People Change, Marriages Change

I’ve spoken with several people recently—friends in their 50s—who have been married for 18-20 years. They all have had issues in their marriage in the last few years.

It seems to me a normal process for people to change over that amount of time and for that fact to make it difficult for marriages to survive.  If in the process of changing the couple grown apart, they either must find a way to grow back together again or they must decide to go separate ways.

I suppose they can also stay together despite having grown apart. I know one couple doing that; he says he has built a life not just with her but in the community and with their friends. He doesn’t want to give that up…not yet…even though he says he is alone in his marriage.

It’s hard to imagine starting over at midlife. We have to strike out on our own…financially, socially…in so many ways. Not only have we changed mentally and emotionally, our bodies have changed as well. I heard a story about a woman who works out constantly and has lost tons of weight. One person speculates she is having an affair or ready to have one; another speculates she is trying to hold on to her husband, who she fears is having an affair.

Hard to imagine being alone—or with someone new—when you’ve been with someone for 18 or 20 years. It’s harder, possibly, to imagine being alone in a marriage.

Marriage is a process. Marriages go through phases. How hard we work at them makes a huge difference in whether or not marriages remains successful or not. That said, people do change, but we can’t make anyone change. We don’t go into a marriage hoping someone will change over time; that’s a huge mistake. Staying in a marriage hoping someone will change can be a mistake as well. We can work at changing together…we can try…

I went to my high school reunion. I met maybe 5 or 8 people tops who weren’t on their second marriage. Their marriages hadn’t even made it to 18 years. That doesn’t say much for their ability to work a relationship. Or maybe they married too young? When we do that, we are still changing a lot and very quickly. We don’t know who we are. Their second marriages seem to be working better; that says something, I suppose, about maturity, but I wonder if they have problems later in the marriage as well?

Funny thing is, we change a lot in midlife, too. We discover many things about ourselves in midlife we didn’t know…or that we knew but that we now accept. We allow ourselves to be who we are. Maybe that’s what makes such a huge difference in our relationships. Maybe our unwillingness to be anything but real and our unwillingness to settle becomes a problem in our relationships. We feel we are halfway through our lives and we want…more. We expect our mates to be real, to not settle, to live up to our expectations. We expect them to want what we want from us and for themselves.

Change…it’s a constant, but I think that just like children have growth spurts, there are times in our lives when we grow in other ways, and this affects us in different ways as well. Maybe that’s why marriages struggle around the 18-20 year mark or around the time people hit 50. Maybe it marks a type of growth spurt.