Chelsea Summers is playing Dear Abby today to a couple of middle aged, long-term committed men, and as a long-term committed man, I think her advice is excellent, if a little general. I think the real issue is that we all develop hangups, reactions, expectations, and habits about our partners over time, some to our benefit and some to our detriment. We all find them a little or a lot hard to break, because our partner’s always there, and there’s a feedback loop reinforcing the bad habits along with the good.
It’s not poor relationship skills or poor communication, always, but rather a side effect of living in close quarters with someone for an extended period of time. You learn them, and in learning them, forget that they change and forget that you haven’t learned everything there is to learn. Or maybe you don’t forget, but you lose sight of what there is to try, what new looks like, because, well… the groove is hard to get out of. It’s not impossible, though.
It happens often, and to successful married couples, I think it happens many times to the same couple, year after year, and recognizing and getting out of the groove when you need to should become as much a habit as anything else. We’re constantly reorganizing everything around us, from small spaces like our workspaces to the upheavals of major corporations, always greeted with much fanfare by upper management and television pundits who think that this upheaval marks the final, perfect vision for the company. As long as this need for change is recognized as nature and doesn’t lead to cynicism about our relationships, it would seem like a perfectly healthy part of any relationship, to be embraced and not avoided, even as hard as it is to deal with.
That’s not an insight a ton of people before me haven’t made before, but it bears repeating.
