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Stop Waiting For A Better Relationship · Head Shrink Inc.

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, friends.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a question for you.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: You've been together 15 years.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: You're not particularly happy in the relationship, but you're not miserable enough to leave the relationship.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you know when it's time to fix your relationship or finish it?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would often say it's time to fix it.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's always time to fix it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: But let's talk about this more.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: You are listening to Head Shrink Inc.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Your Answers to Life, Relationships, and Daily Living.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back, friends.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Ted Shrink Inc.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying a new thing today.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm recording while I'm also videoing.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so there might be some.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to upload it to my channel on YouTube as well.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so there might be some weirdness a little bit as I'm going back with screens in front of me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I know it'd be nice to for people to think that I just like I am memorizing all this stuff, but I'm not.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's sometimes I have to look at screens.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so you'll be able to see that on the video today.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I often run into relationships in my office here where people have been married a long time and they've lost that spark, right?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's called the spark.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that relations the thing about relationships is like the longer you you've been married, I think the spark turns into embers.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't mean that, or it could be a roaring fire at times.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think it doesn't mean that there's no love.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: It just means that things have gotten into a rut often.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean that people don't care about one another.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this happens in seasons of life.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I think it becomes really important to make sure that you are doing things to continue to be living and married to your best friend.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: But anyways, we'll we'll dig into that a little bit more.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So why do people not why why are people willing to stay miserable in a relationship and they're unwilling to fix it or they're unwilling to leave it?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I in no way am advocating people divorce.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a I am not a proponent of divorce.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a big fan of divorce, unless there's like abuse of some kind.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And in that case, I want separation first to see if there's any kind of reconciliation that can happen.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: But the one of the biggest reasons, or there's several reasons I think that why unhap unhappy couples tend to stay together.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And a big one is financial dependence.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of times in families, a husband is working and a mom stays home.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I know that that's often seen as a traditional way of doing things, but overwhelmingly, when I work, I work a lot with uh military couple couples.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Overwhelmingly, one part of that couple is working and the other part is staying home, taking care of the kids.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then a divorce happens or something happens that leads to a divorce, and the wife, and it's usually the wife, the wife wants to leave, but she has no job, she has no income.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And her leaving would mean I gotta get a job now, I gotta go to school.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And sure, she would get potentially half of what the husband made, but that's not always a guarantee.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And military has weird rules around that kind of stuff.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: So financial dependence is a is one reason that people stay.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Children is another big reason that people stay.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I have talked to lots of couples who have been divorced and they're in my office talking about current challenges, and I just happened to, you know, maybe talk about why they didn't divorce earlier, why they didn't leave their partner earlier, and and often it is because of kids.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I told myself I would stay until my kids were out of the house.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or I couldn't leave my I couldn't risk having my kids be parented by my husband's girlfriend, you know, things like that.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so people don't leave because kids tend to play a big role.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and I tend to I tend to agree with that because honestly, it's unfair to the kid.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: The kids had no choice in this.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: The kids had no choice in who they were born to.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And unless there's absolute emotional abuse, physical abuse taking place, parents, I think sometimes just need to suck it up and do what's right for their kids because divorce takes a huge toll on children.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Again, over and over again, I see people coming into my office who grew up in divorced homes and they had horrible relationships with their stepparents.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's the norm.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: The outlier is people saying, Oh, my stepdad was great, my stepmom was great.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: The norm is the stepparents are usually really crummy for the kids growing up.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So children's children is another reason that an unhappy couple would stay together.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Guilt.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's church guilt that comes into play.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so interesting to me because there's people that I run into that are not regular church attenders, but they grew up within the church, Catholic, evangelical, Protestant type church setting, where divorce was seen as a really bad thing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And now that they're adults and they're kind of doing their own life, and they're not really church oriented, but yet they still have these kind of ideas of like, oh, I can't get divorced, it's a bad thing.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I'm not a proponent of divorce, but there's guilt that comes into play as at times.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a there's this guilt that comes in again for church kind of related things.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And what would my family think of me?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's another powerful motivator as well, that keep unhappy people together.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're in this relationship, if you're in an unhappy relationship currently, that's something to really consider.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, why are you staying in this unhappy relationship?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was just talking about this with someone yesterday, that a lot of times people will tell me the reason for their divorce is like they just fell out of love.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And what I what I know about that kind of statement is that that wasn't just someone waking up one day and realizing, oh, I'm not in love anymore.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: What that is, there's a long process usually to that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: I just fell out of love.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that long process is ignoring people, not being kind to people, not thinking of your partner as special, not treating your partner special.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's just kind of going along and getting stuck in a rut and not getting out of the rut.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so when people come to me and have these conversations about their marriage and how they're unhappy, I immediately start talking of asking them about what's the behavior that's going on that has led to you falling out of love or you being unhappy.