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A “good marriage” is one in which we are expected to live with our spouse in the same house, forsake all others, and stay together forever.
Why?
What if those assumptions were actually interfering with the health and well-being of your relationship? What if they were causing the problems in the union?
Not everyone likes living with other people. Given what we know about infidelity statistics (approximately 20% of men cheat and 13% of women do), a good number of people are not cut out for monogamy.
In our culture, when relationships are not going well, we basically give people two choices: Stay or go. People can stay and work on the relationship by going to therapy, reading books and recommitting to each other—or, couples can split and go their separate ways.
Let’s see what it might look like to have alternative norms for coupling.
1. When conventional wisdom would have couples try harder to merge, you might be surprised to know that a temporary separation might actually be the remedy for the relationship ailments—especially if one of the issues between the two partners is a sense of feeling trapped in the relationship.
I recommend what I call a Therapeutic or Enhancement Separation. This is, in essence, a time-out; a chance to get out of the middle of “the forest” and see the relationship from outside of it. It gives people an opportunity to see what they are happy to get away from and also what they miss.
After an Enhancement Separation, if a couple decides to come back together, it’s because they truly want to stay in the relationship. If they split, they will have ostensibly done so from a more thoughtful (rather than knee-jerk reactionary) place because they would have given some space and time to the possibility of staying.
2. There’s an increasingly popular trend known as the Living Apart Together or L.A.T. marriage.
In the past, the option to stay together and live apart was one chosen primarily by partners forced to live apart because work pulled them in different directions. LATs became better known during the Great Recession in the mid 2000s. Jobs were hard to come by in particular areas, so when a job did come up somewhere else, in order to make ends meet back at home, it worth the sacrifice to live where the work was. At the other end of the LAT spectrum are the wealthy who live in separate places just because they can. Each partner may prefer to live on their own and, with money being no object, they can buy their own abodes.
More and more, we have freedom to choose to live a lifestyle that we mold to us rather than having all of us humans contort to fit into a one-size-fits-all paradigm,
Live by Your Own Set of Rules
3. Might your relationship be strengthened if you change the rules and shake things up – questioning all the unspoken norms? The traditional rules include marrying for love, ending the marriage when the romantic love is gone, living together in one house, staying together forever, and being monogamous.
Some of these norms were challenged by the earlier two suggestions, but I’ll add some further ideas here: Imagine that your romantic love has gone away. You have no kids, but you have a nice life. If you divorce, however, you both will constantly have to worry about money. You get along well enough to stay living together. Would you? People increasingly seeing the wisdom of marrying and/or staying married for the financial benefits. We used to marry almost exclusively for money in our culture. In fact, many cultures around the world still do. Yes, it might be challenging to see your ex-romantic partner go on to meet someone new, but in situations in which both people accept that their old way of relating can never be revived, and they get along well enough, why is it wrong to stay together if it gives them a leg up monetarily? Perhaps they can agree to stay together until they’ve amassed enough funds to go their separate ways and so staying together buys them (no pun intended) some extra time to build some wealth.
Likewise, if you are married with kids and the romance withers, would it be wrong to stay together to raise healthy kids together in a stable environment? Many couples have been living this way for decades, but suffering with the shame of feeling like they were doing something wrong. Staying for the kids, though, can actually be a loving, selfless endeavor known as a Parenting Marriage.
A final shake up that has also increased in popularity in recent years is polyamory, or loving more than one person at the same time. In her 1998 book, The Future of Love, Daphne Rose Kingma predicted that open love would become normalized. She was absolutely correct. While loving more than one person at once, or having an open marriage, complicates matters, most who live this lifestyle report that it enriches their lives greatly.
It's possible that none of these hacks could work to help keep your flagging marriage together, but, if you get along well — and you’re not in an unhealthy or abusive situation — could it be worth at least having a conversation with your spouse before you file divorce paperwork? Everything is a trade-off and divorce is a very difficult, expensive process. If it can be avoided, at least for the short term, why not explore one of these out-of-the-box options?
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