Who You Marry...

I know you are thinking you marry your soulmate, the person you want to walk through thick and thin with and perhaps, maybe sometimes you do. 

But, more often, I see that we all marry the people who trigger in us the very unhappiness we have grown up with.  We find partners on two levels, one is attraction (we like the way the look, the fun we have with them, the laughs we share) and then the other level is this quite desperate seeking to find the love and happiness we did not get as children.

After the surface stuff melts away, we find we select spouses and mates that are seeking to heal the wounds that started in childhood and proliferated from there.  Of course, most of this happens at a very subconscious level.  Even, despite, the countless treatises on the subject and all the self created evidence to the contrary.

Harville Hendrix propogated this idea in the 1980s:  that all of us are recreating the exact situations from our childhood where we did not get our needs met, and we do this so we will finally get our needs met!  But no one talks about it or even knows what is going on.  So relationships founder and fail.

Gabor Mate has furthered this idea by folding in how trauma affects us as individuals and in our interrelationships.  Today we know more than we ever have about why we do what we do, how it gets so fucked up and what we can do about it.  But it is easier to continue the process than it is to course correct.  So, I guess, lucky for me, I still have a job.

Being a divorce attorney and seeing the parade of misery through my office is hard.  Seeing well intentioned people completely losing their minds, their financial security and damaging their children in the process is not an easy every day task.  At best, it is difficult, but some days, it is excruciating.

I have done a lot of research on relationships and people and trauma and marriage and divorce.  A fucking lot.  And while I think I have come to know a great many things and have done my best to use those things to help people see how they got where they are, why they are where they are and how to get our and NOT do it again.  I also have to own that in my own life this practical knowledge has been hard to apply and I have tended to make the same mistake repeatedly.

That is how strong the pull is to heal that which you didn’t get in childhood becomes.  Knowing better is simply not enough.  You have to really, really, really want to do better and then set about changing your hard wired, long standing relational defaults.  It isn’t easy.  It is painful.  And often times, you find yourself really just wishing that you could, for once, just get what you want as you are without all the attendant change and self reflection.

There is a lot of resistance to changing yourself in divorce.  There is a lot of attention given to what a shit the other person is, how they let you down, how they failed you, how they were mean, or spiteful, or uncaring or cold and distant.  But the thing that is unavoidable for us all is that we picked them.  Out of the 8 billion other people on the planet, we picked that one.  No matter the status of the relationship, most of us had the element of choice and exercised it poorly.

And why is that?

Because we only had the illusion of choice.  What we were really doing is acting out a very old script attempting to heal that which wounded us in childhood by giving us too much of something we didn’t want or not enough of something we did.  And likely the too much or not enough was delivered in a manner that was painful and traumatizing.  And we spend the rest of our lives trying to get over the first ten years of our lives.

So who you marry is really telling about your childhood wounds.  And if you are brave enough to really look at them, then you can alter course and find yourself someone who will be wiling to help you heal instead of wound you further.  But the resistance to looking at our own dysfunction is great and in my experience, takes a marital failure for us to even begin to be wiling to pay attention.  It seems, at least to me, we are not really able or willing to look at this whole subversive subplot in our lives until and unless we crash our relational boat into the rocky shores of complete marital decimation.  And even after all of that, we still don’t learn, often.  Which is why the divorce rate is so much higher for second and third marriages.  They are just outgrowths of a wound being propagated and practiced for decades, which results, as I am sure you can guess, in more relational dysfunction, not less.

Who you marry is a great insight into what is wrong with you.  Even if your selection of your other half wasn’t an ongoing tragedy, the fact that something that wasn’t all that bad ends anyway, is something to look at and study so a course correction is possible and perhaps, maybe, you can find the love you have always wanted with a partner who is capable and willing to provide it.

If we look at who we date, who we love and who we marry, this is the shortest, most complete study in what is wrong with us and where we are broken, hurt, wounded, traumatized and all the ways and means that require healing.  The evidence is all around us but we ignore it because we are really married to this idea and ideal that if we just keep doing what we are doing, someday we will find that magical person who changes everything for us.

When all along, it is our own failure to own our own dysfunction that intensifies, solidifies and breaks us.  There is a way out and a life that is infinitely better, but we are so married to this notion that all the power and all the dysfunction lies elsewhere that we stay miserable in marriages that will never fit our needs and in relationships with people who lack the capacity to give us anything but more of what we do not want.

Who you marry is the cause of divorce.  All the lack of awareness about why you selected this person is the undercurrent that keeps you forever stuck in an age old pattern that you hate, don’t want, but feel absolutely powerless to get out of.  Hey, I get it.  No one wants to do the heavy lifting.  It is so much easier to just plug and play a new partner, but I assure you, when this pattern is repeated, it becomes harder, more ingrained and toxic.

If you want to get free, find out where you are broken, then work on healing you.  Once you have reached a significant level of honesty and willingness within yourself, you are free to select a partner that can aid in your healing process instead of making that which is difficult, intractable.

Relationships are vehicles for healing.  And this I know despite all the evidence I have to the contrary being a divorce lawyer for the past 30 years.  Relationships are kind of like cars, they are designed to get you from one place to another, but whether you end in a fiery crash or have a lovely ride to your designation, really depends on how you wield it.  You can select the beatdown junker that is only going to give you headaches, or you can select better a model that is more reliable and more likely to stay the course with you.  But unlike cars, people have so much more going below the surface.  Pay attention.  There is way more going on with you and your intended than you realize.  And your failure to acknowledge this simple fact, is the one thing that will most assuredly place you in a situation where your life, your financial, emotional and physical wellbeing is in jeopardy every day of your life...

So choose wisely and get some help.  You didn’t cause the wounds of your childhood but you can heal them and if you find the right partner, you can grow yourself into the best relationship in your life.  Sure, it will take work and time, but I promise the efforts expended to unearth and heal will pay handsome dividends for the rest of your life.  And your refusal to deal with your own issues will absolutely assure that you remain in perpetual relational hell forever.

Don’t you want something better? Finally.