by Timothy Clinton, Ed.D, LMFT, L.P.C.

When you're tired, feeling trapped or faced with persistent hurt and rejection, it's hard to believe in love's warm embrace or to even think of a second chance at love.

The everyday pressures and issues of life's stress, such as deliberate hurts from a partner, scripts from the past and false expectations about marital love are enough to leave one or both partners confused, exhausted, empty and expecting. So when the Eagles' old song, "Desperado" plays, we see ourselves riding off into the sunset, facing life — wanting to be loved but having to go on alone. While others have survived this aloneness, there remains for most a longing, to fill the void created by the absence of love. Furthermore, in my work as a counselor I find that the yearning to be loved embellishes a path of disaffection that takes hold and goes deeper, step-by-step, day-by-day, emotion-by-emotion.

Distancing
When you no longer feel safe and secure or significant in a relationship, it's only natural to distance and isolate yourself from the partner. "Tim, it's like being hit in the stomach. You can only take so much. Then you have to move to protect yourself." I call it a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation — but it's also destructive. When counseling, I try to assess distancing on two levels:

— Troubling Signs: Often very subtle and unintentional, distancing presents early on in overly crowded schedules, a general lack of sharing about everyday life or tuning out your partner. Little demonstrations of love declared in random acts of thoughtfulness, like a note slipped in a lunch box or flowers sent for no reason, tend to disappear. Such lapses of practicing love begin to eat away at the relationship and loosen the marital grip.

— Warning Signs: After researching marriage for twenty years, Dr. John Gottman has formulated what he believes to be progressively destructive patterns couples fall into as they try to handle conflict. The small rift between them begins to open up into a canyon as negative interactions of criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling appear.1 As you become familiar with these relational patterns, you learn quickly that they are primarily defense tactics that serve to protect the self in the heat of battle.

As the distance grows, God-ordained needs go unmet in the marriage. Attempts to self-medicate the ache in the marital soul become priority, taking on the forms of golf, work, kids, shopping, romance novels — oh yes, and new friendships.

But disaffection exerts a death grip. It's not just a steady walk away from love — it involves hurt and rejection, distancing, hurt and rejection again, more distancing — a pattern of clearly definable behaviors that spiral back on themselves, each time becoming more severe and consuming.

In fact, disaffection sucks out life like quicksand.

It seems the more one struggles to recover the relationship, the worse it all gets. Quickly the walls thicken and the cries for love are lost in the "dialogue of the deaf."² If distancing goes unchecked, heels dig in and polarization takes over.

Polarization Vast, burning tides of hurt, anger and resentment swirl in this troubling marital state. Emotional backs are stiffened and heels dug in. Talk, if there is any, becomes extremely demoralizing.

Where polarization has set in, the couple's pain is visible. By now, family and friends can see the marriage is in serious trouble. Even outsiders recognize it. Frankly, everyone believes the relationship is so severely damaged that it's on life-support and the only option left is to pull the plug.

Lacking marital structure with purpose, safety and humor, characterized by the ultimate power struggle, a destructive cycle takes hold. Dorothy called in on our national talk radio program recently and shared these words, "Tim, I'm the one you're talking about. I've been married 40 years and all I ever wanted was for someone to love me — that's all — just love me. I've tried hard to love my man for a long time. I just don't think he ever has or ever will love me. I got all caught up in that cycle of disaffection, and I'm tired of trying. I have nothing else to give."

Just before Dorothy called, I had just explained how the heart starved for affection must stay vigilant to avoid getting caught up in a vicious cycle wherein you lose at love in the name of love.

The Cycle of Disaffection

Raising The Bar
Aching for love, the lonely heart develops special expectations of love from the partner. Raising the bar is like setting a love trap for your mate. It's creating a hurdle a spouse must leap in order to prove his or her love, a hurdle the partner often knows nothing about. For instance, "I just hope he'll bring me flowers this week." Now, he hasn't brought flowers home in five years — is he going to bring home flowers? Probably not. "But, Tim, you can't blame someone for wanting to just "be loved" — can you?" No. But follow this cycle.

Raising the bar is a form of personal desperation. One or both partners want assurance that they're still loved, so they set the hurdle — usually in secret. One client gave her husband a week to make a sexual advance. Yet another wanted a call from work three days in a row. Perhaps their husbands were waiting for a word of praise for their success at work or a copy of that new book they wanted to read.

