Liz has been feeling disconnected in her thirty-year marriage for the last ten years or so. She loves her husband, thinks he’s a good man who works hard and means well, but she feels like she doesn’t know him anymore. And maybe more painfully, she feels like he doesn’t know or understand her any longer. They do things together occasionally, but they don’t share any part of their inner world with each other. To her, it feels like they’re comfortable strangers living life alongside one another, but not really sharing a life together.
She’s been trying to connect with him. She’s expressed how she’s feeling in the marriage. She’s tried to make it safe for him to come out from behind the wall he’s built that keeps them safe, but separate.
And his response is something along the lines of: I know I’m guarded, but that’s not going to change. This is who I am, and I’m the same man you married.
What she’s asking for is to know her husband, to be trusted enough to understand how he thinks and feels, what he’s interested in and what terrifies him. She wants to understand his inner world as a way to feel more connected as a couple. She also wants to feel like she is known herself in her most intimate relationship.
She wants to be in the deep end of their relationship, but he’s perfectly happy floating around over in the shallow end.
He doesn’t want to go there for all the reasons he’s said and not said…
It feels heavy to him
It feels like too much work
If he’s really honest with himself, it feels scary
So instead of trying to meet his wife’s need for greater intimacy in the marriage, it feels easier to just try to convince her that she shouldn’t want what she wants.
Hypothetically, let’s say that he gets a promotion at his job and his boss tells him he’s going to need to learn some new skills in order to do this job. There’s a new system he’ll be using that he’ll need to understand, and the processes are different in this role, meaning there are some skills he’ll need to acquire to be effective.
And let’s imagine his response was: “I know I don’t have these skills that you want, but I have no interest in learning them. I still want the job, so just let me take on this new role without those skills. This is who I am and I’m the same man you hired all those years ago.”
How do you think that would go?
What Liz is asking for is to have an intimate relationship and an emotional connection with her husband. And what his actions are telling her is essentially: I don’t care what you want…I don’t care that you feel lonely…I don’t care that you feel like we’re strangers and that you’re hurting right now. I am unwilling to grow, so just deal with it.
This is emotional neglect, my friends.
As a coach, what I hear is that he wants the comfort of marriage, but not the intimacy of marriage. If you don’t want to feel emotionally connected to someone, you don’t actually want a marriage. You might want a roommate or a friend, but you certainly don’t want an intimate partner with whom you share your life.
Sometimes we say we want to keep our marriage, but what we really want is to remain comfortable.
I know I am the coach that will tell you that no one is here to meet your needs; it’s no one’s purpose on this planet to make sure I have what I need, want and desire. But inside of a marriage, there are some baseline things that distinguish this relationship from every other relationship you have. And one of those things is an intimate emotional connection.
If you’re feeling a lack of connection in your marriage and don’t know how to bridge that gap, I can help. Click here to complete an online application to see if there’s a fit for us to work together.