You know who your friends are when you’re going through a relationship crisis. Maybe your husband is coming up to 40 and has started acting strangely; perhaps you’ve caught him texting another woman; or, worst of all, he’s threatening to leave you and break up the family.
Whatever the circumstances, it’s only being able to phone a friend or chat with the girls over a glass of wine that stops you from going round the bend.
However, after almost 30 years working as a marital therapist, I’ve become convinced that, while men don’t have enough friends or emotional support, women can have far too many and too much.
In fact, my heart sinks when a new female client tells me her ‘friends have been wonderful’ because time and time again, while she thinks they’ve been helping her save her relationship, they’ve been fanning the flames or even throwing petrol on the fire.
EXAMPLE
Charlotte, 48, who chairs the board of governors at a school in Kent, sought my help when her husband David, 47, announced out of the blue that he didn’t love her any more, saw no future in their marriage and wanted to rent a flat in the next town, away from her and their three children.
‘You’ll never guess what he’s done now,’ she said as she sat down in my office, in the same tone I imagined her speaking to friends. ‘He’s bought our 12-year-old some trashy heels. He knows I don’t approve and he’d have been the first to complain if I got her a small top or anything else he considered inappropriate, but since we’ve separated, he’ll do anything to curry favour.’
When Charlotte finished cataloguing the ways her husband had let her down, I asked her to reflect on why he might have behaved like this. She became more thoughtful.
‘He’s not used to disciplining the children, as he’s left that up to me, and he’s frightened of alienating the girls, so he’s a pushover.’
Her friends hadn’t been so understanding: they just matched her initial outrage and told her she should return the shoes. She hadn’t yet done that, and as we talked she admitted that it would escalate the problem, so instead she decided to discuss it with her husband.
That’s what she did, he apologised and they were beginning to communicate better. Charlotte told me that she was relieved she hadn’t listened to her friends.
However, a few weeks later, she discovered her husband was using their temporary separation not to ‘get his head straight’, as he had told her, but to date another woman. Once again, it seemed her friends were a vital support system.
When her internet trawl discovered new evidence about her rival, she would call friends at all hours. ‘I’ll find a new picture of her on Facebook and I’ll be so incensed I pick up the phone to a friend to analyse what it means,’ she told me.
Unfortunately, going over all the minutiae with your friends is more likely to pump up your distress, make you feel angrier and betrayed, and more likely to fire off a late-night text or email — as it did with Charlotte.
In her case, goaded on by her friend, she sent a message to the other woman. ‘I thought she should know just what she was doing to my family,’ she explained. ‘But it totally backfired. All I did was push my husband and her closer together.’
One problem with confiding in friends about your marital problems is that you often give them a very one-sided account of the situation — and thus get a skewed response.
FIVE STEPS TO SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE
When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Under pressure, we tend to try the same failed strategy again and again. Even though we know pushing for an answer, getting angry or going silent doesn’t work, we imagine doing it one more time (but bigger, louder or for longer) will
change things. It won’t.
Stop playing tit for tat. He does something horrible and you match him. Soon it’s become a race to the bottom.
Just for a second, put your feelings to one side and step in your partner’s shoes. How does your relationship look now and what would you like to do differently?
Make a full apology. This is different from saying sorry. First, acknowledge any behaviour that you regret; next, identify how this might have made him feel, and then apologise. Please don’t explain why you acted as you did — that’s for another day — because it can sound like an excuse and lessen the power of your apology.
Be the big one. If you love your husband — and if not, why are you spending hours talking about him to your girlfriends — do you love him enough to give without any expectation (in the short term) of getting anything back?
Perhaps it is not surprising we urge our friends to take the same path as us because, when it comes down to it, everybody questions whether they’ve made the right choices and having friends come to similar conclusions is reassuring.
So while it’s fine to occasionally talk to your friends about your relationship, instead of talking about the man in your life, you should be really be talking and — even more importantly — listening to him.
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