Episode 100: Top 10 Ways You’re Ruining Your Marriage or Doing it Wrong

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. I cannot believe it. This is our hundredth podcast episode. I mean, I'm not going to say I never thought we'd be here, because I guess I did assume that.

But I remember probably three, four years ago, one of my clients said, you really should start a podcast. And I thought, no, I can't do that. I mean, I have to do content on so many platforms. That's just another platform. And by the time it's going to take me to get any sort of real number or quantity of podcasts to be relevant, people will have moved on to another platform.

And lo and behold, they just never did. They never moved on to another platform. So for those of you that are engaged with my podcast and listen to the episodes, I just appreciate you so much. I think it's amazing. And if it is helpful to you, that's why I do it. Right? So today is podcast episode 100. And so my team sort of challenged me to come up with give me like a top 10 list.

And so I thought, well, let's go where people need me to go, which is the top 10 things that we are doing that are destroying our marriages, Right? So this is all the things that we inevitably do, some more than others, that are killing marriages today. So this is what we've got to stop doing. All right, that's what we're going to focus on today. And some of these will be very obvious.

Some of them won't be. All right, so let's dive in. The first one is around our use of technology. Now, you might have heard me talk about this before. Technology, when it comes to relationships, is not actually our friend. Like, it helps us keep in touch with people, but when it comes to our most intimate relationship, it's doing more harm than it is good. And so it's time we just sort of acknowledge that.

So when we are putting our attention more into our phone than we are into our partner, that's telling our partner something about their importance and priority in our life. Because if our focused attention is towards what's going on in someone else's life, scrolling through Facebook, scrolling through Instagram, whatever platform it is that you like, if we're spending more of our time and attention there than we are having our time and attention on our partner, of course our relationship is going to suffer.

Okay. Wherever we place our time and attention, that tells us what the priorities are in our lives. And so if you're a lot of your time and attention is spent in your phone looking at other people's lives, I just think you gotta question that or certainly at least don't be surprised when your marriage is struggling from it. Now the other very. I think of it as a very strange thing, except that I know that I do it too sometimes to a certain degree.

And that is this idea of just being hyper connected and overly stimulated. So some people were giving me their stories about this because I was like, is this really a thing or is it just like your spouse? And then people started telling me their stories. So one woman, her husband is often sitting in their big chair in their family room. The TV is on. He's got his iPad on his left and his, which is like his news and sports and I guess interest things that interest him on his iPad.

And then he's got his work laptop on his right side and he's got all of this going on and his phone is always nearby. So as that's dinging, he every time he gets a notification, he pays attention to it. Like there's nowhere for humans to interact in that and it's just being hyper connected to what's happening out in the world. Not hyper connected to yourself or your family or your kids or your spouse.

Right. You can see how that would be not helpful to a marriage. Sometimes people will be in their phone and kind of off and on and then they'll also have earbuds in like all the time, which is essentially you tuning out your partner. So anytime they're trying to speak with you or communicate something with you, they've got to go to great lengths to do that. They've got to wave their arms, they got to come and stand in front of you, they've got to interrupt you.

And now they're an inconvenience to you. Now they're nagging, now they're an interruption. So of course it's not going to create a loving connected dynamic inside your marriage. Now look, I'm a realist. Technology is not going anywhere. It's not. But we are human beings. We get to choose, we get to make choices. We get to choose how we use technology and how we choose not to use technology.

Right. So it's always going to be here. It's on us to self regulate. We understand this when it comes to our kids. We don't want our kids in their phone all day or playing PlayStation all day long. We know that that's not healthy. But then why is it that when we come home, a good percentage of our time is spent doing just that? Being connected to technology and consuming from multiple sources simultaneously.

It's just a question that we should think about, because it is one of the things that is destroying our marriages today. It's certainly not helping. Now, the second thing is our complaining or our ranting. So let's just talk about complaining first. Here's what I mean by that. These are the small, nagging little ways in which we are unkind to one another. Like, sometimes we say the most biting things to our partner just because we didn't sleep well the night before, and it's somehow their fault.

Or maybe it's just because they're the closest person that we can sort of take our frustration out on. But that doesn't mean it's healthy. So harsh words, using sarcasm, even a sarcastic tone, blaming our partners, accusing them or making assumptions about what they're feeling or their motivations on why they did what they did or didn't do, what they should have done. And certainly our body language when we roll our eyes, when we turn away from someone, that's telling them something.

