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Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away summary

Name: Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away
Rating: 4.1 (147 reviews)
Author: Gary Chapman

Gary Chapman

Real Help For Desperate Hearts in Difficult Marriages

4.1 (147 ratings)

21 mins

Topics

Love Marriage

Table of Contents

Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? A manifesto for mending marriages.

We’ve all seen it on the big screen and read about it in novels. Two people fall in love at first sight. Then they marry, buy a house, have kids and live happily ever after. It’s an image of perfection that shapes the way we think about married life. No wonder so many of us start panicking and planning our escape when the first cracks appear in a previously happy marriage.

Divorce, however, isn’t the easy solution it sometimes appears to be. When a marriage starts going off the rails, it’s usually because there are underlying problems. Left unattended, these problems have an unfortunate habit of reappearing in future relationships. The real answer, then, is to address them. Love isn’t perfect and marriage isn’t always what the movies tell us it should be. Working through issues is as much a part of marriage as the honeymoon.

Luckily, there are plenty of tried-and-true strategies you can start putting into action today to help heal your relationship.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

how positivity makes even the most damaged relationship mendable;
why shocking your partner can put your marriage on the road to recovery; and
why infidelity doesn’t have to be a deal breaker.

Divorce might seem like an “easy” solution, but it isn’t an answer to deep-seated emotional pain.

We live in a throwaway society. When the latest electronic gadget hits the market, we don’t hesitate to hit the buy button and toss out our old devices. That attitude isn’t just restricted to consumer products. When it comes to marriage, we’re just as likely to favor trading in the old for the new. But there’s a problem: divorce isn’t the “easy” solution it sometimes appears to be.

When people tell one another that they’re having a tough time in their marriages, they often want to be told that they should hit the eject button. But marriages aren’t like bad investments; they can’t be ditched as soon as their value drops. Your partner isn’t a stock option but a person with whom you develop a deep bond founded on love, even if only for a certain period of time.

That’s why divorce – the severing of that bond for good – takes such an emotional toll. Then there are the practical difficulties. Take Karin, one of the author’s clients. Her life was much harder after she divorced. She realized that she now had to work a full-time job to support her family, leaving her with less time to spend with her children. She felt sad, anxious and drained.

Another reason that divorce often fails as a solution is that the problems it addresses reoccur in all relationships. That’s something Michael, another client of the author, realized after divorcing his wife. The cause of the split was their constant fighting. A few years later, he met another woman and fell in love. He was convinced he’d be happy in his new relationship.

He was wrong. A few months in, the couple ran into trouble. Michael’s new partner had children from a previous marriage, and he resented how much attention she devoted to them rather than to him. He also struggled to assert his authority in what was now his family. Divorce, it turned out, hadn’t been a silver bullet to his problems.

So if divorce isn’t always the solution, what should you do when your marriage hits the rocks?

The best way of getting through tough times is to focus on the positive and try to be more loving.

Sadness is infectious. When you’re in a situation that makes you unhappy, it’s easy to end up getting stuck in a quagmire of misery. But the only way out is to stay upbeat. Staying focused on the positive is what’ll get you through tough times.

So how do you apply that idea to your marriage? Well, the place to start is recognizing that you’re responsible for your own responses. If you’re constantly thinking about everything that’s going wrong and letting that upset you, things will inevitably get a whole lot worse. Keep the positives in mind, however, and you’ll be well on your way to turning the situation around.

Be constructive rather than critical if your spouse doesn’t meet your expectations.

If you married someone, it was probably because you assumed they were responsible enough to share the burdens of married life. But sometimes it doesn’t work out like that. Marriages often run into difficulties when one spouse doesn’t meet the expectations of the other.

Take the author’s clients Suzanne and Jamal. Suzanne was a highly motivated and competent saleswoman as well as a dedicated mother to her first daughter from a previous marriage. Those were the qualities Jamal found attractive in his soon-to-be wife. He assumed that he could take on the role of provider while Suzanne took charge of the domestic side of things.

Sometimes you need to give your partner a shock to communicate that there’s a problem.

When the author gives public talks, he often encounters the same question. How, someone in the audience will inevitably ask, do you deal with a workaholic spouse? After all, it’s not easy to work through problems with someone who’s never there in the first place!

Sometimes the only way of addressing unresolved issues is to give your partner a shock. Take it from Amy and Jim. The latter was a confirmed workaholic. Amy barely saw her husband due to the long hours he put in at the office. She’d tried to broach the subject a couple of times, but nothing had come of it.

Try to understand your spouse’s controlling behavior rather than attempting to argue it out.

Sometimes spouses start to become overly controlling. They want to know where and with whom their husband or wife has been as soon as they get home. That can quickly leave their partners feeling caged in. But there are solutions. The key? Trying to understand what’s driving their controlling behavior rather than confronting them head-on. And that requires coming to grips with the psychology behind it.

Two points stand out. First, controlling spouses love freedom – as long as it’s their freedom. Making their partner go along with their wishes enhances that sense of being free. Second, most controlling spouses have a strong need to feel important. Achieving the goals they set for themselves is their way of getting that feeling. If their partner’s own wishes get in the way, so much the worse for them.

Dealing with a verbally abusive spouse requires a plan and a tough line.

Sadly, verbal abuse isn’t all that uncommon in marriages. Partners belittle their husbands or wives all the time, suggesting that they’re stupid or inadequate. Dealing with this kind of vitriol isn’t easy, but it can be done. What you need is a plan and plenty of love.

Let’s start with your plan. Think of it as a roadmap to a healthier marriage. The first step is to share your intentions with your partner. If they’re willing to change their abusive behavior, you can draw up your plan together with or without the help of a therapist. If they’re not, you’ll have to inform them that you’re no longer willing to deal with their verbal abuse.

Being on the receiving end of the silent treatment is infuriating, but it’s often a sign of unmet emotional needs.

You can be the most upbeat and communicative person in the world and still run into marital problems if your partner refuses to talk things through with you. What makes matters even trickier is that there’s nothing quite as infuriating as being on the receiving end of the silent treatment.

Take it from Katelyn, a woman who sought out the author’s advice after her husband Chris refused to talk to her for days on end. The situation had left her feeling powerless. Every time she asked him what was wrong, he’d simply get up and stomp out of the room.

Infidelity doesn’t have to be a deal breaker as long as your partner can forgive you.

Ever heard the phrase “I plight thee my troth?” It’s essentially an old-fashioned way of saying that you’ll be true to your partner, and it was long used in wedding vows. The basic idea that fidelity is the linchpin of marriage is still very powerful – so much so, in fact, that infidelity is commonly considered a deal breaker.

If you look at it from another angle, however, infidelity can actually be seen as a chance to heal a relationship. Sounds counterintuitive, right? But there are good reasons to think about it in this way.

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What is Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away about?

Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away (2008) is about difficult marriages and how to work things out when you’re most tempted to hit the eject button. Written by a marriage counselor with years of hands-on experience, this patient and thoughtful reflection on rocky marriages is ultimately filled with hope. With enough understanding, empathy and clear communication, Gary Chapman argues, there are few marriages that can’t be saved.

Best quote from Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away

While divorce removes some pressures, it creates a host of others.

—Gary Chapman

Who should read Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away?

Couples who’ve hit a rough patch in their marriage
Unfaithful spouses
Psychologists and counselors

About the Author

Gary Chapman is a writer, public speaker and counselor who specializes in helping couples overcome romantic adversities and heal their marriages. His previous work includes the best-selling The Five Love Languages.

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