Love Shak, Baby

If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, right?
Wrong, when it comes to a marriage. Keeping your mouth shut when
something is bothering you in a marriage is a recipe for disaster.

We are taught from a young age (most of us, anyway) that you should keep
your mouth shut when someone you care about does something that you don’t like,
and just deal with it… accept them for who they are. Any deviation from
this is considered "being negative", or if you do it more than once,
"nagging". We are also given to understand that it’s bad to be
those things.

What happens in a marriage where you follow this idea? You slowly
build up this list of things that your spouse does that bug you, but that you
don’t tell them. Then, when they start doing something on that list, you
mentally say to yourself: "There they go again! Why can’t they just
stop doing that crud?" It gets on your nerves, and over time builds
up. Eventually it can even get to the point that you start identifying
them with the behavior that bothers you.

And all of this happens without your spouse knowing what’s causing it.
All they know is that you get more and more distant and short with them,
without knowing why. This can cause them to become frustrated with
you! And that, of course, leads to you being more frustrated with
them, and on and on it goes until someone puts down their foot and stops the
cycle.

Stopping the cycle is both easy and hard. It’s easy because all you
have to do is actually tell each other what’s bothering you. It’s hard
because those conversations are hard to have, and can really hurt sometimes,
too. The alternative hurts worse, however… it’s the death of 1000 cuts
for your marriage. All the small things build up into a bigger and bigger
ball until that ball is big enough to crush you and your relationship
underneath it. The only way to prevent and reverse this is to open up
your mouth and talk… really talk.

You should probably prepare yourself for the conversation ahead of time, if
it has been a while, because it’s likely that deep emotions will come up, and
if you haven’t prepared yourself, you may react defensively to those emotions,
lashing out at your spouse instead of simply letting them know. It’s
generally not a great thing to tell your spouse "We need to talk
later" too much ahead of time, though… it just makes them imagine what
you’re going to say, probably imagining the worst, and get pre-emptively
defensive, instead of being open to what you have to say.

Speaking of making your spouse defensive, you should be somewhat careful in
choosing your wording. Starting a sentence with "You do x"
is generally not a good way to go. "It really bothers me when you do
x" tends to work a lot better. It conveys that it
bothers you when they do it, rather than implying that it’s all them doing bad
things. That’s what you want them to understand… you’re not condemning
their actions, you’re just letting them know that it bothers you when they do
it.

When you have these conversations, it helps relieve some stress from you
immediately (you get things off your chest) and may lead to them changing the
behavior that bothers you. It may even be something that doesn’t even
matter to them, so it’s not a big deal at all to change… they just didn’t
know before your talk that there was any reason to do so. If it is
a big deal, the fact that it bothers you may still be enough incentive for them
to change the behavior. Some things, however, may just be a part of
who they are, and you’ll need to figure out why it bothers you and try to deal
with that, rather than expect them to change a major part of who they are for
you.

It’s helpful to have these talks fairly regularly, but they should be
talks, dedicated to this purpose, not just constant criticism. That just
leads to resentment… no one wants to be told what they’re doing wrong all
the time. Once a week is fine, or every two weeks… even once a month is
probably enough for many couples. Talking about it regularly helps to
keep the air between you clear, keeping things from building up too much.

Two notes to keep in mind: One, this is two-sided… if only one
person is sharing what’s bothering them, the other person may start resenting
them, and two… you actually have to listen and try to change your
behavior. If you don’t really put an honest effort into it, your spouse
may feel like you simply don’t care about them… if that’s not true, you’d
better show them.

Keeping your mouth shut can really cause problems in a marriage, so be nice
to your spouse and yourself, and open up.