When we don't make eye contact with someone, it's telling you something in terms of how present I am or am not in this conversation. So the complaining part is not helpful to us. Sometimes I think we will. We will treat strangers nicer than we will treat the person that we said we would love until the day we die. Right? And so sometimes I think about that because I'm human, too.

There's sometimes that I can get a little snappy if I'm overwhelmed or in a bad place. It's not like I'm perfect. But I remind myself in those moments of, you know what? I shouldn't be treating strangers better than I treat my spouse. And that pulls me back and go. And sort of. It's a way for me to sort of check myself. Now, here's the other thing to think about, though, and I want to put this in the.

In the context of a rant. So inside my membership community, someone had. It was a title of, like, something about a rant. I'm gonna rant here. And they went on and on and on, and it went all the way down the page. And it was all the things that their husband should have been doing but wasn't, and all the things he shouldn't have been doing that he was doing.

All the ways in which he should change all the ways in which they don't work, all the. All the stuff that isn't working for them. And she was sort of swimming around all the negativity. And I just asked her, I said, what do you want? And she's like, I don't understand the question. I'm like, what do you want? Because whatever you want to find, you go looking for.

And whatever you go looking for, you're going to find. So if you are looking for reasons to end your marriage, well, this rant is giving you everything that you need. It tells you all the ways in which this relationship does not work. But if you actually want your relationship to heal and to feel good again, then is ranting about and swimming in all the things that are not working, Is that actually going to help you?

Is it going to get you closer to your goal or further away from your goal? See, I think it's important to figure out, what is it that we actually want? If I could wave the magic wand, what is it that you would want? And whatever that is, let's use strategies to help you get there. Because if you're going to swim around in all the things that aren't working and never talk about what is working, well, we know how that story ends.

We know what that's leading you closer to, that leads you closer to divorce. And if you want to divorce and you want to be able to explain it to somebody else and make peace with it in your mind and your heart and all the ways it's not working, then great, you're employing the exact right strategy. But I knew that that's not what she wanted. So my friends, get clear about what you want.

Because swimming around in all the ways in which your relationship is broken is not the path to making it feel better. You can't get there from there. All right, number three, this one's obvious. Infidelity, betrayal, and micro cheating. Just sort of a new phrase that's going around. We all know what infidelity is, but I will also bucket in betrayal in there. And it's essentially anything that is going to erode the trust in the relationship between the two of you.

Trust is so foundational to having a solid marriage that anything that sort of chips away at that is a betrayal to the relationship itself. So when we withhold information or we withhold love or we don't tell the full truth or keep secrets, those are things that are going to, even if your partner doesn't know, it is eroding the trust in the relationship. Because, you know, if you're the one doing it.

You know, certainly affairs are blowing up a lot of marriages. It's happening in 60% of our marriages, maybe more. I don't know that that number is one that I totally believe. That's just a number that people will admit to. And when it comes to sex and infidelity, people aren't terribly truthful. So it might be more than that, but it's happening a lot. And it's becoming more and more frequent because we're not clear about do I want to be in this relationship or not, and if I don't, then am I willing to walk through what I need to walk through in order to then be open to and available for a new relationship in the future?

It's another version of our escapism, I think. I mean, affairs are a very complex topic. So it's hard to sum it up in one thing, on why people do it. But many times it's because they don't want to address the challenges in their marriage. And it's used as a point of distraction in the same way that we use food and alcohol and drugs and porn and all the other things.

Affairs can be another angle on that. Now, in terms of micro cheating and what that is, think of it like this. It's prioritizing someone else, their feelings, their approval, their attention over your partner. Right? It's seeking validation from someone else and placing that as a higher priority than the person that you're married to. It can also look like your partner deliberately hiding things from you. And that could be something like deleting a text conversation.

That would be a form of micro cheating. So these things that we. That are so available to us mostly through technology, they're. They're pulling us away from our relationships, they're pulling us away from marriage, and they're causing a lot of hurt and a lot of pain and certainly is eroding the trust inside of our relationships, which makes the marriage viable to begin with. Okay? Now, number four is the ability or the inability to communicate like an adult.

Now, just because we turned 18 and now we're, quote, legally an adult does not mean that we now know how to communicate. Right? Those two things don't go together. On your 18th birthday, you don't get some random download from the universe on skills and tools on how to be an effective communicator. And yet every single one of us can get better at it. And if we did, it would improve every single relationship we have.

So here's what this means. Being able to listen without interrupting Your partner listening to be curious about what their experience is, not listening to rebut them or make them wrong, but just wanting to understand them more deeply without making it mean anything about you, without you feeling threatened that somehow your thinking about this might be wrong. When we need to be right, we automatically have to make our partners wrong.

