What is Your Losing Stragey Profile?
In today’s post, I outline five losing strategies couples use toward each other that can eventually kill their relationship. These five strategies come from Relational Life Therapy (Terry Real).
The Same Fight, Over and Over: Breaking Cycles of Conflict
Most long-term couples aren't actually arguing about twenty different topics — they're having the same one or two arguments in different costumes. The specific trigger changes (money, in-laws, chores, tone of voice), but the underlying pattern repeats: one person pursues and the other withdraws, or both dig in and neither backs down, or the same unresolved hurt from years ago gets reactivated every time.
Growing Apart: When You Feel Like Roommates, Not Married
This quandary rarely announces itself with a crisis. It arrives quietly, through years of full calendars, tired evenings, and the assumption that the relationship will simply take care of itself while attention goes elsewhere — work, kids, ministry, the next deadline. Then one day someone looks up and realizes they're coexisting rather than truly knowing each other.
When It’s Time to Cut Ties: How to Know If You Should Leave a Narcissistic Spouse
Every other post in this series is about living with someone. This one is about whether you should.
Deciding to end a marriage is one of the hardest choices a person makes, especially for people who take vows seriously. If you're asking the question, you are almost certainly not being casual. Here are the criteria that help.
After Twenty Years, My Husband Isn't Interested in Me Anymore. What's Wrong With Me? What Should I Do?
Twenty years is a long time to build a life with someone. It's also long enough for silence to grow around a hard topic without either of you quite meaning for it to happen. If sexual intimacy has quietly faded, and you're left wondering what you did wrong, please hear this clearly: a husband's loss of sexual interest is rarely, if ever, a verdict on his wife's desirability. It's almost always a symptom of something else — and most of those somethings have nothing to do with you.
