Is Your Marriage in a Cycle of Retaliation?

Most couples seem to be in what we call a cycle of retaliation. Here's how it works:

Because of a self-absorbed lifestyle or just a lack of "know-how", the husband fails to love his wife as she needs to be loved. Consequently, the wife does not feel loved, and, therefore, she does not feel like loving him back. This causes her to act cold, indifferent, sarcastic, rude, emotionally and/or physically absent in bed, angry, and, well, the list goes on.

Now, here is where things go from bad to worse. The husband feels disrespected. In fact, the more disrespected he feels, the less he feels like loving his wife. This only causes him to retreat into his emotional and, often times, physical "cave".

Now, the wife feels less loved than ever, and, in turn, she becomes even more angry, cold, indifferent, bitter, et cetera toward her husband. Do you see the cycle? It's horribly vicious! Does this accurately describe your marriage?

Get Rid of that Baggage

Many couples bring a lot of excess baggage from the past into their marriage. The typical forms of baggage are hurt, anger, SELF-CENTEREDNESS, a lack of understanding of what true love is, a wrong attitude toward physical intimacy, and a low self-image. Because of excess baggage, many marriages are doomed from the start. They are actually time bombs ready to go off!

When couples start to feel the effects of the baggage that is weighing down their marriage, they often feel that the answer is to throw the marriage out, however, the real answer is to THROW THE BAGGAGE OUT. As a matter of fact, one of the problems with not dealing with the baggage is that people tend to just TAKE THE EXCESS BAGGAGE on to the next relationship. (Because of this reason, there are many people on their 2nd and 3rd marriage that still think they have not found the right person! - If they would have initially dealt with the excess baggage in their life, they may still be on their first marriage.) You can start to deal with this baggage through counseling, marriage resources, and friends that have went through similar situations and came out on top.

Remember, be very careful to work on yourself first. Certainly, your spouse needs to change, however, up to this point, your spouses vision of seeing his/her own faults has probably been blurred by your own errors and mistakes! It is so important to take your own faults out of the picture so he/she can see theirs.