They promised each other love and faithfulness, but something went wrong [10 Signs of the End of Relationship]

Ten silent signs of the end of relationship

1. You haven’t been arguing. For a long time.

2. You argue. All the time.

3. Winning is everything.

4. Children, work, and in fact anything else – is always more important than you.

5. Sex is a relic.

6. He is not a “first contact person”.

7. Control.

8. It is hard. All the time.

9. You imagine what it would be like when it’s OVER.

10. If it weren’t for the children...

***

Krystyna Romanowska: As a lawyer, you see signals that the relationship is slowly disintegrating. Are these signals repeatable for most couples who come to you for help with divorce?

Marcjanna Dębska: Two things must be distinguished: the reasons for a divorce and the reasons for breaking up. My clients talk about the reasons that influence the decision to divorce. So together we are looking for evidence in order to be able to prove in the courtroom that this breakdown of ties took place and to explain why. The courtroom loves facts and evidence, so we can talk about betrayal, violence, lack of cooperation, neglect, etc. And I feel that these are the circumstances that justify divorce, but do not explain why the partners committed these marital offences. Even post factum, my analytical nature makes me want to drill down and try to figure out what really happened between those people who promised each other love, fidelity and marital honesty.

I think we pay a lot of attention to the issues around divorce, but still too little to having a good relationship life.

If couples were attentive and present enough in the relationship and in constant, regular contact with each other, perhaps they would be able to notice some disturbing signals and therefore take some action. First of all, I try to approach my clients in such a way that I can advise them primarily on how not to divorce, and how to create lasting and building relationships. We will always have time to part ways in the end.

Then let’s analyse the individual signals: “you haven’t been arguing for a long time” and “you argue all the time”. Are these two versions of the same problem or two completely different problems?

There are such marriages, families shown as role models. We hear (or say): “My parents never quarrelled and you are so quarrelsome”. And it’s true: there are houses of silence where for some reason no one argues. It has always puzzled me. Why don’t people argue? Maybe because there is already such a level of indifference in the relationship that no one just wants to? Because what for? Everyone has their own life, a shelf in the fridge, salary, car. Shared children go to school, life has a rhythm. There are no points of contact at all to explain or establish anything. Or to put it another way: one of the partners is so pacified that he or she has nothing to say. People do not argue, because everything is settled, there is nothing to fight for.

There is no quarrel because there are no emotions either.

There are no high emotions in such a relationship. A peaceful, fun life. A very bad sign: every relationship must have its amplitude. If it is not there – it means that the relationship does not work. After all, our energies interpenetrate and interact with each other, and this also increases the interaction. A completely different situation is when the partners keep arguing and neither of them is able to let go. These conflicts may be an earlier stage in the pacification of one of the parties who surrenders. He or she gives up and remains silent. And the relationship is slowly turning into a firing squad.

You ask people directly: “Do you argue?”

I do not have to! Clients, of both genders, say this in the first place: “I can’t stand it”, “I won’t take it any more”, “I hate these quarrels, this mental and literal struggle”. Paradoxically, it is mostly men, not women, who are physically oppressed. A man saying: “My wife scratched me” will not be taken seriously. The trouble is, for example, that his wife scratched him for the seventh time this month.

What do women say?

Women complain that they constantly hear: “You won’t get it, you don’t deserve it”. A kind of male domination, essentially economic violence.

Quarrelling is badly perceived by society. Quarrelsome people are disliked. It is assumed that it is not proper to argue in public, and the saying “the wiser should yield” is well-known to us. The trouble is, just because we don’t argue doesn’t mean we don’t have problems. It is therefore essential that we accept that every relationship encounters problems and arguments are the aftermath, which in turn is a sign that the relationship is alive. A constructive row from which we draw conclusions takes us away from the courtroom.

“Winning is everything.” Is it about people proving to themselves that they are better than their partner? They take part in a competition for better parents, employees of the month, for the best cleaners?

Competition in such couples is omnipresent: “I am a better person”, “I cleaned the sink better”, “I vacuum well”, “I can do everything better”. I believe that this is the so-called corporate approach to relationships. What happens next? Since one partner is better, someone has to be worse. One of my clients, a young married woman, pays for the kindergarten, and her husband pays the other bills. And it’s not the same amount. They both feel that it is not equal. And if it is not equal, it is unfair, so someone is wronged. Winning in a relationship involves communist thinking: “The same amount to everyone – fairly and equally”. And yet the family code says something different: not the same to everyone, but to everyone according to their capabilities.