And almost no one would say, yeah, I need to be right. Except that that's how we show up to many difficult conversations inside of our marriage, is this need to be right. I had this. I had a simple interaction with my husband this morning, and I was like. I was thinking, well, he's not listening to me. And he's like, well, you're talking really low. And then I just was like, this is not.

This is not worth bringing up as an issue. Because I was like, me pointing it out, like, how it went down and how he wasn't listening is just me trying to be right when ultimately it doesn't matter. Because I want to love my husband today. So whether I was not talking loudly enough or he wasn't fully listening to me, regardless, it doesn't matter. It truly does not matter, because my ultimate goal is to feel good in my life and to love my husband and to have a healthy marriage.

That's what's important, not who was right in that one scenario. I think that everyone wants to talk. I don't think anyone wants to listen. We all want to talk and no one wants to listen. And that's sort of at the core of a lot of our communication challenges. I think that everyone wants to be heard. I think that everyone wants to be validated. And what I would tell you is that when there is an upset, the minute that you validate your partner's experience, all the anxiety or emotion just calms down.

Everything starts getting softer as soon as someone feels heard. So when your partner is trying to communicate something with you, you can either escalate it by digging in, defending, pointing out what they did or how it was their fault, or you can just hear them and validate their experience. Doesn't mean you agree with their experience. You just say, like, I can see how you could feel that way, like, based on your life and the totality of your experiences and what you're trying to accomplish in your life, I could see how you could feel that way.

That's validating someone's experience, even when it's not the same as yours. I think that so much can be solved when we just get a little bit more curious about one another and we approach our communication with Our partner from a place of curiosity as opposed to needing to be right. So communication is a biggie. Number five, stop keeping the peace. I know it sounds counterintuitive, Sharon. Wait a minute.

This whole thing is the 10 things that we're doing that are destroying our marriages. So you're saying that when I keep the peace, I'm destroying my marriage? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Here's why. Relationships are only strong when you can talk about things. So when you're trying to keep the peace by ignoring hurts, sweeping them under the rug, pretending they're not there, shutting it down, stonewalling your partner, not talking about it, giving each other the silent treatment for a few days and then waiting until it blows over and we both forget about it and move on with our lives until the next time it shows up.

This is what's causing repeated trauma inside of our marriages. And the more that that repeats itself, the more disconnection we feel. So while the intention of keeping the peace in the marriage or in the family comes from a good place, it's actually not serving us. We've got to be able to talk about the hard stuff. And denying our hurts in order to keep the peace is just going to create a war within ourselves.

So let's not do that. Also stop carrying your partner's wounds, though they are yours to take care of, that they're yours to heal. Someone said to me, they're like, well, Sharon, we're married. As his spouse, aren't I supposed to care about and take care of his wounds? That and his traumas. And they were created in his childhood, like, so his parents created a fear of abandonment, and now she's triggering that fear of abandonment in him, and she's taking responsibility for that.

And all the while, all she's doing is just creating codependency in the relationship because she's showing him you don't have to heal those childhood wounds. I'm gonna. I'm gonna take care of that for you. I'm gonna orchestrate my life so that you never get triggered because you've never healed those childhood wounds. All that's doing is showing him that you're gonna take responsibility for his emotional well being so that he doesn't have to.

Hence codependency. And it's not healthy. And by the way, you can't heal it anyway, even if you wanted to, which I bet you do. Someone that you love, if they have a hurt or a trauma in their background, of course you'd want to take that Away somehow or heal it somehow. But my friends, you are not that magical. I'm a coach. I do this stuff for a living.

And I can't take it away from someone's experience. I can guide them, I can challenge them, I can ask them the right questions, but I can't do that work. That is their work to do. So stop overtaking responsibility and calling that love. It's actually one of the most disempowering things that you can do. Okay, number six, not repairing after an upset. So many of us, we have an upset inside of our marriage, some kind of a disagreement, and then we don't repair.

So we have these points of disconnection, but we never bring it back together. It's like we have these. We disconnect from each other, and then if we don't repair, we don't heal that break, then we might come a little bit more towards center, but there's still that gap. And it might be small, it might be subtle, you might not be able to tell, but you have enough of those.

You have a hundred of those, and now that gap is wide. So much like a baseball player that gets on base three times out of every 10 attempts, they're a great baseball player. The same thing is true as it relates to disharmony versus harmony or disconnection versus connection inside of our marriages. So there is a gentleman named Ed Tronik who is an interpersonal neurobiologist, and he did a study that showed that you can have a healthy relationship with up to 70% of disconnection, disharmony inside the relationship, and 30% of connection and harmony as long as you repair.

