Part of the process of bettering your marriage is to really open your eyes to some of the delusional thinking many young couples have when it comes to their partner and their marriage. You were likely one of those people once and so was I. These beliefs contributed to how you conducted yourself and how your wife conducted herself over the course of your time as a couple. Here a few basic delusions that married couples have.
I can fix this person.
Things will get better if we married or when we get married.
I will have infinite sex with this person until death do us part (largely a male delusion).
The person I marry now is the person I’ll be married to in 20,40,60 years.
I’m sure you are reading this and thinking “yeah of course these aren’t true”. Yet, so many young folks have a level of belief in these four delusions and it eventually catches up with them.
“I Can Fix This Person”
Men and women both do this. The person that needs to be fixed has some good redeemable qualities like being great in bed for example but has something or a series of major issues or less severe issues that could become greater issues. The fixer can be a person with codependent type issues or maybe feels trapped in the relationship and for a myriad of reasons. You cannot fix anyone.
“Things Will Get Better if We Married or When We Get Married”
While marriage and combining forces can absolutely level some things up in your life, that is only true when looking at some metrics and not as a blanket universal truth devoid of context. Your pre marriage problems will not get better through marriage. What in the marriage ceremony or the greater construct of marriage makes you believe this? Is Marriage self-work? Counseling? Is marriage a medical doctor? Marriage is not the wonder drug to cure bad behavior, bull shit, character flaws, substance abuse, or anything else. What’s often more accurate is that some problems will get worse with marriage. People don’t want to see that though.
“I will have Infinite Sex with This Person Until Death Do Us Part”
This is largely a dude thing. A lot of young men lack the understanding of how human sexual dynamics work and that the combined familiarity, loss of novelty, comfort, and many other factors slowly and sometimes not so slowly erode the intimacy that was there. Men want this area of their life handled. If we men had it our way we’d have sex on demand. Why? Well, it feels awesome and its how many men feel the most loved by their wife. While that’s logical, the assumption of a lot of young men is that women feel the same and can operate within monogamy like this. This is largely untrue and it’s an unrealistic expectation that some men have. Having a great married sex life is obtainable with a physically/mentally healthy, sex positive, woman with a libido closely matched to the man’s libido and combined with man doing the right things to keep the spark alive. When a man has put so much emphasis into this area to yield such a crappy result (shitty sex married life) it’s crushing. This is where some men are very tempted to step outside of their marriage to get their sexual needs met.
“The Person I Married Now is the Person I’ll Be Married to in 20,40,60 Years”
We all develop over the course of our lives. We become wiser, we learn from mistakes, we experience new things that shape our thoughts and actions, and we mature. When you get married you need to understand that you are signing up for all phases in life, not just the honeymoon phase. Yeah buddy, you are signing up to change your wife’s diapers when she is 90 and in a wheelchair. How do you feel about that? There are countless things that you cannot predict. What should really count here is that the person’s baseline stays the same or better yet improves. A great indicator of that is whether they are committed to self-work or not and can demonstrate a pattern of that over time. This is where you hear folks say, “you grow together or apart”. The lack of understanding here contributes to the gray divorce population after the kid’s leave the nest.
Ideally, you’d want to know all these things prior to getting married but, it doesn’t happen that way many times. Gaining a more realistic view on these delusional beliefs can help you understand what got you into the situation you are in, prevent the next one, and is certainly useful as an educational tool for your children.