When starting a family, we are obliged to contribute with all our strength and intellectual, financial and personality abilities to ensure its well-being. Cooperation does not mean that it should be even. On the contrary, it just cannot be equal and even. If she empties the dishwasher, he can’t empty it any more – that’s normal. What is the equivalent of a dishwasher? Will it be vacuuming or putting in the laundry? This is where classification and competition begin. If we treat each other equally and start billing each other – the essence of relationship and energy is lost. Women and men have different energies. A couple that forms is a new entity composed of two unique energies. How is this entity supposed to develop if it is accounted for in Excel as an enterprise?

Winning is a common part of the divorce conflict. Accounting the future ex-spouse for every slightest breach is a standard. Can you imagine that in the courtroom we sometimes have to deal with the fact that the child had two toenails uncut or came back wearing two different socks? After all, this is the element of winning – “I will prove to you that you are a worse parent, what’s more, that you have always been worse!”.

There are relationships where someone does more and there really is no equivalent.

Of course there are a lot of lazy partners, of both sexes. But how to deal with that? Is competition the solution? Or maybe we should just say: “If you do not want to clean, then you pay for the cleaning lady, because I will not do it”. It will probably sound strange in “Wysokie Obcasy”, but women are still trying to race against men on male terms. Or maybe just say: “I am a woman to look after me and I don’t want to take part in another competition.”

It is worth asking the question: why do we need a relationship/home? To prove and win, or rather to have a shelter, an enclave, to gain strength? And now a classic of the genre – why do men leave for another woman, having a well-educated, attractive, cool wife with them? My experience shows that because they are tired of fighting and look for an enclave. Therefore, many of them leave such relationships. They don’t want to feel like in school all the time.

This does not mean that the woman should cook at home and applaud whatever he does.

Absolutely not. On the contrary. If you want a clean house, there are people who do it professionally and you pay them for cleaning. A lot of women constantly fight for gold in the home race, they cook, clean well, give 300% of themselves, but I also know a lot of couples in which this competition does not exist. It is peaceful, although the women do not cook at all and keep ordering sushi. A woman doesn’t need to prove or deserve something. We don’t need to cook or vacuum to deserve love. It’s the same with men.

“Children, work, and in fact anything else is always more important than us.” Is this a kind of escape so as not to think about what is happening in the relationship?

“We don’t go away alone with my husband/wife at weekends because you know... we have children.” And the kids are 14 and 16 years old. They are an excuse, hostages to emotions. We are so busy being parents that we are no longer partners. It seems to us that we do not have the right to live as a couple, since we have children, and we want to be very responsible and not make mistakes of our parents, we do not want to miss anything, so initially pushed by this parental enthusiasm we forget that the city after 11 p.m. is still full of life. And this parenting machine takes off until finally someone looks at the spouse only through the prism of the role of father/mother.

Men (paradoxically not only women, as it might seem) who are not happy in a relationship very often run away “into children”. And they actually spend time with these children. Each Saturday, they take them from ball to hockey, from hockey to piano. Just so that they don’t spend time at home. Therefore, a potential divorce is a tragedy for them. So children form a very strong wall against divorce. They also run away to social media and work. Virtually anything that keeps their head outside the house.

“Sex is a relic.” Is this perhaps the most reliable measure of a relationship?

I haven’t met a client who would say: “Yeah, we’re getting divorced, but the last sex was right before I moved out”. But I heard about couples that haven’t had sex for two, three, four years... No sex, no argument, no conversation, nothing. Silence, peace. You can drink your coffee in peace.

I know this sounds cruel, but the first sex crisis begins after the baby is born. After giving birth, a woman focuses on the baby and naturally has less sexual needs. He feels rejected. And he doesn’t always cope with the fact that a woman’s body is changing. The man’s lack of acceptance of this body – a life changed by the daily effort, being close to him and loving him – closes the door to sex.

The moment when a woman focuses on her children and her partner intensifies her complexes can be a turning point for sexual life, which is one of the pillars of marriage.

Remember that the cessation of a physical bond is one of the three reasons for divorce.

For me, this difficult time after childbirth is de facto a test of masculinity. To what extent you, man, are ready to be with a woman despite the changes that have taken place. And tell her she is a sexy babe with nice breasts.

