The Negative Cycle Begins

Distancing`

Why does God hate divorce, Tim, when he knows how awful a marriage can be? “a broken woman asked when telling me of her marriage plight. She told me of the hateful words that cut deeply and the lack of touch and the silent treatments that would tear at her heart.
“I have prayed for my future husband since I was a little girl. Why is this happening to me-to us? I cry alone a lot, and I’m so tired of trying to make this marriage work,” this desperate woman said.
It’s hard to hold on when you are faced with persistent hurt and rejection.
As we’ve shared, just the everyday pressures like street, evil, sin, false expectations, the speed of living -all are enough to leave one or both partners confused, and expecting.
But, the path of disaffection goes deeper. A negative cycle begins stp-by step, day-by-day, emotion-by-emotion, until love is destroyed.
When you are in a relationship in which there is little or no respect, no warmth or closeness, or you feel as if you are taken for granted, abandoned, or shamed, it’s only natural to drift apart, to distance, and to insulate yourself from the other.
Distancing is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. But, It can also be a primary killer of love in marriage. Even before we know what has happened, distancing begins occurring in small ways, moments when we ignore or put down our partners, lapses of love that subtly eat away at the relationship. The early signs of this negative cycle include rubbing out your partner, ignoring important comments, and a general lack of sharing about everyday life. These are strong signals of love’s early demise. Such behavior often kills simple acts of thoughtfulness, such as a note placed in a lunch box or flowers sent for no particular reason.

Raising the Bar

Raising the bar is setting a love trap for your mate. It’s creating a hurdle your mate must leap over to prove his or her love. For instance, ” I just hope he’ll bring me flowers this week,” He hasn’t brought home flowers in five years. Is he going to bring home flowers this week? NO.
Raising the bar is a form of desperation. One or both partners want assurance that they’re still loved, so they set the hurdle-in secret. As the cycle spirals, the bars become increasingly high and increasingly unlikely to be hurdled. Raising the bar is a horribly destructive act:; it’s a love trap and it always leads to increased failures.

Increased Failure

The instant the partner fails to leap the hurdles, one partner gets angry and the other feels guilty For the one who was disappointed, thoughts like You just don’t care or you never how me you love me abound. For the one who failed to jump the hurdle, there are thoughts such as You’re impossible. There’s nothing I can do to please you. You’re the problem. You’re the one who needs help. Increased failures only cause both to shut down even more

Increased Negative Evaluation

Before long, both people become locked in the dank cellars of their own minds, and both are thinking the same thing-our marriage is getting worse. And the worse it gets, the less each is willing to invest in it. They’ve reached a very dangerous point; you were probably consumed with how tour mate was failing the marriage.
Simply put, you believed your mate was wrecking your marriage.

So what do most couples do when they get to this point, they begin to vilify their mate. In their mind, the mate has intentionally hurt them. He or she is destroying their relationship on purpose. At this point the negative thoughts and their resulting distortions begin to abound in the relationship.
And what do you do with villains? You punish them. And what do villains do to you?
They hurt you, so now there’s an even greater need for self-preservation.

3. False Expectation

Unrealized expectations leave us disappointed. Ii our expectations are unrealistic for our marriages, we’re setting ourselves up for a fall. A few of the most common expectations include:

Marriage will complete me. Perhaps we grew up with parents who didn’t care for us
Like they should, or with siblings who stole the limelight, or in some other painful
environment. We may expect marriage to reverse all the negatives we’re carrying
Into it.
My spouse won’t hurt me. As the first expectation sees marriage as the healing
agent, this one sees marriage as the ultimate safe heaven. The first hurt we
receive from a spouse is catastrophic.
Life will be easy now. This is the happily-ever-after expectation of fairy tales. If we
have this expectation, every unhappy moment in a marriage then brings
disappointment and possibly fear.
Love will keep us together. As the song says, “All you need is love.” Well, not so,
because you will need more than your love. This expectation, by far, produces the
Greatest disappointment as it batters the very thing that is supposed to hold us
Together-our love . Every time we hurt one another, intentionally or unintentionally,
love is perceived as increasingly less effective until, in the end, we can easily say
our relationship just wasn’t meant to be.

How do you combat unrealistic expectations? With realistic biblical ones. No one is perfect, including your spouse. No one person will ever fulfill all your needs, nor, will you supply all your spouse’s needs. Only God can. No marriage is free from discord, and no spouse is completely unselfish
Marriage brings together two people who have many human frailties that are at first magnified, then hopefully, in Christ, strengthened into godly traits. But it takes a lot of humility, grace, and constant work at understanding what is reasonable for you and your spouse to expect from each other.

4. Selfishness

During dating, most of our energy is exclusively focused on the other. But something strange happens after we say,” I do.” The giving often becomes taking. The “Island of we” becomes an “island of me.” In our marriage we don’t really want to hurt each other. We say hurtful words. You know the routine. Like the apostle Paul in Romans 7:15 (NKJV), regarding his walk with the Lord, we can say, “I don’t understand myself a all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing i hate.”
Marriage was designed to be a team effort, one of loving and giving, of making a commitment to our mate. Lately, in our culture, marriage has been reduced to prenuptial agreements, occasional intimacy (or none at all), and quickie divorce. Selfishness creates an “island of me,” where there is a wall around me. On the “island of we,” there is a wall around us.

5. Scripts from the Past

A lot of our behavior is influenced by our past scripts, scripts that were written for us long ago. We find that we now faithfully follow them, and our scripted behavior is reinforced as we hold tightly to them. For instance, if one or both of our parents abandoned us when we were children, we will live today as if we expect those we love to abandon us in the here and now. Such scripts distort current reality and cause us to act and react in what can be very destructive ways. These scripts also impact how we give and receive love.
If this sounds true for you, look for those elements of your life that are unresolved. Look for the physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, the effects of parental divorce and/or abandonment. Look for the gross failures and the emotional loss and deal with them in sound biblical ways.

6. Speed

Relationships and intimacy take time. Time to understand, enjoy, and respond to one another-time to satisfy the other’s needs and have your own needs satisfied. When we live life in the fast lane, there is precious little time for the building of intimacy. We’re the microwave generation addicted to speed. Every element of our likes seems to be a trade off, and often we end up trading off the very steps to intimacy the time to nurture our mates and our marriage.
Both partners in a marriage succumb to these pressures to varying degrees at various times. So we think a date night will solve our problems. What happens on date nights when things haven’t been going well? One lousy night! The result is loneliness, anger, feelings of rejection, and sorrow-enough to rip the foundation out from under most couples. A natural response to this pain is to create space, a gap between you and your partner. A subtle, even unintentional severing of relational strands takes place characterized by some pretty hurtful communication patterns.