Introduction; Courtship and Romance

“All marriages are happy. It’s living together afterwards that is difficult.”
Anonymous

Once upon a time, you’ll remember, your husband would bring you flowers, open doors for you and generally offer you his open and sincere heart. If your marriage is like most marriages it has grown comfortable and, let’s admit it, stale, over time. “The thrill is gone,” is the lament of so many married couples. Familiarity and routine, recriminations and disappointments, take a predictable toll on happy-every-after relationships. Husbands and wives drift apart, physically and emotionally, or maintain alliances of custom and convenience, keepers of a flickering flame. By the time you hit midlife, your marriage is “settled” and most often things start to cool down. Certain aspects become repetitive as people take each other for granted. The love may still be there but it is a less passionate, more platonic love; a familiar love. In the most negative instances this can lead to increasing unhappiness and frustration and ultimately, in the worst case scenario, infidelity and divorce. Even in the best cases, I will offer, it is less of a marriage than it could be.

If you don’t believe me, allow me to refresh your memory a little. I am now talking to women who are married or who were married before. Remember when you were first dating? Remember how accommodating your future husband was and how all his desires were directed at you? Think back… Remember how he was so sweet and kind. Remember how he used to bring you flowers or little gifts? He would do whatever you wanted to do and go wherever you wanted to go. Do you remember what it was like, how exciting it all was? Remember your wedding day, and the love and romance of your honeymoon? Remember that?  Remember how much you loved him then? Let me ask you this. Has it changed? If so, what do you think changed?

Of course once you got married, your day-to-day interactions will almost always have changed, become more domestic. Maybe relatives or in-laws took more of your time and in many cases children entered the mix. Regardless of this evolution, almost certainly your husband’s attitude changed, didn’t he?

• Did he tend to ignore you?
• Did more and more often something become a fight and/or an argument?
• Did he become a little more selfish?
• Did he start to disrespect you in private or maybe even in public?
• Maybe he started to hang around his friends again or he watched television all the time or he played video games or he surfed the web continuously.
• Did he become absorbed with work and work related activities?
• Did he start to refuse to go with you to visit your friends and family?
• Did he refuse to go with you shopping or to the places that he once loved to go along with you just to be near you?
• Did the flowers and gifts stop?
• Maybe he became cheap and tight with money?
• Then there is the sex. Sex used to happen anywhere or anytime, used to last all night and be so exciting. Now, has it become boring, predictable and fast?

Perhaps you have asked your self, what happened to the passion? What happened to the romantic guy that you were dating? While it is unlikely that all of the above symptoms apply in your particular circumstance, I’m sure virtually every married woman will be able to point to some of the above as prevalent in her marriage.

There seems a sad inevitability in all this. Most wives assume that this is the natural course of marriage like the erosion of a rock by a river or the fading of paint in the sunlight. Love has its seasons, as John Gray reminds us in “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”. It’s folly to expect eternal springtime, perpetual romance. Most marriage counselors would agree. Divorce attorneys can be even more pragmatic. They know that once the cancer of disaffection has spread, the damage is almost always irreversible.

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