Men cannot break away from their mother’s phantasm, they play the role of fathers themselves, and this is the end of the romance. Something like going out on a date appears. I am in favour of dating. Once a week we talk about our relationship on Thursday at 7:15 pm or we arrange to have sex on Saturday at 10 pm. Whatever. It is so unromantic, unspontaneous, but it works. But it’s very difficult to be spontaneous, working 60 hours a week and having three children, a dog and sick parents.

“He/she is not a first contact person.” Meaning she doesn’t enter his name in the box when she goes to hospital?

No, he or she does not call him/her when something wrong has happened, there has been some unpleasantness, he/she wants to cry. He or she doesn’t call the partner saying: “Save me, hear me”. The partner knows that they will not be understood. In a crisis situation, we call when we need help, support, and to be heard. Sometimes we make phone calls on matters where there is nothing to be done, but we are so frustrated, so unhappy, so angry that we want to be heard, reassured. Sometimes we hear charges in the courtroom: “She always calls her friends”. “She/he only calls her/his mother.” Then you feel like asking: “Or maybe it’s just that she called you a number of times and you ignored her?”. And the opposite question for women.

“Control.” Do we control our partner’s social media and phone? Or rather, use parental methods like: “You didn’t put on your hat”?

Control in general. A partner is our child and must be subordinate to us: I need to know where he or she is because he or she hasn’t been answering the phone for two hours. I heard an anecdote about a couple where the husband always came home from work at 6:15 pm. After 20 years, his wife realised that he finished work at 4 pm. The right question was asked on her part: “What’s going on in these two hours?”. There were private detectives, investigation. And what turned out? The man sat in his Volkswagen with a newspaper, ate a sandwich and read the newspaper every day for 20 years. He was free then, uncontrolled. Surprising? After what I saw, not any more.

Control begins because there are suspicions or it is simply commonly believed that “being in a relationship” equals “control”?

Control is convenient because we all operate in familiar patterns: women control their partners, just as their mothers previously did. And women fulfil themselves as mothers to their men. In addition, they will make them breakfast, do the washing, prepare a sandwich for work and they will check that he is wearing a hat and taking his medication. Women have power over men the way they do over children: they know better. The snag is, no one wants to sleep with their mother. Polish women control incredibly hard, but so do men. They ask their partners: “Where are you going? Who are you going with? With friends? Which friends?”. They also exercise financial control: “You know, I looked at the account and I’m surprised you spend so much. On what?”.

“It’s hard all the time.” I understand that we are dealing with a state of permanent stress, tension, but also resignation from the fight, surrender?

 “It’s hard all the time, it’s hard in everything. When we go on vacation, when we are at the airport, when we are at work or in a shop – it is hard all the time.”

This relationship has ceased to be an enclave, a refuge. They don’t even know why it’s hard any more. They would like their partner to dissolve in the fog, to disappear.

Sometimes people can’t afford to break up for financial reasons. They cannot afford to be together, but they also cannot break up. This is just a very frustrating situation.

“You imagine what it would be like when it’s OVER.” We visualise the situation of parting, because it is easier for us then.

Yes, clients see themselves in such an optimistic version. Or they think: “God, how stupid I was, do not let me make this mistake again”, so they already treat this relationship as a mistake. They are planning an escape under the slogan: “Ah, and if I were single”.

This visualisation is good because it may help you decide to break up.

But there is also a difficulty. This picture: oh, I will be so free – is also, of course, untrue. It’s not that our partners are unambiguously bad. They also have a lot of nice things to offer, but we cut off the good ones on this level of thinking, we do not confront the fact that we will miss something, that we also took something from this relationship.

“If it weren’t for the children...” Then what? We would split up?

Yes, if it weren’t for the children, it’d be over a long time ago. Children become hostages in the sense that unconsciously their parents blame them for still being together. Children are the sad reason we are together, so they somehow cut us off from this wonderful single life on a bed of roses.

If I – as a lawyer – were to give any advice, it would probably be to turn on the heart rate monitor. To check at what stage we are in the relationship. Let us remember that we are imperfect, that we make the same mistakes. For example, when we resort to work. Maybe we do not notice that the partner feels neglected. The easiest way to do this is through conversation. This ancient way of communicating information – talking. Believe me – it is reliable.

Marcjanna Dębska – lawyer and mediator

Autorka:  Krystyna Romanowska

Ilustracja:  pexels.com

The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 21 August 2021