Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: I often hear from folks who had initially hoped that a trial separation would help to give them some clarity about their marriage. Often, the hope is that the time apart will allow them to see that perhaps things weren’t so dire. Unfortunately, this clarity doesn’t always come. Sometimes, the separation only provides a continuation of the misery, instead of the reprieve that was desired.

An example of a comment that you might hear in this situation is something like: “both my husband and I were miserable in our marriage. All we did was fight and say mean things to one another. My husband and I have very different personalities. He’s very flamboyant and he likes to be around a lot of people. To put it plainly, my husband loves to be the center of attention and he will often draw attention to himself in a crowd. I am very introverted. I don’t like people noticing me for the most part. I am a home body and I like quiet and calm environments. Being around my husband (especially when we go out) makes me feel anxious. But when I am honest about this, my husband tells me that I need to lighten up and that I am too uptight. Usually after this exchange happens, we say nasty things to one another. Then, to make things right my husband will agree to stay home and spend quiet nights with me, but he will resent it. Or, I might agree to go out with him, but I will feel very uncomfortable. Things finally got so bad between us that I insisted that we separate for a while. I honestly had started to feel as if I couldn’t be myself around my husband. And I hated feeling that way. So I got a small apartment because I just wanted to be alone for a while. I thought that the quiet and calm would be just what I needed. But I’m just as miserable without him. I miss him. And he says that he misses me too. He’s asking me to come back home. I want to. But I also know that once I come home, we’ll fall back into our old patterns and we will be just as miserable together as we are apart. Is there any hope for us?”

Marriages With Spouses With Different Personalities Have Unique Challenges And Some Advantages Too: I believe from my own experience that there is always hope. Spouses with very different personalities can face some challenges in their marriages simply because each person is going to have to step outside of his or her comfort zone. However, the plus side to this is that these types of marriages can be exciting if the couple learns to make the differences work for them rather than against them. And this takes some skill and some compromise.

Learning To Move Away From Old Cycles: I know that this wife was tempted to come home because she missed her husband. But she was also right in her assumption that she and her husband would probably resort back to their old behaviors, simply because they hadn’t done any work whatsoever on their marriage or on how they navigated their problems. So of course when the same old problems came up, so would the same old conflicts and the same old ways of arguing about them. Sometimes, your marriage is only able to withstand so many of these blow ups before one of the spouses checks out of the marriage or starts to believe that, as much as they might miss their spouse, it would better for them to be alone. The reasoning is that it’s better to be lonely in a healthy relationship with yourself than within an unhealthy relationship with someone else.

Moving Toward A More Healthy Relationship: But what would happen if you could make the marriage you have now a healthy relationship? Would you want this? Many people will immediately say that yes, they want a healthy marriage more than anything else and yet they repeat the same old patterns because quite frankly, they have become accustomed to the drama. And when they don’t get it, they get bored, so they shake things up with an argument or two and then they realize that the whole process has made them so empty, tired, and miserable.

In order to end the misery, you have to end this cycle. You have to willing to compromise sometimes, but you also have to be true to yourself if you are truly uncomfortable most of the time. Different personalities are going to have different ways to handle conflict, which means that there is a risk of things never getting resolved. Learning how to compromise and learning how to criticize the situation and not your spouse will often go a long way toward resolving this.

There is a big difference between telling your wife that she is neurotic and uptight instead of telling her that you love having her on your arm when you go out. There’s a big difference between telling your husband that he is starved for attention and makes a spectacle of himself instead of telling him that such extroverted displays make your introverted self very uncomfortable and left feeling judged.

There are ways to say what you mean and to disagree with your spouse while allowing your spouse to still maintain their dignity and to have the input to compromise with you. This is the key to ending the misery. You have to be willing to compromise and you have to be willing to speak up when the compromise isn’t working.

You might suggest a compromise of equal nights out and at home so that neither person feels that they are giving in and then see how that works. Or, you may think long and hard about what really bothers you. Perhaps it’s not going out so much as your husband’s behavior when you do. Perhaps it’s not the wife’s introverted nature that bothers him but the fact that he feels judged. The key is being honest and being flexible and remembering that this your marriage that you are talking about. There is no need to keep score and, where there is love and commitment, then everything else can be negotiated. The fact that you are miserable without him tells me that the love is probably still there.

Learning to manage our conflict was the biggest skill that my husband and I learned during our separation.  I firmly believed that learning this skill allowed us to save our marriage.  If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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