All marriages go through ups and downs and highs and lows. After all, living with another person, meshing your lives together, is not always easy, no matter how much you love one another. Particularly when you have children, you can get so busy with their activities, your work, and keeping the household running, that you may miss the signs that tell you your spouse is not just in a lull, but has truly checked out of the marriage. In fact, according to many marriage counselors, by the time a couple makes it to therapy, one of them—usually the husband—has already emotionally divorced himself from the marriage.
An emotional divorce occurs when one partner is so fed up, he or she simply disconnects. At this point that spouse will generally be apathetic about their partner as well as about the relationship. There are signs that a spouse has checked out; while some are the same for men or women, others are more specific to gender. If you think your husband has checked out of your marriage, look at the following signs and see how many he has exhibited within the past few months:
He’s hypercritical. Most of us can remember the beginning of our relationship. Love colored everything, even the personality quirks of our partner. As relationships progress, those rose-colored glasses will naturally begin to fall away, and we will likely experience mild annoyance that our spouse can sink a basketball from twenty feet, but is unable to make it to the clothes hamper with dirty socks. Mild annoyance, yes, but in most instances, you still exhibit some level of generosity to one another when dealing with mistakes. If your husband has grown extremely hypercritical of everything you do—things that were never a problem before—then you likely have a bigger problem.
Renowned psychology professor and researcher, Dr. John Gottman, believes “stonewalling” is one of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” as far as a predictor of divorce. Stonewalling is basically withdrawing emotionally from your spouse, or, in simpler terms, giving your partner the silent treatment. When a person gets so angry, frustrated and upset that he or she shuts down and disengages from any type of meaningful conversation, stonewalling has occurred. A full 85 percent of all “stonewallers” in a heterosexual relationship are men. When you add criticism, contempt and defensiveness behaviors to stonewalling, Dr. Gottman believes he can predict with 90 percent accuracy the demise of a relationship based on those four issues.
