Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

Healthy relationships take work. Healthy marriages that people want to stay in don’t just happen, although we think they do. We believe two people magically work together, never fight, and never have an issue or disagreement to work through, but they do.

So, where do things go wrong? How can a friendship that was working so well, a marriage that seemed so right, suddenly seem all wrong?

And often, that’s how it feels. When a marriage goes off the rails, it feels sudden, but it has been moving in that direction for several months or years. 

In some ways, the list below is a dashboard to ask, “Are we going off the track and not knowing it?”

It’s too much work. Healthy relationships take a lot of work. It means being patient, listening, hearing someone out, and putting your wants and privileges aside. That’s work.

It means sacrificing and serving the other person, laying aside your wants and desires for the other person or your family. That is easier said than done.

It hurts too much to face their past or do the hard work. As we’ll see later, almost every fight in a relationship is not about what you are fighting about. You are fighting with a past incident, a hurt you haven’t dealt with, a person you see in the person in front of you. They remind you of your dad or mom; they said words similar to an abuser or someone who you were supposed to trust. Healthy people face their past and see it redeemed by the power of Jesus. This doesn’t mean that you pray, and it is gone. The memories and scars stay, but you move forward in healthy ways.

Unhealthy people use their past and stay the victim instead of finding healing. This is hard work and can be incredibly painful. In any argument, you have to ask the crucial question, “Are we fighting about this? What are we fighting about? Who am I fighting with?”

They want the other person to do all the work and change. Just like #1, being lazy and selfish in relationships is easy. Serving, putting in the work, putting the other person’s needs and wants first takes work. Often, too, we want the other person to work to become a healthy person while we stay unhealthy. “I’ll hold on to that incident and bring it up whenever it suits me. I’ll remind them of my hurt instead of dealing with it.”

They think they are better than their spouse or the other person. Sometimes, people are in an unhealthy relationship because they believe they are less sinful than the other person. They look down on them. They wouldn’t say this but hold the other person’s sin in contempt, thinking, “How can they not see that? Why do they struggle with that?” They turn up their noses at the thought of working hard to reconcile with a spouse or a friend. They will say it is the other person’s fault, but deep down, they are the least sinful person they know.

Confuse what reconciliation means. Reconciliation doesn’t mean you are friends with everyone. You might need to protect yourself from an abusive situation, and you may need to protect your kids as well. Reconciliation means that you don’t hold it against the person anymore and don’t bring up the past. You stop saying, “Remember…?”