How to overcome a relationship crisis

When a relationship is in crisis

When a relationship is in crisis, the sooner you start talking about it with your partner the better.

Opening up communication about the causes of the crisis you are going through, without closing in on yourself, while at the same time distancing yourself from others, allows you to face it with awareness and maturity. It allows you to emerge strengthened as a couple or in any case enriched as people, even if “alone”.

Not all crises can be overcome by staying together

How to overcome a relationship crisis?

All crises can be overcome, but not all can be overcome together. Sometimes it is better to separate if being together is equivalent to condemning yourself and your loved ones to unhappiness.

When the motivation is lacking in wanting to move forward and face the problems and the differences are irreconcilable, or when being with the other implies a sacrifice of one’s physical and mental health, the choice must be to separate one’s paths. The end of a story does not necessarily represent a failure, indeed it can be the beginning of an internal rebirth and a new love story.

Many times in therapy we meet couples who “stay together for the children” or issues external to the two partners. Even in these cases, it is essential to try and try to understand if there is a personal and shared reason for keeping that relationship going because we can take care of “the things that matter to us”.

Given this necessary premise, let’s try to understand what a relationship crisis is and how to overcome a couple’s crisis.

Advice and suggestions for dealing with a love crisis

The signs of a crisis are not difficult to grasp, even if sometimes we would prefer not to see them and not be aware of them.

Admitting that the couple has entered a difficult moment, recognizing that there is no longer harmony, can represent one of the most difficult phases. We may therefore tend to “pretend nothing happened”, not to see our signs of discomfort and those of our partner: questioning scares us and, probably, we know that once we have given a name to the problem, we will have to act and face it. We then tend to postpone the beginning of resolving the crisis and the problem.

Recognize the signs of COUPLE CRISIS

• Dialogue is lacking: we often communicate by arguing, we no longer listen to each other, we think we already know what the other thinks or says and we behave accordingly, without checking that our attributions coincide with reality. There are mutual prejudices.
• The prevailing emotions are anger, sadness, or disappointment.
• There is a lack of interest in the partner, in what he does and thinks, but also in what he is. This is often associated with sexual disinterest.
• It turns out that the partner is at the last place in the scale of our priorities, selfishness prevails over altruism and sharing.
• You are no longer able to share, there is a lack of common interests, your interactions differ, and you can be strangers in a commonplace. 
• You no longer feel like yourself, you feel a sense of constraint in the relationship as if you were in a cage, and you do things in which you no longer recognize yourself.  

What is a relationship crisis?

The word ” crisis ” comes from a Greek term that means ” rupture, change “, so it can indicate the end of a certain phase of love, and not necessarily the end of love itself.

A couple’s crisis is almost always an obligatory stage in the evolution of a relationship and being aware of it allows you to deal with the situation constructively.

If the couple is in crisis, there is no need to be alarmed immediately. The first thing you can do to overcome it is to change the idea of ​​crisis and the way of dealing with conflicts with your partner. 

We must remember that in every crisis lies an opportunity for change, even if we do not yet know the outcome or evolution of the moment or period of crisis. Even the marital crisis is a message: it means that the previous balance is no longer stable and that a new, more current relational structure must be found.

One of the main causes of relationship crises

Especially for long-term couples, it must be considered that the couple is made up of two individual subjects, who together build an entity that is above the individual parts: the couple is something new and different compared to the sum of the two individuals.

If the couple’s relationship as an entity has its history and evolution, it is also true that over time the two individuals grow, have experiences, and perhaps change. In this process, it is possible that the two individuals do not evolve at the same speed: perhaps one of the two “runs” and goes further, while the other element of the couple may have a slower and more gradual path… This misalignment can lead to communication difficulties, the loss of common goals, and the lack of synchrony in the two individual evolutions that take place in parallel.

On the contrary, if you grow together, every evolutionary step, even individual, will represent an opportunity to relaunch the couple’s pact and to give new life to life together.

What aspects to consider differently to overcome the marital crisis

• Abandon the idealization of love:  false myths such as eternal love, the conflict-free couple, the symbiotic couple, etc. must be abandoned, understanding that every feeling or story needs continuous evolution to continue.
• Accept the ups and downs of the relationship: they are physiological in every couple. Crises are a natural passage that, if handled well, will allow us to grow together, to feel even more united, and to truly love each other for who we are.
• Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by everything that takes you away from your partner at a given moment. We must try to focus on what still unites us and on sharing pleasant situations and emotions, rather than on negative emotions and situations.

Advice for overcoming a marriage or relationship crisis

• Learning to deal with others, transforming differences into an opportunity for listening, discussion, and mutual understanding.
• Learning flexibility and the art of compromise. For example when the interests of one clash with those of the other. Both must seek their well-being (giving space to so-called “healthy selfishness”), while always respecting the well-being of the other. When it is necessary to resort to a compromise, the important thing is that it is not always the same partner who gives in.
• Learning to cultivate well-being within the couple:  we must take care of the couple daily, without taking it for granted that this well-being is self-sustaining and that “being together is enough”. Furthermore, it is essential to be the creators of this search for well-being and not wait for the partner to take care of it “first”. You have to do something concrete to please your partner, create pleasant moments to experience together, and seek spaces of intimacy.
• By re-negotiating the equality of the relationship.  Many relationships go into crisis due to a lack of alternation of the relational position in the balance of the couple. When a disparity emerges, discomfort can arise which requires revisiting the couple’s path, the factors that emerged, and those implemented unconsciously: it is therefore necessary to find new balances.
• Searching for adequate openness to the external context (not too much, not too little) allows the couple to establish a relationship life full of stimuli that safeguard the specificity, identity, and exclusivity of the coupled system. 
• Making themselves available to modify well-established emotional dynamics, and to question themselves. This is one of the most important, and at the same time most difficult, aspects. It is certainly easier to demand change in the other, placing the origin of the couple’s problems outside of oneself. It is always important to first start with yourself and what you can change yourself, taking on your share of responsibility. 
• Respecting other people’s interpretation of reality.  In conflictual interactions, partners often appeal to the objectivity of the facts, but everyone reads them differently. It is typical to think that the other exaggerates or makes mistakes, perhaps if we look at him/her through the glasses of prejudice. In “sterile” conflict, the partner loses interest in the interpretation of the other’s reality, in her mental paths. At the same time, the perception grows that the different idea is contrary to one’s own, and intentionality is attributed to this (” he is doing it on purpose, he wants to attack me “).