Your car makes a strange noise and it’s at the mechanic by Friday.
Your knee aches for a month and you find somebody who knows knees.
Your business flattens out and you hire a person who knows more about it than you do, and then you tell your friends about it over dinner, a little proud of yourself for handling it.
Your marriage has been making a strange noise for six years and nobody has called anybody.
I want to look at why.
The season is never the right season
I worked with a couple married more than thirty years. Smart people, kind people, the kind you’d want living next door.
They knew something was wrong for a long time. And every year they decided it wasn’t the right season to deal with it. Not with the kids at this age. Not with work like it is. It always landed in the same place. We’ll get to this later. It’s fine.
When it finally came apart, it took their entire retirement with it. It also cost their grown children something I don’t think anyone in that family saw coming. A whole family reorganized itself around a conversation two people never had.
I’m not telling you that to frighten you. I’m telling you because it’s ordinary. That’s a regular week in my practice.
Why the relationship ends up at the bottom of the stack
Brooke made a point in this episode that I think is exactly right.
Early on, when something goes wrong, most of us read it as evidence. We’ve only been together a little while and we’ve already hit a wall, so I guess this isn’t my person. That’s the story the culture handed us.
But further in, after years together, something else takes over. We start putting the relationship at the bottom of the pile. Partly because we assume they’ll be there no matter what. Partly because everything else on the list has a deadline attached to it and this doesn’t. The grocery run. The kids’ appointments. The Christmas shopping. Those things get done because they have to be done today, and the relationship gets moved to a someday that keeps not arriving.
Then come the illusions, and I hear the same ones over and over. Once we get through this stretch, we’ll be fine. Once the kids are out. Once the new job starts. Once the money settles down. And then, I promise, I’ll have the time and energy to put into us.
I call it chasing the elusive carrot.
I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I can still see myself on the couch watching cartoons with a list my mom had given me sitting there untouched. Not a hard list. I just didn’t want to look at it. After this cartoon, Mom. I swear. Ten cartoons later it was after my shower, then after I brushed my teeth, then after I met Mark at the back fence. I swear, I swear.
And the whole time, something was actually being spent. Not the list. The relationship with my mom. The house got tense, she got upset, I felt terrible about myself, and then I said something rotten to justify it, and so did she.
That’s the part we miss. We think we’re delaying a task. We’re spending something.
The other reason nobody calls
Here’s what I find strange, and Tom named it in this episode better than I would have.
We accept help almost everywhere else. Help with your business, help with your body, help with your diet, help from your doctor. Nobody flinches. But help with your marriage sits in a different bucket, like it’s reserved for people who are really far gone.
Meanwhile, when you listen to what people say at the end of their lives, almost all of the regret is relational. That’s where it lives.
So when did any of us go to school for this? I don’t remember that class. And if nobody ever taught us, why do we judge ourselves so hard for not being naturally good at it?
There’s the illusion again, that I’m just supposed to know how to do this. And when it doesn’t work, it must mean something is wrong with me, or wrong with them, and we’d better find out which one right now.
Most of the time that isn’t it at all. Most of the time you can see perfectly well what isn’t working. Seeing it was never the problem. Not knowing what to do instead is the problem. And if I don’t know what else to do, I will keep doing the thing I know how to do, because that’s all I’ve got.
The one idea I want you to leave with
Every one of us is driving around on a tank of emotional gas.
When somebody finally says I just can’t do this anymore, they are almost never telling you they stopped loving you. They’re telling you the tank is empty.
You cannot make a car go by explaining to it how important the trip is. You have to put fuel in it. Rest. Support. Being understood. Somebody finally taking the problem seriously instead of promising to look at it later.
Nobody argues about this with cars. If you don’t put gas in, it stops. Everyone nods. We’re strangely willing to believe our relationships run on nothing.
This is why the repair you’re reaching for right now, in this desperate moment, isn’t coming easily. It isn’t that there’s no solution. It’s that you’re trying to do the hardest work of your life on an empty tank, and the emotional capacity that work requires got spent during all the years you were waiting.
That’s the real cost of waiting. Not that the problem gets bigger. That you get emptier.
What else is in this episode
I go further into the thing I call the catalytic event, the moment that finally forces your hand. The affair. The diagnosis. The suitcase in the hallway. Nearly everyone arrives in my office right after theirs, and I make the case in here for why you don’t have to wait for it, and why you’re not a failure if you’re already in one.
Brooke asks the question I get more than any other, and I give her a straight answer: what do you do when you know the relationship needs help and your partner is completely against it? Then she does something better. She gives you the actual words to say. Two sentences, and they take the threat out of it, which is usually the whole reason those conversations go sideways.
I also read some of your own words out loud in this one. Testimonials people have sent us. I don’t get through them. Tom has to take over.
And Brooke tells the story of her and Jack, which she has never told on this show. Somebody asked for it on Instagram. She was eighteen, they met in a Dashboard Confessional fan group, and it ended in a way she couldn’t forgive for twelve years. What she found out at thirty about why he really ended it is the part I wasn’t prepared for, and I’ve heard a lot of stories.
And the thing we’ve been sitting on
Both books are here.
Is My Marriage Dead? is for the person who can’t tell whether this is a rough stretch or the real thing. I was a divorce mediator for thirteen years. I sat with people at the very end of it, and I learned what the end actually looks like on the way down, which is not what most people are watching for. There’s a pattern in there I’ve never seen anybody else name, and I’m not telling you what it is here.
The Crisis Communication Scripts exists because of something we say near the end of this episode. Changing a pattern takes two parts. Knowing what not to do anymore, and knowing what to do instead. Almost all of us get handed the first half and nothing else. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s a gap in your education, and gaps can be filled. This book is the second half. The exact words, for the moments where you currently don’t have any.
Get both here: https://stacibartley.mysamcart.com/is-your-marriage-dead/
If you’re not sure how serious this is
Start with the Better Love Quiz. Twenty two questions, about five minutes, free, and completely private. Only you see your results and your partner is never contacted. You’ll get a straight answer on whether this is a rough patch or real trouble, plus which skills are working for you and which ones are quietly costing you.
Take it at betterlovequiz.com.
If you already know it’s more than that, you can book a private session with me at stacibartley.com/private-sessions. I work with couples all over the world, and with plenty of people whose partner isn’t ready yet.
And if you don’t know where to start at all, schedule a clarity call at stacibartley.com/apply.
There’s a line I come back to over and over. For a long time it seemed to me that life was just about to begin. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
The waiting is the life. That’s the whole thing.
Love isn’t enough, but skills are. Learn them, practice them, and live them today.
