Marital Fatigue

Every fairy tale we ever read as kids ended with the princess meeting her prince and living happily ever after as if finding a lover/ partner was the impetus to live happily. So we have this notion that the search for a partner is the treacherous bit but there after, it’s a breeze.

To be fair, there isn’t a lot of literature about how people build their relationships, so can we blame someone for assuming these fairy tales reflect reality?

People are now starting to come out and talk about their personal well-being, which is a step forward. But relationships? We are still quite conservative about it. It’s because relationships bring out who we truly are, and we feel embarrassed to talk about them when things aren’t going well.

When you’ve been married a long time, you slowly start letting go of this notion that it needs to be perfect and complete at every instant. You begin to make peace with the imperfections. But you have to be careful about making peace, because marital fatigue disguises itself as making peace.

What is marital fatigue?

This is when you feel exhausted and feel a lack of motivation to do anything with your spouse. It’s not necessarily a grand thing that shows itself up as “everything is falling apart, I think we should get a divorce today”.

In fact, it’s the contrary.

Everything feels normal, and you seem to be able to discuss most things quite casually. You almost don’t see any problems, yet at the deepest level, there is something inside of you that is uncomfortable with the status quo and it shows up in the little momentary frustrations that come and go without you noticing.

When you’ve been together a long time, you learn to choose your battles. But with marital fatigue, you choose fewer battles, and the ones you choose, none of you seem to ever win.

What does marital fatigue look like?

Ever since my husband and I became parents, and especially since our child started school, our socialising has been limited by our child’s routine. We do kids’ birthday parties, day-time family functions or our individual catch ups with our respective friends while the other watches the kid.

We barely go out as just the two of us, or go out for a meal with other couples, just the two of us. There are always a few children in the background. I understand you can’t help it, but do I enjoy pure unadulterated adult time? Yes, I do.

But then again, not everyone lives like this. People have nannies, some live-in even, and so they are able to continue “living their lives”. We somehow never got onto the nanny bandwagon, and now we’ve got a system that works for us, most of the time.

Yet, there is a nagging feeling of a dwindling social community, so every now and then, my husband and I address this community building problem with grand conversations about organising social events at home.

We are exhausted by the end of the conversation, and we do nothing about it after.

I am an introvert, my husband is an NED fellow and so my brain says, it’s a hard problem to solve. So, after a few iterations of this, subconsciously, I have written this off as a conversation I do not wish to pursue with my husband anymore.

The extent of our being able to “talk things out” is only limited to analysis most of the time, and if we’re lucky to be aligned on the problem, we’ll get to the strategy. But implementation - let’s not talk about it.

Does that sound familiar to you too?

Getting Stuck

Too many couples get stuck like this about something or the other, and marital fatigue starts to set in. But when you have too may things you get stuck in, you start to quiet quit your marriage.

Before you know it, you’re still married, but not together any more.

What does that mean?

While you may still talk as a couple, your conversation begins to become hollow, devoid of credibility and trust. And I don’t mean trust in the sense of infidelity, but trust in terms of “can I count on this person to make things happen”.

The obvious message most unmarried people take out of this is - “oh I’m not going to be like them, I’ll find someone who can plug all the holes that I’ve got in my personality, and then I’ll be fine”.

That’s called “trauma bonding”. It does not lay a foundation for a healthy relationship. The question here isn’t about how you avoid getting stuck in these unproductive loops, rather, it is about learning to get out of them together.

I’ve always thought that my husband and I are able to talk about things, there’s nothing that’s off the table. It’s one of the things I love about us.

But being able to share every thought with each other isn’t the same as working together to solve problems.

Getting unstuck

A marriage is a constantly evolving bond, never complete - so how do you make peace with it as it evolves without looking at it as being imperfect or falling short of a certain ideal at which you ought to be at all points.

Does ignoring your problems mean making peace?

Does becoming aware of it with all its flaws mean making peace?

Now I’ll be honest, I don’t exactly know how my husband and I will learn to step up our ability to “talk things out” together, but I suppose the first step is becoming fully aware of where we stand?

You can’t possibly solve a problem without understanding it, let alone assume that there is a certain “right answer” to the problem even before you’ve started solving it.

I started writing this two days ago, and for various reasons my flow has been interrupted. But interestingly, some things changed over the course of these two days. My husband who is an ardent follower of the “Art of Manliness” podcast dropped this episode - throw a 2-hour cocktail party that can change your life.

Coincidence? Chaos Theory? who knows.

Last evening, my husband sat me down and shared his learnings from this podcast. He had managed to overcome his exhaustion independently, and I listened patiently too. Sure, it was yet another “plan” we were making, but this time, he initiated. For an NED fellow, that is a progress.

Will we learn to tango and move?

You’ll have to wait and see.

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What I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:

Tejo Tungabhadra by Vasudhendra: My mum had told me about this book in Kannada, so I was happy to find the English translation recently. Angela’s Ashes is probably the only other historical fiction I’ve read and enjoyed before.

YouTube Surfing: A friend was telling me that a great way to get to know someone could be through their YouTube home page. Exchanging quirky videos that show up there could be a fun way to learn interesting things. Here’s something that popped up on my feed today.

Shapely Gal song: Be the One by Cheat codes and Kaskade