Questions and Answers: Married Five Years

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A questioner writes:

I have been married for five years. Last year my wife’s daughter, from another marriage, got married and moved out of the house. She, my wife, has not been able to break the chains of her child. She gets up every morning and goes to her house because her daughter is scared to be alone and wants her mother with her. My stepdaughter dominates her life. For the last few months we have been having problems. My wife has moved into her daughter’s old room. She is becoming increasingly distant. She says that she loves me and that she can't imagine her life without me but she says she is just not happy and doesn't know why. She is starting to want to go out with her friends and have a drink after work and doesn't want to come home! We have had other problems, too. I had a debt problem and hid it from her but she says that she doesn't hold that against me now. What can I do?

Dr. Einhorn replies:

Sometimes marriages die before the people involved even notice it, and then, like a tree that is dead on the inside but still looks ok on the outside, gradually fall apart for what seem like environmental causes, like a storm. I hope that isn’t the case for this writer; I hope for his sake that his marriage can be healed. He has a choice: to examine his marriage and see if it can be saved, or to deny or avoid the problems and hope they go away. Since he has sent a question, it would appear that he would like to try to heal it, but does he really?

The questioner describes a problem in a relationship, and then asks, “What can I do?” Sometimes this means, “What can I do to make the problem go away?” Or, “What can I do to make the person I’m concerned about be more like I want her to be?”
The real answers are, “There’s nothing you can do to make the problem go away, so you may as well face up to it,” and, “Rather than turning her into the person you’d like her to be, you may have to find out more about who she really is. And, in the process, you might have to learn more about who you really are.”

From his description, his wife and stepdaugher are in a mutual emotional crisis over the daughter’s becoming an adult in her own right, and this is spilling over into his marriage. His wife says that she loves him, but her actions contradict her words, so she seems to be conflicted about her relationship with him, to say the least. After all, his wife could spend a lot of time with her adult daughter without moving out of their bedroom, and she could stop for a drink with her friends after work without wanting not to come home afterward. How she really feels about her husband and her marriage is one of the issues to be explored in therapy.

We also don’t know how this husband treats his wife, what she may be reacting to in him. For example, she says that she doesn’t resent him any longer for concealing his debt problem, but does she really mean this, or is she just saying it because she thinks she ought to? Are they still digging themselves out of his indebtedness? If he has tried to cope by lying on this occasion, has he tried the same strategy to cover other problems too?

I suppose that a “life coach,” such as Dr. Phil--whom, by the way, I’ve enjoyed watching on Oprah’s program, though I haven’t seen him on his own yet, and don’t always agree with how he sizes situations up--might give straightforward advice to this couple. To the wife, he might say, “You have to decide whether or not your marriage is important to you, and if it is, then it should be the most important thing of all and you should get out of your daughter’s bedroom and get right back in the bedroom with your husband.” But even a life coach would do some exploration of the situation, to try to find out where the wife is coming from before challenging her or giving advice. And, if it turns out that she does continue to harbor resentment toward her husband for concealing his indebtedness, the life coach might scold him as well for fundamentally violating her trust and admonish him not to repeat it and to strive to make it up to her. And there you are: diagnosis and treatment in seven minutes, and, who knows, maybe helpful.

A “medication type” might quickly diagnose a “biochemical imbalance” in the wife and prescribe an antidepressant, which might well make it easier for her to act more in line with her words, for awhile. To the extent that her distancing from her husband has to do with depression, and maybe anger at him, or with anxiety about her life for whatever reasons, medication might alleviate those feelings and allow her to be closer to him. After the period of time, usually about six to eighteen months or so, that the medication typically has its most potent effect, they may have repaired their relationship enough to continue to get on better together. Or maybe not.

I’m a therapist, so I recommend therapy. If this situation were presented to me in my practice, my preference would be to begin by seeing them both, so I could get a sense of the relationship and of both people in it. My recommendation is for this writer to ask his wife if she’ll see a therapist with him. If she will, then they should look for a therapist in whom they both have confidence (see my prior column on “Selecting A Therapist”). In couples therapy, the husband will have to be willing to learn more about his wife as a person and what she is experiencing, including her reactions to him. If she won’t join him in therapy, he could enter therapy on his own to discuss the deeper implications of his question, including whether or not he has a marriage worth staying in, and how bad it has to get before it isn’t worth staying in any more. Hi might use part of his therapy to try to become more honest with himself; to try to see, as impartially as he can, what problems he brought to the relationship. This will help him to understand his wife better and, if he decides to leave the relationship, avoid repeating them in future ones.

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