A woman who is over 50 years old and still has this mentality towards marriage will probably be a failure in her life.

2bebetter
8 min readMay 9, 2024

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I found that many people have this idea in marriage: I have no other requirements for you, as long as you don’t cheat. But in the end, you find that he can’t even do this. So you begin to wonder: Is it difficult for two people in a marriage to be loyal to each other? Why can’t we meet such a basic requirement?

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Why can’t our marriages be happy?

01. The more we defend against something, the more we will promote it.

Have you ever discovered that whether we are in a marriage or daily life, sometimes the more we fear, the more things we fear will become reality? Just like Murphy’s law, the more you don’t want something to happen, the more it will develop in the direction you don’t want to happen. For example, my expectation for marriage is that we should at least be loyal to each other. As long as we don’t cheat during the marriage, the marriage can continue.

Then finally one day, the other party cheated on her… Why did this happen?

I once had a friend who wanted a divorce because her husband cheated on her. She said: “I bumped into him before. He was crossing the road with that female colleague. After seeing my car, he immediately started to keep a distance from that female colleague. What do you mean? If he didn’t have any trouble in his heart, why would he deliberately keep a distance from her?

I asked her: What would you have thought if he had not kept a distance from that female colleague at that time?

Then he must be pretending. He deliberately acted calm and didn’t want me to find out. But his acting skills are not that good. Look at him, he revealed his secret immediately.”

We will find that no matter what the man does at this time, the woman has already determined that the relationship between the man and the female colleague is fishy.

At the same time, she is afraid that the man will cheat, so she will constantly want to confirm whether he has cheated, but all her views and behaviors will revolve around the fact that the man has cheated.

Because the stronger the fear, the more depression will form, and she will perform many defensive behaviors to resist this fear.

For example, the wife will be anxious to check her husband’s mobile phone every day and try to find out what he is doing. As long as he goes out to socialize, she will feel very anxious inside.

And when I see him checking his cell phone when he gets home, I get angry easily, wondering if he is chatting with a female colleague again. Even though she knew that the two of them were colleagues and would inevitably have work interactions, she still couldn’t help but release her suspicions. Her surveillance, anger, and anxiety are like a prison, trying to trap the other person firmly inside. At this time, marriage is no longer happiness and joy for a man, but depression and control. He will feel that he is restrained by you and can’t breathe.

So he began to try to relax and would escape from his wife’s sight more often. He would go out for drinks and dinners but didn’t want to go home.

But he didn’t dare to tell his wife clearly, so lies and secrets began to appear between the two of them. The wife will also be more suspicious, why are you becoming more and more homeless? Have you gone to see your female colleague again? Do you not care about me at all?

This process is a closed-loop process: faith — wish — action — witness.

That is to say, whatever you believe in, you will have a corresponding desire. To achieve this desire, you will establish the same behavior. These behaviors will in turn confirm and strengthen what you originally believed.

Just like the wife above firmly believes that her husband doesn’t care about her and doesn’t like her enough.

So she vowed to get this man’s love, and what she tried to do was to test, bind, and demand him. As a result, the other party becomes more depressed, more tired in the relationship, and wants to escape. But it further confirmed my wife’s original belief: You don’t care about me enough, otherwise why would you want to escape? The two of you are directly trapped in this vicious cycle and cannot extricate yourself. In the end, you will likely push the other person towards the outcome that you least expect.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

02. The lower our standards are, the more likely we are to fail.

Everyone will probably set a goal for themselves when they face exams when they are young. We will find that children who study better will set higher goals for themselves. If I want to get full marks, I will be ranked first in the class, and then I will keep studying hard for this. And those children at the bottom of the pile may just think that it is best if they can pass, and it doesn’t matter if they fail. They don’t care whether they have learned or not and whether they can do well in the exam.

He is just worried about whether he will get beaten if his score is too low and he goes home. As a result, the “students” are getting better and better at studying. They may not be able to achieve their goals and get perfect scores in all exams, but they are always excellent overall. The “stupid student” will increasingly be unable to keep up with the progress of his classmates and teachers. It may be difficult for him to achieve the goal of passing the exam, and failure will become a common occurrence.

The same is true for marriage.

Some people think that cheating is my bottom line for marriage. As long as you don’t cheat, you can do whatever you want. I don’t care about the rest, and it’s a laissez-faire state. But once you find that the other person is showing signs of cheating, as mentioned above, you will start to launch a crazy defense until you push the other person into the state you fear most. Then you will blame and go crazy because he finally touched your bottom line. But you don’t seem to care about why the relationship between the two people has become like this. What you care about is that this result is unacceptable to you.

It seems that we don’t know what a good marriage should look like and what we can do to achieve this state in marriage, so we are always on guard against getting hurt. This causes the problems we see and the consequences we face to be the most acute and heart-wrenching ones that we fear the most. It is difficult for us to feel that our marriage is happy.

But in fact, many times we feel that our marriages are unhappy because the standards we set for marriage are too low. We have been paying attention to this bottom line, so we feel that when we encounter problems in marriage, it doesn’t matter as long as we don’t hit the bottom line.

Just like that child who always failed, I just needed to pass. It didn’t matter whether I worked hard or not in the process, as long as I didn’t get beaten in the end, but I often couldn’t escape the beating.

Why is this so?

The life of two people is a process of getting along, and conflicts are inevitable during the process. The small conflicts that appear at the beginning are to help you face the differences between the two people and enhance your understanding of each other. However, many people do not pay attention to this and feel that it is innocuous if they do not touch the bottom line. It seems that it’s not worth fighting over this, it’s not a big deal, and there’s no need to communicate. I should solve it myself faster.

But if small problems are not solved, big problems will come.

Because you have never been in each other’s hearts and don’t know what the other person is thinking, you usually make a mess when you face more serious problems that must be dealt with. Do you still expect to perform exceptionally well in exams when you don’t memorize knowledge points?

Photo by Gus Moretta on Unsplash

03. Only a marriage with happiness as the bottom line can reap happiness.

Therefore, if we want to make our marriage happy, we cannot rely on the lowest point of marriage but should pursue the highest point of marital happiness that we want. For example, you hope that two people in a marriage can trust each other, be honest with each other, and exchange love with each other without reservation. Then regard this highest point as the bottom line of your marriage, and work harder to get closer to this goal. After all, only you know how to make yourself happy.

For example, if you are in a bad mood and want to be comforted, you can just sit in the other person’s arms and say, “Hug me, I need you to give me some strength.” Or if you feel uncomfortable today and don’t want to move, just take the initiative to tell the other person: “I’m not feeling very well. Can you get me a glass of warm water?”

Since you are looking forward to such a relationship, take action and let yourself enter such a state first. Don’t shrink back because you are afraid that you won’t be able to get it. It may be difficult to take this step, and being honest may make you feel insecure. But you have to know that happiness is cultivated by love. You can only get it if you work hard, love, and strive for it. Just having expectations is just wishful thinking.

And when your focus is on how to obtain love and happiness, you will find more love and happiness.

Sometimes you never lack happiness, but you lack the mentality to pursue happiness.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

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2bebetter
2bebetter

Written by 2bebetter

"Exploring love & relationships. Providing advice, insights, and inspiration to inspire you to find & maintain healthy and fulfilling connections."