When Your Spouse Shuts You Out - 1

Isn’t it amazing how difficult it seems sometimes to reach someone with whom you are in conjugal bond? Life often sprouts this complaint from couples looking for help in their relationships. “I feel distant form my spouse” “I try to get my husband to open up but instead he just shuts down.” “My wife just doesn’t seem interested in me anymore, I feel like we’re a million miles apart,” “I don’t know if I love him anymore.” These are some of the comments we hear from people who are supposed to be soul mates.

Obviously, this is nothing but emotional abandonment. It is a situation where, instead of physically leaving the relationship, your spouse simply checks out emotionally. He/she stops investing in the marriage, leaving you the mate feeling detached and unwanted. To the outside world the situation can still look rosy but in reality the relationship is dying a slow, quiet death.

I once heard of a couple, who for the past five years of their marriage, never seemed to be together. Much as outsiders saw them as the best of friends, they were worlds apart. What it was that went wrong remains ambiguous; but the fact is that they keep separate accounts, live in separate rooms, spend their salaries on separate projects and indeed have separate investments. Perhaps, the only thing they seem to have in common are the two children of their marriage. The question you want to ask is: How did a marriage reach this point?

Sometimes it’s a slow slide into complacency, and at other times it’s a little more sudden. If it’s a sudden abandonment there is likely to have been some precipitating event or incident between the mates that needs to be resolved. On the other hand, if the deterioration has been more gradual, there are probably a lot of little things that have gone unresolved and are taking their toll on the relationship.

Lack of forgiveness or emotional abandonment is unforgiveness taken to the extreme. When you feel that your spouse has hurt you and you refuse to forgive him/her, you look for ways to protect yourself from being hurt again in the future. I suppose that because of the many opportunities for hurts to occur, you no longer find it easy to share your fears, failures and fantasies with your spouse.

(To Be Continued)