Lonely, Together: When Couples Struggle to Make It Work

Find yourself stuck in a pattern with your partner that feels unhealthy and unproductive, but you can’t sort out a solution? Minaa B. — the author, mental-health educator, and social media sensation — might be able to help. Her new book, Owning Our Struggles: A Path to Healing and Finding Community in a Broken World, is devoted to helping people heal, whether they’re trying to improve their marriage, battling trauma from a tough upbringing, or even taking stock of their internal negative self-talk. Here, in an excerpt from the book, she talks about common red flags in a relationship and how to address them in a positive way — before they get any worse.

There’s no perfect relationship, although society and the trending social media hashtag #RelationshipGoals might make it seem that way. You’ve probably learned that relationships thrive when they are rooted in interdependence. We must bridge self-care, our inner healing work, to community-care, our relational healing work. Although no relationship is perfect, healthy relationships do exist and they can thrive in conflict because of that foundation.  

In relationships, people grow more into who they always were. It is very rare that a person’s character will change into something they haven’t already shown you, but often, when we ignore red flags early on and don’t address the yellow ones, we run the risk of ending up in troubled relationships that feel more like a burden than a safe place. Healthy relationships are formed when people take the time to address the issues that are manifesting in their relationship instead of ignoring them, minimizing them, or pretending they don’t exist. 

When couples struggle to make it work, they’re experiencing issues that feel like threats to the relationship. When not addressed, these threats put a strain on the relationship and may weaken the bonds that have been formed. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, many couples found themselves struggling to keep their relationship afloat. The divorce rate increased 21 percent and continues to rise post pandemic. 

What many couples had to face head-on during the pandemic was the health of their relationship and their level of satisfaction with their partners. It takes time, effort, and energy to make a relationship work, and there must be an investment from both partners. Sometimes couples will need additional care and support to help make their relationship work, which is why participation in couples therapy also increased during the pandemic. One of the best things couples can do for the health of their relationship is to acknowledge the habits and patterns that run on a constant loop and gain the tools and skills they need to create new relational patterns and dynamics to enhance the relationship, rather than drain it and their partners as individuals.

Having trouble spotting the unhealthy habits that might be lurking in your relationship? Here are a few common ones: 

1. Poor Communication

A common reason why many couples struggle in their relationships is lack of communication. Often, a person in the relationship is struggling with their own cognitive distortions, which manifest as making assumptions/jumping to conclusions, over-generalizing, mental filtering, and more, and these thinking errors get in the way of cultivating healthy conversations. 

Healthy communication looks like: cultivating psychological safety where your partner has the space to share their thoughts, feelings, and emotions without being belittled, chastised, or shamed for expressing themselves. It also requires active listening and ensuring we are hearing our partner’s words carefully — not what we want to hear in the moment to spin the situation or to make their words fit into our own projections and insecurities.

2. Poor Boundaries

All relationships require boundaries. No matter how much we love a person, we all have needs and limits, and learning to express them to our partners is how we invite safety and intimacy into our relationships. When we have boundaries, we are not only advocating for our needs but are also taking responsibility for our actions, and we are asking our partners to be responsible for themselves and own their behaviors. Some ways poor boundaries in a relationship manifest are:

• Poor sexual boundaries: Pretending to be sexually satisfied by your partner instead of speaking up and expressing your likes and dislikes and finding ways to try something different so that you both experience pleasure.
  
• Stonewalling: Giving your partner the silent treatment instead of engaging in communication to tackle the issue at hand. In a case where you become emotionally flooded, it’s important to express this to your partner and decide what it looks like to take a break to self-regulate, and then re-engage in the conversation. However, leaving the conversation with no intention of resolving issues and becoming passive-aggressive are unhealthy.
  
• Testing: Testing your partner to see what choices they will make to help you decide how to navigate a situation is a sign of poor assertiveness and poor conflict-resolution skills. A relationship is not a game to be played, and people are not pawns. Speak up and say what needs to be said and address what needs to be addressed. 

3. Following the Fifty-Fifty Myth

No relationship will ever be fifty-fifty. There are going to be times when the work of sustaining a relationship manifests differently for each partner depending on the roles and dynamics at play. In some cases, a new mother may decide it is best to be a stay-at-home mom while her partner works because the partner brings in most of the income, and this can manifest vice versa where a father chooses to stay at home while his partner works. This can also look like one partner taking on more household duties while the other works late-night hours. Your relationships are not a fight for equality. Things will not always be equal; instead, fairness and equity are the support beams a relationship will stand on.

We choose people for a variety of reasons, and down the line, we may realize that a relationship that was once beautiful is now too broken to be repaired and that the only way to make things work is to step away from suffering and choose a life apart from each other. We are human, and the reality is that people are learning that the work that it takes to make forever last simply isn’t worth it when you are in an unfulfilling, unhealthy, unsafe, and unhappy relationship and staying would be an act of self-harm. Regardless of what the people you know think and what society thinks, you have a right to decide what is best for you when it comes to decoupling and your relationship.

Excerpted from Owning Our Struggles: A Path to Healing and Finding Community in a Broken World by Minaa B., with permission from Penguin Publishing Group