, and we accept that excuse. We assume that because we don’t know that the answer isn’t there, how would we know what the answer is if we don’t know what the answer is?
Yet the best response to any time you hear yourself, say I don’t know the answer . What if I did know? Then pay attention to all of the thoughts your brain spins out on. Cause you see when you face what you’re struggling with that’s where you’re going to grow. And when you grow you overcome the limiting factors that are holding you back in roommate syndrome.
It Might have come from something before your marriage.
The aspects of watch you’re struggling with whether it is you avoiding conflict or you are avoiding why you don’t want to stand up for yourself. You may even struggle with why you’re a nice guy. The struggle often shows up from something well before you were married. This obstacle that keeps you from finding fulfillment in your marriage is most often the thing that you need to work on.
And this is not easy for anybody. Many times we expect our wife to make the changes. Because that’s easier I don’t have to do any work. My wife has to do all the work she needs to change to make the marriage better, but you are part of that relationship. That means you have your own set of problems that you have brought to the table, and these problems can only be fixed by you. And often what needs to be fixed isn’t what the other person actually needs to work on. Therefore, you still have no power over your wife and what she does to better the marriage. But you have all the power bestowed on you to fix and make the marriage even better.
Why do you get stuck
Many times when we try to better ourselves, we will find ourselves getting stuck for a period of reason. Whether it is mental spin, confusion, uncertainty, or perfection. Our brain has a lot of tools to keep us playing small. One of the most devious means is to get you stuck. And we allow this stuck feeling to happen because it feels like we’re doing something but in reality, we’re doing nothing.
Confusion is one of those indulgent emotions that allows us to feel like we’re trying to find the answer even though we actually know what the answer is. Well, I don’t know if I need to make a right-hand turn or a left-hand turn. The answer is that picking one doesn’t matter even if it’s the wrong one, you’ve taken action, you found out it was the wrong one and so now you can do the right action. So many times making a decision can be scary because we don’t know what the outcome is. But when we see that the outcome isn’t what we want then we know we made the wrong decision and we can choose the other. Our brain produces this feeling of uncertainty and fear so that we stay planted on the couch And try not to improve or rock the boat in any way. So why do we get stuck because we try to believe what our brain tells us so that we do not have to violate our motivational triad.?
Expecting our wife to change is one of those unrealistic excuses that our brain tells us. Because again it requires us to have to do the work and that is too much energy and too much discomfort for our brain to be OK with. So therefore our brain wants to do the unrealistic action of saying our wife has to change. And the more we believe that the more we’re going to stay stuck in roommate syndrome. The more we’re stuck in that roommate syndrome the further away our ideal marriage goes. So do you want to have your ideal marriage, or do you wanna just have a marriage that is mediocre and possibly end in divorce? That choice is yours.
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