Relationship Dynamics In Married Couples

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When people get to know each other and begin to build relationships, it is quite natural that they somehow mobilize the best sides of their soul and personality in order to please each other.

Having started living together, they most often make common efforts to build some kind of common world, to shape their common lifestyle. In this way, they also try to engage all the "bright sides of their soul."

This is not to say that in these initial stages of a relationship, someone is deceiving someone or trying to show off and impress - both spouses usually behave quite sincerely. And that contact, that understanding of each other, which they form at this stage, in general, is their true relationship to each other.

Next comes the test of their relationship by external factors.

People learn to help each other when faced with the outside world. In relationships with difficult relatives, in problems at work, in a collision with some other everyday adversity.

During all these periods, some minor difficulties, quarrels, resentments, irritation arose in the relationship. Something managed to be resolved along the way, something remained suspended. By a certain period, the total mass of all these grievances and unresolved disputes, as well as unfulfilled promises or rejected requests and proposals, reaches critical proportions.

When a lot of grievances, irritation and misunderstanding accumulate, the effect of a "snowball" starts to work, when others stick to one small grievance and all this turns into one big lump of grievances.

The build-up effect on the relationship of "communicative slag"

Any relationship has its own dynamics, and from time to time situations arise when a "communicative slag" seems to build up on normal and warm marital relations. That is, the same “unforgiven grievances”, “unreacted irritation”, “unanswered requests”, “unfulfilled promises”, large and small disappointments accumulate.

In everyday communication, this begins to manifest itself in the fact that even when discussing simple everyday situations, people constantly come across some "offensive words", "annoying remarks." For this reason, very often there are verbal skirmishes, showdowns, disputes about who was to blame for this or that event or why it was not possible to implement the plan.

Despite the fact that the total volume of disappointment and mistrust in a partner, when viewed soberly, is still very small compared to the kind feelings and gratitude that spouses could experience each other, their relationship under the yoke of accumulated "communicative slag" is noticeably difficult.

At some point, this communication noise can interfere with the discussion and implementation of joint plans or simply fill the entire communicative space, so it becomes very difficult to discuss anything at all. And if it succeeds, then you have to break through a series of insults, misunderstandings and reproaches that someone once did something wrong. Classic phrases: “Well, I told you….”, “Well, if you would have listened to me then…”, “You are constantly….”.

Formation of sustainable communication games on the basis of "communicative slag"

Psychological play is an interchange of a sequence of words, remarks, and addresses, which are pronounced as if according to one given scenario, albeit with some variations and "deviations from the text." Usually games unfold around a certain type of situation, and there are phrases or actions that turn out to be like a signal to start the game. They kind of provoke people to start such an exchange of remarks.

Most often, the exchange of these remarks occurs with a gradual increase in emotional tension and even irritation, and ends with dramatic rhetorical exclamations.

Here is a typical dialogue that can be played out during such a game (this is a fictional dialogue):

- Listen, how are you doing with this repair?

- I haven’t dealt with it yet: I didn’t have time.

- But we agreed that you would complete it by Thursday!

- No, we did not agree so! You just wanted to get it done as quickly as possible!

- But I well remember that we discussed it!

- I also remember that we discussed this, and I said that I would need your help!

- You did not tell me anything about the fact that you will need my help!

- You just remember and hear only what you want to hear!

- You always juggle everything and you can never agree on anything!

- …

This is usually followed by a stream of indiscriminate accusations of each other using a set of standard theses and with appeals to the same situations, with rare improvisations and the addition of new types of accusations.

At the same time, one interlocutor has not heard the other for a long time, but both consistently bring each other to the level of increased nervous and emotional stress. Further, depending on the degree of neglect of the relationship, the situation turns into a stage of an acute and violent scandal or people disperse, as they say, "slamming the door."

If you start the situation to the point where these games begin to break into a scandal mode (scandals are one of the variants of "bad psychological games"), then the spouses begin to spend more time on games than on communicating with each other. And what is most unpleasant: scandals are a very strong "psychological drug", they are quite addictive. In the course of scandals, there is a very strong surge of emotions and adrenaline, the psyche is brought to the maximum tension, after which there is a "discharge" and a phase of "complete exhaustion" and "complete devastation" begins.

Further, as in Brodsky: "if in the course of days only the details of pain, and not happiness, are seen better." It is as if the relationship itself and the person himself are forgotten, all good things fade into the background, and against this background only resentment and irritation emerge.

