Coming Apart

Relationships do end—even though we don't want to believe it. Whether you have obscured that truth from yourself by having an affair or enduring years of boredom, whether you have been starved for emotional communion or have never been able to recover from a move—if you think your relationship is ending, you're probably right

farewell. It doesn't please me to list marriage counseling as one of the indicators of a relationship that is ending, but I think it is important to note that generally people seek therapy only when they have already crossed their own interior limits of problem-solving capabilities

Because affairs touch us at some of our deepest and most vulnerable emotional levels, we tend to treat them as ultimate reflections on the character of the persons who engage in them.
People who indulge in affairs may indeed be selfish, self-indulgent, and inconsiderate. But what is also and more importantly true is that affairs may not be so much a statement about individual character as they are about the quality of the relationships upon which they inevitably impinge

When either partner desires to change the arrangement into a truly intimate emotional relationship, chances are it won't work because the emotional territory has already been violated by so many imposters

The marriage that is constantly punctuated by affairs is not a marriage or an intimate relationship, it is a circumstantial arrangement and will survive only as long as both partners are content to have a marriage of convenience

it generally does have a divisive and corrosive effect when we dilute our commitment by having sex outside of our primary relationship. When we do that, we take away one of the things that makes that particular relationship unique and exclusive

Deep emotional distance is often an indicator that there is no turning back in a relationship, that on an unconscious level both partners have already created an alternate private reality based on their differing values. Once this has happened, they also stop consulting each other about creating a joint reality that serves both their needs

Sometimes the process of emotional withdrawal isn't even a process. It's the carrying forward of a status quo, the continuance of an emotional bonding that never occurred

This is what people mean when they refer to “a lack of communication.” Verbal communication—what we say to one another and how we say it, the amount and depth of our revelations about ourselves, the spirit in which we say what we say—is one of the most important means of sustaining emotional closeness. When there is a breakdown in any form of communication—verbal, sexual, affectionate, emotional—there is a breakdown in the relationship that is experienced as emotional distance.
Emotional distance occurs when you come to the place in your own consciousness where, for whatever reasons, you have moved away from your relationship. You are, in a sense, holding back your emotions and expending them elsewhere. It's as if you've got money, but you're not spending it at your partner's store anymore

There is an important difference between boredom and familiarity. It's like the difference between an old shoe that's comfortable and a shoe that's worn out and has started to hurt your feet. When a relationship has settled but still has liveliness, you don't experience true boredom; what you experience is familiarity, comfort, security. You value your daily involvement with the other person