Imagine the spiraling vortex of water as it drains from a filled bathtub.
It’s an illustration I’ve hand-drawn simply with markers on whiteboards for countless counseling and divorce support group sessions.
The analogy works like this. At some baseline point in a marriage, one spouse perceives the other to be contributing “less” to the marital dynamic. As a reaction, his or her partner then gives less from their side. But it’s tough to hit the line just right here: Invariably, respondent overshoots by some margin, withholding a bit more than what they perceived to have been withheld from them in the precipitating action.
And, ya know, even if they’re spot-on, it’s the nature of individual perceptions that their spouse isn’t going to see it as all that even, right? So the initiator responds to the response by taking away still more.
Response follows response — swirling, diminishing marital attachment.
Speaking to the signature complaint for this discussion, 1 Corinthians 7:3 reads, “The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs.” But just as Paul’s writing here is intended for more than the fledgling church at Corinth, it is also more instructive than as a mere caution against any prolonged “refrain from sexual intimacy ,,, so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” 1 Corinthians 7:5.
A marriage is vulnerable when real or perceived scarcity of resources result in competition between spouses, each to ensure that he or she gets a bigger piece of a limited, if not diminishing pie. This can mean dividing up the backyard for use. Money. Time. And, yes: Sexual enthusiasm.
Conversely, you’d be amazed at how many ways there can be to increase the size of the pie, to create a situation where the needs of one marital partner are met with little or no perceived burden on the other.
That’s quite a distance from some of the couples that come to me for pastoral counseling, thinking divorce is the only option (as opposed to simply being “a” possible answer). Ironically, by the time they get here, one or both is actually reducing their own opportunity for enjoyment through efforts dedicated to seeing that their spouse receives less from the marriage.
More often than not, they’re both amazed at how easily we can map out steps for responses that begin with open communication of concerns about perceived withholding or reduced marital enjoyment — which occur at the earliest, lowest-impact moments. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Other times, we work on responding to “receiving less” by “giving more.” Even suspicious spouses frequently return in kind.
Another option is to buck trends and compare apples to oranges. In other words, “sure, I’ll take less of X, because it doesn’t really matter to me; I’ve noticed that Y doesn’t seem to matter to you, so how ’bout if I take more of that?”
Drain plugged. Make bath time fun again!
Off-Site References
“Beware of marital constriction” / August 27, 2009 / Divorce Pastor (accessed September 7, 2024)