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And usually it's people being complacent in their in their marriage and their relationship.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so if there's one thing I can really encourage you in today is do not get complacent in your marriage.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Do not get complacent in your relationship.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: That means if you see your partner and you have the thought of like, oh, I should give him a hug, go give him a hug.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of times what people do is they they have these thoughts, but then they don't act on the thoughts.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: I will tell you you should be acting on the thoughts.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I should give my partner a kiss before I leave.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Go give him a kiss before I leave before you leave.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Make it a habit.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: I should serve them in some way, go serve them in some way, make it a habit.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's these small little gestures that you do for people that are that is going to keep the in-love, valuable person status uh of your partner in your life.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's when you stop doing those things that I would start thinking, uh-oh, you're headed on a path that's not going to be great.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you can say, Oh, kids are so busy, work so busy.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: You should always be making time for your partner.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Period blank dot.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Period dot blank blank period dot exclamation point.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: You should always be making time for your partner.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So here's here's some questions that I think you should ask of your partner.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote these down, so let me let me look at them.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Here's some questions that you should ask of your partner and ask of yourselves, especially if you're struggling, is like, is there still mutual respect to one another, for one another?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have mutual respect for your partner, you should start working on that.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you shouldn't wait around for them.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: You shouldn't say, well, they don't have respect for me.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's low emotional intelligence.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: We don't tolerate low emotional intelligence here at Head Shrink Inc.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's not something we like.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you should ask yourself, am I respectful of my partner still?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're not, if you can be honest with yourself and have some good self-reflection and think, yeah, I'm not super respectful, you should get respectful.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You should start working on that.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Are both people willing to change?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I would I would be more specific and say, are you willing to change?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Are you willing to do something different?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Are you willing to s to sacrifice?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: Are you because there was a time you were there?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or you let your partner woo you and they were the best thing ever.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: They can become the best thing ever again.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like you have to make the effort.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's work involved in this.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so another question to ask are we dealing with incompatibility or unresolved conflict?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say 98% of the time, it's always it's it's often funny to see these celebrity couples divorce and you see the reason as irreconcilable differences.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean unresolved conflict.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's more like, I don't like that you did this and it's it's an incompatibility.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now we can disagree with that, but I think for us people that don't have lights lots of money and fame and stuff that are just doing life generally, I would say about 95 to 98 percent of problems in marriage have to do with unresolved conflict, and that's just that's not just unresolved conflict between two people, that's unresolved conflict within ourselves about the families that we grew up with.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I often find with couples that the the patterns that they have today in interacting with one another, they were those patterns were created somewhere, and those patterns were created usually in a family of origin somewhere.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you resolve the conflict from your family of origin, it becomes much, much easier to resolve the conflict with your partner present day.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of people don't want to do that because it means forgiveness, it means conversations, it means emotions, and that just gets difficult for people.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: They would rather stay unresolved in their conflict with themselves than work on it and have a better relationship with their partner present day.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: If nothing changed for five years, would I stay?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's another question to ask yourself.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if nothing changed for five years, would I stay?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is probably going to be no, I wouldn't stay if nothing changed for five years.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, do the work to get things to change.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then the last question to ask yourself is Am I staying because I love this person or because I'm afraid to leave?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: The first one, am I staying because I love this person is awesome?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Then keep working on that.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: The second is because I'm afraid to leave.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: If that is true, if your answer is yes, I'm afraid to leave, that's why I'm not leaving you that needs to be understood more.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we're not talking about physical abuse, emotional abuse, being real being in a relationship with somebody that's a narcissist.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're not talking about that.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about kind of typical unhappiness in a relationship and what you can actually do about it.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're afraid to leave, I would, if you're talking to me, I would want to understand why you're afraid to leave.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I have clients who have told me they're afraid to leave because of the emotions of it.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to experience the emotions of a breakup.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: You need to work on that.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can do hard things.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: We can all do hard things.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: We can face difficult emotions if we put our mind to it.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so, my encouragement to you if you're finding yourself in a place where you don't want to talk about difficult things emotionally in your relationship with your partner, you need to start doing that and get with a therapist, counselor, and do that because that would be much more helpful in building a long-lasting relationship than continuing to avoid difficult things in the relationship.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, as always, I would love your comments, questions, thoughts.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can email me directly at headshrinkink at gmail.com.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you listen to me on Spotify, there's a place to leave comments on Spotify.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you listen to me on Buzz Sprout, which is where this is hosted, you can go leave comments on Buzz Sprout.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I want to start answering some questions from listeners.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to put this out on TikTok as well.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: But message me.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: I want to answer your questions.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate you.