Why respect in partnership is so important
It should be a nice evening for four, but for the 48-year-old elementary school teacher Dagmar Gessler * it was the ultimate stress. Her best friend Anja had just fallen in love with her at the age of 51 and wanted to introduce the new man to her side. So they sat opposite each other? the old couple Dagmar and Wolfgang and the young love happiness Anja and Peter. The couple at a distance, little eye contact, hardly any touches, why also, one knew each other already longer. The lovers a human pretzel, nonstop tender looks and gestures.
"I've never noticed so rudely and inattentively my husband and I deal with each other," says Dagmar, "until Wolfgang reached over to me for salt, while my red wine glass overturned and I grunted him with 'pass on, you dork' And that only struck me so badly because Peter was just taking off his jacket to kill Anja and removing his things from his pockets so it would not be too heavy for them Wow, I thought, there is such a thing as well."
By then, Dagmar had kept the tone in her marriage perfectly normal. After all, they were no longer a newly-in love young couple. They had raised three children, bought a house, built a business, and lost again. They had cheated and forgiven themselves. He had held her hand when she learned it was not breast cancer. She bought him pumpkin seed pills for the prevention of prostate enlargement. A bed without him in it was unimaginable to her. A life without him even less.
Is there something missing in the partnership when there is no respect?
But was that really enough? Suddenly there were questions. When did Wolfgang last stop her car door? When she folded up the newspaper after reading because he hated "messy" newspapers so much? When was the last time she had laughed at his jokes? When was the last time he had praised her cattle roulade? Did you even compliment that? She touched him tenderly because she loved touching his skin? And the main question: Why do we treat the people we love the most, often worse than completely strangers? Why do we sympathetically show each other when a coworker is late and react irritably with "I find that ruthless of you!" When the partner does it? Yawn unashamedly when reporting from the company, and then hang around for hours with our best friend on the phone?
"Because we believe we can afford it," says Hamburg behavioral therapist Petra Ohlsen-Andresen, "and because we are often so stressed out at work that we do not want to work on our relationship, we think that love is a self-reliant But it's not as hard-wearing as we would like it to be, and it's often not the big breaches of trust, such as cheating, that break them, but the accumulation of many small things. "
Dagmar knew that after 24 years of marriage, "the air was out," as she called it. It would have seemed silly for her to suddenly smuggle Wolfgang small messages of love into the briefcase or greet him in the evening in a black nightgown. What bothered her much more were the little loves and carelessness that had gradually crept into her marriage, of which they had once sworn before the altar "to love and honor themselves until death separates us ".
Since the children were out of the house, they had become accustomed to eating in front of the TV, barely talking. Only for two was the cooking no longer worthwhile, so there was dinner from the microwave or a cheese sandwich. Afterwards, Wolfgang often fell asleep on the sofa. Dagmar then went to bed. Every morning at breakfast everyone read the newspaper. Needless to say that her sexual frequency was no longer measurable. Dagmar loved her husband and also loved him. But was it really still love, this warm, inattentive togetherness? On her fridge stuck a sticker, which said, "Lucky for the reduction of happiness!" Sound clever, the saying, but also somehow depressing. Just like the abrupt change of voice when the husband gossiped at home, but when the boss called, the friendliness was in person. "But I also reacted to the stress of Wolfgang much more irritated than any other person."
Love has to be earned
Marriage is like aging: changes happen slowly, over years and decades, and for a long time we can suppress that nothing is the way it used to be. When we start a relationship, says Ohlsen-Andresen, "we take mutual trust, respect and fairness for granted, and we believe we deserve all that, but that's not true: love has to be earned, every day anew We have to be attentive, listen, look.One must never let up and must treat his partner as one wants to be treated by him. "
And that's what we forget in everyday life. We let ourselves go, internally and externally. Like the 43-year-old housewife and mother Corinna Seifert, we walk around in the slick Mutti T-shirt and comfortable jogging pants. We do not put our hands over our mouths when we yawn, we brush our teeth together over the sink, we use our damp forefinger to dab the crumbs from the plate, and when we get rid of a burp, we are no longer embarrassed. "You walk around in your dressing gown, do not even change your clothes, your hair is dangling from side to side," sings Charles Aznavour in his unforgettable chanson "You let yourself go." And although it bothers Corinna herself, when husband Helmut sits on the edge of the bathtub and cuts his toenails, it does not stop her from shaving her armpit hair.
"It's the two sides of the relationship medal," says Ohlsen-Andresen, "the positive ones: I'm not afraid that you'll leave me, and the negative ones: I'm not going to strain myself on you anymore. that we do not care too much, and freedom is very important. "
We do not notice the dying of love at all
Do we understand our love as something precious, which we must handle very carefully so that it does not break down? No, we do not. When love lasts longer, it becomes as natural as the air we breathe. Always there. Not worth talking about. We do not notice their creeping dying at all. We cut ourselves off, pulp ourselves off, do not listen. We do not mean it all bad. That's the way it is, love, it gets tired, it wears off, but you're just powerless, are not you? "No, you're not when you realize that every relationship needs to be nurtured," says Ohlsen-Andresen, "Love must not only be diffused, it must also be actively expressed."
This is often easier than we imagine or fear. We just have to overcome our inertia. For example, have breakfast with your partner, instead of turning back in bed and staying asleep. We really talk to each other instead of reading the newspaper while eating. "For the first time in years, I did not give Wolfgang a coupon for my birthday, but I scoured the shops for a leather jacket," says Dagmar, "he was really happy about it.
We know that a good relationship is not just air and love, but also the enduring of disillusionment. Nobody is so close, so good, but no one can disappoint and hurt you like that.
"What are you doing to make it better?" Petra Ohlsen-Andresen asks if you're facing one of those couples who want to work on their marriage. And she advises both, not always just waiting for what the other one is doing. Because escalates the frenzy. It is better to see together: "Yes, we are disrespectful to each other, we have noticed that our relationship is fanning out, but we forgive ourselves the botch and the legacies of recent years, we go back together tidier."
* all names changed by the editor
