IT’S NO easy task being married: it’s got to be one of life’s truly bittersweet experiences. What starts off with a fierce romantic passion, rarely survives the grinding ordinariness of living day after day, decade after decade, with the same person.
Forget for a moment the all too brief, ‘hearts and flowers” period, and the massive discrepancy between our first flush of idealistic romantic expectations — that’s all but a fading memory: most couples are too soon coping with the grinding minutiae of daily life that take over the majority of marriages.
Any couple who have been together for a length of time, will have also stock-piled an arsenal of weapons of marriage destruction. Pick your weapon, there’s a wide choice on offer, most of which are in daily use in a home near you.
There’s pain, betrayal, sacrifice, loneliness, boredom, rage, disconnection, disillusion, contempt, jealousy, bullying, selfishness, denial, and rage.
In our most intimate daily lives, we need fully to express our views, our demands, frustrations, sometimes our sheer “will” upon each other; then we also have to cope on a daily basis with each other’s weaknesses and inadequacies. If we’re honest, most couples are just as supremely capable of bringing out their arsenal of weapons to make war, every bit as fiercely as they used to make love.
Not everyone is inclined to keep working at their marriage. Many believe the price is just way too high and so they take the decision to divorce. No one says we have to try and work it out; if there are no children (and even if there are), why shouldn’t a man or woman walk away from their marriage if they feel they have good reason to do so, why do we then always have to label them as failures?
The only big risk in closing down the marriage and walking away is that we then take that deeply unhappy, unsatisfied self with us, along with the naïve belief the grass has to be greener in another bed. The risk is that we perceive the banalities and bitching of everyday living as the direct consequence of our own silly mistake in selecting the wrong partner. We feel deep down, that if we were truly meant for each other we shouldn’t be feeling so bloody miserable and discontented enough to want a parting of the ways. What we fail to see is the very real misery that can stockpile in even the very best of marriages; after all there are limits to how different things will be if you decide to trade in your life partner for a new model.
No one in a mature relationship really expects always to be “in love”. But what a marriage can do is allow us to have each other, so that when we do fall out of love, we can hopefully stick around without reaching for the bread knife until the time comes round when we fall back in again.
Couples might wish to look on the ‘ordinary’ in married life as the glue that binds, yet this ordinary life doesn’t have to be boring or repetitive. That everydayness need not be a tedious repetition of a predictable groundhog day of marriage: it can, and should, include some daily flashes of virtues, like the element of surprise, good grace, along with genuine displays of unexpected kindness, virtues that in the main are underused in the ‘ordinary’ marriage.
Most married couples will freely admit that familiar everyday married sex is all about being totally at ease with each other, they will also concur that there are definite peaks and troughs in their level of sexual desire and with any resulting sexual pleasure. Some of the troughs can be put down to age related problems, or the ambient emotional temperature that exists between a long-term married couple. One thing is for sure, couples should never blame each other for their sexual disappointment and discontentment: they are, after all, in this bed together, and any problems are problems for both of them, which is why it’s vital to talk about them, not as whingers or judges, but as good friends and lovers.
Working together may not resurrect the sexual fireworks, just as cookery lessons won’t always turn you into a cordon bleu. But it can help couples get close to the right mix to appreciate the taste for it again.
The older the marriage is the greater the likelihood that the machinery is not as serviceable as it once was, but sex without a total turn on should be considered as an investment, an act of giving in the truest sense, and may well act as a super spur for more mutually emotionally balanced sex.
The facts are that most of us will try to make an effort to endure, or even try to ignore some of the things that we don’t particularly like about each other, but there does come a break point when we begin to resent being in a situation where, day in, day out, we are forced into having to “put up” with certain things.
The lengths you go to to stay married have to include a few simple precepts. They may sound trite, but they will save many a couple from the divorce courts.
Try to be nice to one another.
Stop trying to correct your partner or score points.
Offer a little more praise and a lot less criticism
Like charity, courtesy and charm begin at home.
Don’t expect to get all you need from your partner.
Finally, compromise: it’s easy to do if you recognise that the really big winner is your marriage.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