I thought for sure it was the opposite. It was more like 30% upsets, 70% good times. That's healthy. No, it's the opposite. You can have a healthy relationship, but you've got to repair. So this not repairing, we think it's easier, and it is. In the short term, it's easier to just not deal with the upset. It's easier to not say, I'm sorry. It's easier to not say, you know what, I could have done that better and I'm going to try to do better next time.

Right? It's easier to not take accountability. But long term, these upsets, that's. Those are the resentments that we carry for years, decades sometimes, that create so much disconnection in our relationships that we can't find our way back to one another. So short term, it might feel like the easy thing to do, but that doesn't Mean it's the right thing to do or the healthy thing to do long term.

So you need to repair after an upset. Number seven, passive participant in your relationship or an active participant in your relationship. And here's what I'm getting at here. So Terry Reel has a quote that I love. He said, our relationship to our relationship tends to be passive. We get what we get from our partners and then we react after being disappointed. And if you think about it, that's how most of us operate inside of our relationships.

We assume that we're just. We're going to react to whatever is being presented to us. We get what we get. And then when we're upset about it, we react to that, forgetting that we are an active. At least we have the opportunity to be an active participant in how we engage with one another and how this relationship feels and whether or not the relationship is growing closer together or further apart.

There's only two of us here in this marriage. So if we're growing further and further apart, there's some role that I'm playing. Is it a passive role or is it an active role? The passive role is what is hurting our marriages. Because many times it's around our expectations that we have for our partner or expectations that we have inside of our marriage or assumptions of how it should be.

Many times we don't even communicate those things. We just carry them in our heads and we assume that our partner is on the same page when they're clearly not. So we carry expectations, we don't communicate that our partner doesn't meet those expectations and now we're upset. Yeah, that is a. That is a recipe for an unhealthy, unhappy marriage. So of course it's not working. Number eight is loving to get versus loving to give.

Here's what I mean. A lot of people, they don't even realize it, but they're loving to get something in return. Like I heard something on a reel and it was like, well, what are you bringing to the table? And I get that. I understand what she's meaning. But it comes from a place of only going to love you. I'm only going to be in relationship with you as long as you're meeting my needs.

As long as you're doing what I think you need to do for me. And that, my friends, is loving with an agenda. I'm going to love you in order to get something from you. Like sometimes we'll say I love you to someone in order to get an I love you back as opposed to just loving because loving feels better than hating. Loving feels better than judging. Loving feels better than being resentful.

And I want to feel as good as I can feel in my life. So I want to love. It's who I am. It's what I'm here to do. And by the way, it's who you are and what you're here to do. So we gotta flip the thinking around. What love really means. It's not loving so that I can get my needs met. That's manipulation. That's an agenda, and that's not really love.

I think it's a powerful thing. I think it's an important thing. And I think it, it requires much more and much deeper conversation. But in small, subtle ways. We love people in order to get something in return, as opposed to just loving, because it's who we are and it's what makes us feel as good as we can feel as we move through our lives, right? There's almost no emotion that you could feel that would feel better than love.

And yet almost every day we turn away from it and we say, no, no, no, I'm going to feel sadness, or I'm going to feel anger, or I'm going to feel guilt, or I'm going to feel worry, or I'm going to feel doubt, or I'm going to feel indifference, or I'm going to feel boredom. We don't reach for the emotion of love and then we wonder why our lives don't feel good or why our marriages don't feel good.

So look for those small, subtle ways in which you are loving to get your needs met, loving to get something in return, as opposed to just loving. Because you could be in the energy of love today, right? Go find a child or a puppy. You'll get there quick. All right, Number nine. Okay, this is. I'm going to say something and it's going to be very direct. It might punch some of you, I don't know.

But here we go. If you are unwilling to take responsibility for your choices, your words, your actions, your behaviors and your triggers, if you are unwilling to take responsibility for those things, you have no business being in a relationship, much less being married. Self responsibility comes with being an adult, right? As an adult, we make choices all day long, but we get to live with the ramifications or the outcomes of those choices.

But when you are in a relationship where you're not going to take any responsibility for yourself and you're just going to blame your partner, blame your mother, blame your father, blame your next door neighbor, Blame the economy or blame politics or whatever, then the person that you're in relationship with will always be the fall guy, will always be the one that has to, that has to take the blame for everything.