Increased Failure
The instant the hurdle goes without being jumped, one partner gets angry and the other feels guilty. For the one who was expecting the hurdle to be cleared and is disappointed, painful thoughts like "You just don't care," or "You never show me you love me" abound. For the one who failed to leap the hurdle, there is the internal struggle of feeling like "I'm always walking on eggshells — I can't do anything right to please __________."

Both partners shut down.

Increased Negative Preoccupation Before long, both partners become locked in the dank cellars of their own minds, and both are thinking the same thing — their relationship and their marriage are getting worse. Moreover, the worse it gets, the less each is willing to invest in the troubled marriage relationship. Both people reach a dangerous point; they develop what I call the CNN Syndrome — all news is bad news. Every interaction is viewed through eyes of pain, fueling the belief that "My spouse is unsafe, out to hurt me and he/she just doesn't care." So, what do you do then? You begin to vilify your mate. Now, what do you do with villains? You run from or punish them. And, what do villains do to you? They hurt you. So now there's an even greater need for self-preservation.

Greater Self-preservation Since you're now living with a villain, the castle walls go up fast and thick. Furthermore, you begin to watch every move your spouse makes with heightened suspicion — "That's strange. I believe ____ is getting ready to hurt me again."

But the assault on joy can come from another direction, too. When in distress, as people, we often default to our strengths. For instance, if we're organizers, we begin to organize everything. If we are gregarious, we forget our responsibilities altogether while philosophizing with friends or coworkers about unrelated situations. Gaining confidence and energy from exercising our strengths, we begin to focus on those personal characteristics we once found endearing in our mates, but now we love to hate the same things, renaming them faults. If we are gregarious, our mate's sense of order and responsibility helped ground us in reality. Now we see it as being controlling, intrusive and pushy. Or, if we were orderly and had a streak of perfectionism in us, we liked our mate's unpredictability, his or her splashes of spontaneity. Now we see it as being childish, even foolish, definitely not caring. The delight we took in those traits begins to burn in resentment. As you can sense, Friday night dates lose a little luster.

Then, of course, love's heartbeat slows to a dirge. The broken heart is rejected in its cry for love because it can't possibly be loved in return. Increasingly, each spouse becomes more exhausted, empty and expecting to live in eternal vigilance. Finally, when that happens, whatever spontaneity is left in the marriage drains away, and the partners close the loop, so the next step is back to the beginning of the cycle, raising the bar.

Cycling Back — Closing the Loop Each time we cycle through the loop, as you can imagine, disaffection grows and the secret locked in the heart intensifies — "I am unhappy with this marriage" becomes "I hate this marriage," until finally, "I want out of this marriage." What fight is left can turn to a strong desire for flight — to get out and never look back.

Coming Out of the Pain Losing at love is a horrible situation in which to be. It is made even more tragic by the reality that it could all be avoided if there were only a commitment from both to break the cycle and return to the love God desires for couples in marriage.

Beginning the journey toward healing a marriage starts with a reframe of their marital story and how they lost at love. The goal is to help both spouses empathetically tenderize their troubled hearts to help them get in touch with each other's emotional worlds. This in turn will hopefully give opportunity for each to release the other from the grips of disaffection and challenge the partner to embrace love again. In so doing, carefulness and tenderness can be brought to the necessary work of reconciliation, which involves deep forgiveness, grace and bold love. That should set the stage for a refashioning of new life and love together.

Marriage should be filled with more joy than sorrow, more warmth than indifference and certainly more love than anger.

Ultimately, marital healing moves us from the island of me to an island of we, and most importantly an island of three — you, your partner and God.

Timothy Clinton is a licensed marriage and family therapist, an ordained minister and president of the American Association of Christian Counseling. He maintains his own private counseling practice in Virginia, co-hosts the live radio program, Life Talk and hosts a weekly television program, Time for Hope. Dr. Clinton authored the newly released book, Before A Bad Goodbye: How to Turn Your Marriage Around. For more information call AACC at 800/526-8673.

Notes: 1. John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail — And How You Can Make Yours Last, New York: Simon & Shuster, page 68, (1994). 2. Mark Karpel, Evaluating Couples: A Handbook for Practitioners, New York: Norton, page 31, (1994). From the Editor: the author of this article understands that some people prefer the term "Higher Power," but since Dr. Clinton is accustomed to saying God, he hopes that others will adjust the terminology to suit their own perspective.