A huge problem in marriages is… not knowing how to truly meet one’s own needs. That is, not knowing how to be truly responsible to oneself in interactions with one’s partner.
Most commonly, partners in marriage are only partially candid with themselves and their partners about what they need. By candid I mean, to truly relate to their partner about what they desire, and for their partner, in turn, to truly relate back about how that impacts them and their own genuine needs. Relating, of the type I have in mind here, involves a true going back and forth, which almost always leads to inherently creative win-win solutions in life.
Most of us in marriage expend much of our time relating to fantasies of ourselves and how we should be, and fantasies of how we imagine our partner to be. We then expend a lot of our daily effort to realize these fantasies, thinking that if I can be what I think I should be, then my partner will naturally become who I wish they were; most of this without hardly ever talking to each other.
This marital non-communication often results in terrible conflict, recrimination and self-recrimination at its worst. At its best, these marriages can be tolerable and sometimes content, but with little depth and little real emotional contact.
Note that this all happens because we do not ourselves know how to embody who we are, be clear about who we are to ourselves, and to take responsibility to bring ourselves to our partner, for the purposes of encounter. Our partner, in turn, usually struggles with some similar difficulty.
