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The Silent Thing That Kills More Marriages Than Cheating
This old, dark joke about modern marriages is funny until you recognize it in your relationship.
The legendary comic Rodney Dangerfield said:
“We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations — we’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.”
It gets a laugh because it sounds absurd, but I bet it also gets a laugh because it hits a little too close to home for some.
I can also see why so many couples end up living out that joke.
We go into marriage wanting a forever kind of love and then, contrary to the fairy tales we have been fed, so many marriages don’t actually get destroyed by fire. They freeze to death.
Not exactly how we think of a marriage ending: with the screaming matches or the betrayals.
The big secret is that the things that actually end marriages are not the loud betrayals but the quiet ones, like the slow, silent erosion of contempt or the silence that settles in when two partners stop trying to be understood.
It is time we take a close look at that slow freezing over of the intimacy that once kept you warm and the things that really separate the…