How can you get rid of "bad games"

First of all, games need to be noticed and reflected. A person has a lot of things from the "Pavlov's dog", and many of our internal psychological mechanisms are triggered in us from external stimuli. But we can still notice these words, actions and events, transfer what is happening to a conscious level, breaking stable connections of the "stimulus-response" type. Namely, psychological games are based on such simple mechanisms.

Secondly, you can periodically cleanse the "communicative slag" that is growing on them from your psyche and from your relationships. We are often unaware of how some seemingly stupid and harmless words or "communicative pins" can hurt another person. The fact is that blows from a loved one are much more painful than from outside people.

A simple and seemingly childishly naive procedure, such as “tell me, how have I offended you lately?” Can be very effective and useful.

In response to such a naive question (if you are ready to listen to all the answers), you will hear a lot of strange, ridiculous, stupid and unfair accusations. But the secret is that your partner really carries it all in his soul.

In the process of such a procedure, it is important not to get into an argument. You can only ask clarifying questions in order to better understand the essence of the claims and accusations. No matter how paradoxical it may sound, in the process of clarification, the partner may himself abandon some of his accusations, realizing that his grievances were ridiculous and not justified. BUT! It is important to understand that before that he could quite sincerely consider them more than reasonable.

And finally, it is very important to remember why you were grateful to each other, for which you are still grateful, what you did for each other, what opportunities you opened up for each other.

Psychological games as a mechanism for burning free time

Very often people complain about the lack of free time, but an equally difficult problem is the use of this free time for its intended purpose. The famous American psychologist Eric Byrne generally considered the problem of pastime as one of the basic problems of a person.

In relationships between spouses, this topic usually sounds even more acute. Since it is assumed that they should spend their free time from work and other requirements of society on each other. However, their views on how they spend their free time may not coincide with each other.

As a result, the battles for the style and form of spending free evenings, weekends and vacations lead to the fact that spouses spend all their free time on various psychological games. People may spend more time arguing about how to spend the coming weekend than on events in which they could participate.

In general, devouring free time is one of the purposes of such games. This is the so-called "hidden psychological benefit" that people get from being included in psychological games. While you are basking in your grievances and pouring out your irritation, you do not have to think about what to spend all this "hated free time" on.

Another reason that serves as a mechanism for launching psychological games is non-observance of some rituals expected from each other. One of the most common examples of such neglected rituals is "not showing due attention." Usually, a woman expects her husband to hug, kiss and caress her when he comes home, or at least show some signs of attention. Sometimes the husband is not up to tenderness, or he, like the soldier who “does not know the words of love,” believes that the main thing is deeds and actions, and not the exchange of pleasantries.

It is far from always possible to directly ask to show signs of attention and tenderness to yourself. For this reason, women begin to make some hints or try to somehow provoke the husband to observe the necessary rituals. When they come across refusal or ignorance, they get offended and move on to more "rude hints", and sometimes to petty revenge for disrespecting their requests. At some point, upon seeing her husband returning from work, the wife immediately proceeds to "revenge" for past grievances, bypassing the stage of "hints" and useless requests.

Good psychological games

Psychological games can bring more than the dubious benefits of wasting time. They also allow you to keep your psyche and your consciousness in good shape. It is for this sake that you should often arrange meetings with your friends and just good acquaintances, even if there is no pragmatic benefit in this. In general, friendly chatting is also a game, but this game kind of revives us and reminds us that we exist.

In the same way, new experiences and travels are needed. We can say that traveling is a game that runs on the energy of curiosity. While bad games work on the energy of resentment and irritation. Both eat up time, but the consequences are different.

It is useful for spouses to accumulate experiences, impressions and observations that they can share with each other. Everyone has different tastes and characters. A sharp negativity to the pastime that one of the spouses promotes most often arises due to the fact that he ignores or profanes the other's hobbies.

It makes sense to practice several types of pastime:

• Events in which both spouses are interested in participating.
• Allow yourself and another to participate in some events one by one, including travel and travel.
• "Give yourself" to each other, going with him to events and travels that you yourself are not interested in and not even very pleasant. But there must be some symmetry in these gifts.

Unfortunately, very often the "communicative slag" that builds up in the course of married life becomes so heavy that the easiest and most beautiful relationships drown under its weight. And bad psychological games begin to eat up all your free time. As a result, the dynamics of relations reaches the stage of rhythmically repeated scandals, during which people bring each other to such exhaustion and devastation that living together seems impossible.

So do not forget to clean the "communication slag" from your relationship.

and fill your free time with something more cheerful than psychological games.