When Your Spouse Shuts You Out – 2

Closing up your heart from the other person is an easy way to do this, but it has deadly consequences. Unforgiveness always leads to isolation. Overcoming it therefore requires a willingness to humble yourself and seek forgiveness when you have hurt your spouse, and it also requires that you be willing to graciously extend forgiveness when your spouse hurts you. This forgiveness step is based on desire to re-unite.

Callous Treatment
When I am careless in how I treat my spouse, it gets old really quickly. Whether its discourteousness, unkindness or something worse, it creates hurt that may start out small but can grow into deep wounds as it festers over time. To avoid this, each partner needs to look at his/her own behavior regularly and consider whether they are treating their spouse well. A male, above all people needs to be treated with gentleness and respect. Remember, your spouse is a gift to you, and he/she deserves to be treated as something precious.

Lack of Effort
Sometimes the problem is a little less obvious than unforgiveness or harsh treatment. It is easy, especially for men to just assume that the relationship is going along just fine, and so we don’t put in as much effort as we once did. We start to take our spouse for granted, leading them to think they are not important in our lives. When the marriage slips from being one of the top priorities in the heart of one or both spouses, the other person feels abandoned. This causes them to feel unwanted and then to withdraw into their own world.

Lack of Time
Many of us simply try to pack too much into a day. Being often ruled by urgent demands, we fail to make time for the truly important things like romancing, talking about issues and really developing a friendship with our spouse. We stay constantly busy, erasing quality “couple times” from our schedules. A marriage relationship cannot thrive when our contact with one another is limited to a quick bite of supper, a brief chat before bed or a hurried sex. A good marriage requires weekly face-to-face time, both to talk and have fun.

Fear of Talking Through Issues
“Emotional detachment does not just happen out of the blue; there is always something behind it. If one or both of the spouses have the inability or fear of talking through thorny issues in their relationship, then this kind of disconnection will be the likely result.

Usually both know there is something wrong, but they are hesitant to bring it up because they fear their spouse’s reaction. Or perhaps, they feel like they’ve been through this before and it hasn’t helped, so why bother? In these cases, there needs to be a clear second look at what it means to resolve conflict in marriage – how to have a “good fight” as it were, that really bring things to resolution. Without these skills, and a real courage to step up and deal with problems, the emotional distance will just continue to grow.

Living in Denial

A lot of times, when things have started to go a bit sideways in the relationship, we don’t want to admit that it’s happening. Often the person who ought to make significant changes is not content to deny the existence of any real issue. We kind of live in denial, as if it’s not really happening, or it’s not that bad or things will get better in time. But living in denial doesn’t fix things; it only causes the marriage to deteriorate to the point where the couple does not feel close anymore.