They probably don't get the credit for when things are going well, but they'll take the blame when everything is going poorly because you won't. So you can't be in healthy relationship with anybody. You can't be in healthy relationship with anybody. It's not just your spouse who you're married to now, not with anyone. And so if you're not prepared to just take responsibility for yourself and your own actions and your own choices and your own words and your own triggers, my friends, you're not even ready to be an intimate relationship with anyone, much less be married to them.

So it's a big deal. It's a big deal. And we need more self accountability. We need more self policing and self checking so that we can be in healthy relationship. Okay, Last 1, Number 10. I would suggest we debunk the theory that love should be easy. We should stop thinking that it should be easy. Because the idea that love is only real when it's effortless, that is a delusion.

It was built, you know, based when we were dating. Of course everything's easy when you're dating because the minute it becomes hard, you stop dating and you move on to the next one. But when you are in relationship with someone, intimate relationship with someone, for decades, it's not going to be easy. And I know you get that intellectually, but the other part to this is that if you think about life as a school, we are here to learn, we're here to grow.

And nowhere is that going to show up more than inside your most intimate relationship. You're going to grow. Love and relationship will force you to grow because you'll either grow or you'll be in so much pain and you will live a very unhappy, unhealthy life. So growth is a natural part of what's going to be required of us. So to think that like who I am the day I got married, I'm never going to change after that, that's not, that's not realistic.

Because life is going to cause you to change. Like try to become the person that you were before you had children, before you became a parent. You can't go back to that person. Try being the woman or the man that you were before you lost your parent or parents. That changes you, right? Life is going to change you and your marriage. Being in an intimate Relationship with someone is going to force you higher.

It's going to call you higher. And you're either going to go there willingly or you're gonna go there kicking and screaming, resisting. But it's going to force you to grow. I think that our intimate relationships are our greatest teachers. And if you can see it through that lens and you expect that, yep, this is just me needing to grow beyond where I was, then you'll welcome that opportunity.

And you won't view it as a reason to blow up the marriage or end the marriage or just live unhappily inside the marriage. You'll use it as like, oh, this is just part of my curriculum in this school of life. So there's a quote that I want to share with you. This is from James Framo, who is the father of couples therapy. He says the day you turn to the person sleeping next to you and realize that you've been had, that this is not the person you fell in love with, and that this is all some dreadful mistake, that is the first day of your real marriage.

Welcome to humanity. There are no gods or goddesses here. And what a great thing that turns out to be. While we may long to be married to perfection, it turns out it is precisely the collision of your particular imperfections with mine. And how we as a couple handle that collision, that is the guts, the actual stuff of intimacy. See, we need to go through difficult things together because that's what makes us grow stronger.

It's what builds resilience inside the relationship. And it helps us to trust ourselves and trust one another, that we can navigate life's challenges as they come to us. But when we expect it all to be easy breezy, we are shocked and stunned when things aren't easy breezy, and we think it's all a terrible mistake. And you look over at your partner and you're like, I kind of hate them when that.

I think if we can normalize that, that's going to happen. And then you're like, welcome to humanity. Welcome to intimate relationship. This is now the first day of your marriage. This is what it's about. And navigating these challenges and these ups and downs and these upsets between one another as a team is what creates intimacy. And that, my friends, is the point of all of it. Human connection, intimate human connection with another human being.

That is the whole reason that we got married. That is the whole reason that we're walking alongside someone in this life as a witness to their lives and allowing them to be a witness to ours. Connection is what it's all about, but we've never really gotten very equipped to do it well, but my friends, we can at least stop doing the stuff that is creating disconnection. Are there things we can do to build connection?

Of course. But when you walk into an emergency room, don't you first want to stop the bleeding before you start rehab? Right. Like, if you have, let's say you got a gunshot wound in your leg, or you broke your leg, you were in a car accident and you broke your leg. Like, we want to stop the bleeding, we want to fix the fracture, we want to heal, then we start rehabilitation, then we start walking again, then we start building the muscle again.

Right? And this is the same thing. When you are struggling in your marriage, are there strategies that you can use to connect? Of course. But it's not terribly helpful until you stop the bleeding, until you stop reopening the wound over and over and over again. So that's why I wanted to start with, not start with, but really use this as an exclamation point for my 100th podcast episode of these are the things we need to stay stop doing.

These are the things we need to become much more conscious of. This is the way you stop the bleeding so that then there's space and maybe even a little bit of appetite for wanting to reconnect with one another. All right, folks, I love you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to this podcast and engaging with my work. I just love you. So please take really good care.

If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team on the call. We'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage.

Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.