Disillusionment

 

Once a relationship's balloon deflates, it won’t be inflated again unless there is proactive repair and mutual understanding. Silent disillusionment, resentment, and seething kill relationships. 

disillusionment is the first stage in any relationship that will eventually end. 

Whether it is your spouse, partner, parent, best friend, family member, co-worker, movie star, sports hero, team, or pet, there will be a moment when what you previously thought of them drops a notch, and you notice it. That is disillusionment. 

Once it happens, things will inevitably go downhill, as you are now hyper-aware and start seeing things. The amount of time you focus on it and your ability to tolerate these things will increase, ultimately reaching a moment where you realize you can’t do it anymore, and a decision will be made, either to disconnect emotionally or, more often, to end the relationship.

The whole dynamic of becoming disillusioned presupposes that you once viewed the person through an admirer’s eyes. 

The honeymoon phase is wonderful because of how it feels, but it is a chemical high, not an emotion many a person mistakes for love. When it happens, our brain sends narcotic-like chemicals into our bloodstream that mimic heroin, and we feel high. When we’re stoned on chemical responses, we are irrational and not thinking clearly. We are either blind to red flags or minimize them, sometimes even talking ourselves into why that negative thing about them is okay.

I once had a client who said her future husband was down on himself and his life when they met but told herself she could save him with her love, a common narcissistic fantasy. 

She learned that some people can’t feel loved or won’t receive it, no matter how much you cover them with it. Overlook any worrisome attribute of a potential partnership at your peril, and avoid feelings for anyone that make you feel like you’re on drugs. 

Love is a verb, an action word that implies loving actions toward another. When the chemicals dissipate, and the obsessive state of gooing over the person ends, it becomes a decision, a choice, to dedicate yourself to enhancing another’s life, even on the days when you don’t feel like it.

The relationship deterioration process: A stone drops into the water, heading to the river’s bottom.

Once a person enters the disillusionment stage, things will go downhill unless something is done. People don’t just stay stuck at kind-of-sort-of disillusioned. It is a moving, downward erosion of positive regard toward something or someone else. That’s why the next stage is called erosion: it is what happens to the positive regard held for that person or thing. 

The unhappy person concludes that their negative feelings are serious, not just a minor blip, and not going away.

In any relationship, if you don’t speak out here and make repairs and corrections or go to marriage therapy, you will go down to the third stage, detachment, where you decide to break away and do as much as you can to be happy on your own and minimize time spent with the person. In this stage, the unhappy spouse makes a bargain with themself: “I don’t want to end this relationship, so if I can just spend less time around them, and start a new hobby, work more, have an affair, go back to school, I can cope with it.”

After that, the fourth stage, The Straw, is inevitable. This happens when that one last thing occurs, big or small, making you realize it is time to disconnect for good. The fifth stage, death of the relationship, is when, if you stay, the relationship will have to change entirely or end. This is when so many of my clients tell their spouses they think they want out, and at this point, it is do or die.

That is the process of disillusionment and death of a relationship. The thing is, if the hogs suddenly learned something they don’t know now, experienced real change, and the results matched the hype, and there was some evidence that I can count on them after all, that they won’t let me down, it’s possible we could revisit the relationship, but I doubt I’ll ever get to where I was in the first place. Marriages are the same way.

Marriage and the downward slide.

I work with people who silently went through all five stages of marital deterioration — disillusionment, erosion, detachment, The Straw, and Death of the marriage, or at least, of what it was — and 

most never said one word to their spouse about how seriously they were struggling in the relationship — this … blows … my … mind. How hard is it to sit your partner down early on when things are slipping and say, “I am having major issues with our marriage, and we need to have a conversation and see if we can change these things?”

It is very hard, apparently, because almost no one does it. The problem with this is that the unhappy partner is ready to leave the marriage, and their partner has no idea, which I view as a betrayal of the worst sort, right up there with a full-blown love affair. Look, if you are sitting across the room from me, sleeping together with me in bed and kissing me, and you are in the disillusionment process and not telling me, then, THEN, you walk in the room and spring it on me one day that you are unhappy and thinking of leaving me; there will be hell to pay.

Think about it. After years together, you tell me you’re leaving without giving me a chance to course-correct and repair; how can I not see you as a villain? If we have kids, and you didn’t give their mom or dad an opportunity to save the marriage while a chance was possible, they will enter the disillusionment stage with you, too.

Public personalities sometimes pay publicists to keep the news about them positive. If negative things arise and start making the rounds, the PR person knows how to spin it so people can empathize and understand instead of harshly judging. They can take something negative and turn it into a positive, in many ways, like a therapist does. They hit things head-on, admit an error, and fess up to write the story of what happened instead of having the press and social media define the narrative. Without their expertise and knowledge of humankind, a small thing could become career-ending for someone prominent.

I sometimes wish the men and women I talk to who are considering leaving their marriage had one, too. As I said, the publicist knows how to handle dicey situations and things in a way that doesn’t blow the person’s world up more than it has to. The publicist would tell the Decider who is thinking of leaving that they had best grow balls or a spine and sit down and show mutual respect by diplomatically giving their unaware spouse a warning shot about the level of their unhappiness and a sincere chance at repair. Without this, and if the announcement comes out of the blue, well, as I said, hell hath no fury, and the ripple waves of disgust will shake the entire family and friend system from great grandma down to your youngest child or grandchild.

In marriages that aren’t violent, abusive, or involve major addiction or adultery, an explanation is owed. A spouse should be given a chance to rectify the grievances, period. During my disillusionment phase in the 1990s, I gave my children’s dad plenty of notice and warning, and toward the end, I made my anguished plea, “You need to do something now, I am barely hanging on.”

On a good day, he promised to do something soon. On a bad day, he stood up and angrily left me stranded wherever we were, sometimes in restaurants, where I’d have to take a taxi home, just moving me further down the slope through the stages of a dying marriage. I asked him years later if he had heard my warnings and my pleas, and he said, “Yes, but I never thought you’d actually leave.”

That is because he was a talker and not a doer, and he narcissistically assumed I was like he was when I was not. If I say I will do something, you can bank on it. He learned that lesson the hard way. I had loved him with complete and wholehearted love and felt I was the luckiest woman in the world initially. Six months into our marriage, he slammed the emotional door shut and never came back out, despite my many attempts to get him to come back out and play with me. His lack of action killed a family, and our children paid the price. The idea that I could love someone so much and then want to get away from them led me to my current career. I wanted to understand how that could happen, and 

it happens because of abuse, total incompatibility, and/or lack of responsiveness; 

in our case, it was the latter.

Siblings, friends, co-workers.

With a sibling, friend, co-worker, or someone else, a person has to decide if a repairing conversation is something they want to embark on. I tried to have one of those with my sister, who bullied me as a child and on and off through adulthood, but she signaled that she didn’t want to — or couldn’t. The way she told it, she dedicated herself to making my life miserable as retaliation for existing or something I had done, when all I remember about my actions was trying to stay away from her. I used to watch the cartoon Popeye as a child, and in my mind, I was Popeye, and she was the villain, Bluto.

When she had my young children in a car at a family wedding in the late 1990s and told them secrets from my past, I was livid; she just shrugged and said, “You should have told them before now.” She never took responsibility, apologized, or showed any remorse for the many verbal and emotional crimes she committed throughout our lives. This helped me understand that we probably should not be spending time together.

With a spouse facing a marriage crisis, faced with the idea that they must make changes or there will be divorce, I would hope they would want to do what they could to do repairs, and once the crisis has stabilized, the Decider can face things they need to repair as well. But often, people won’t face what they need to because they are emotional children, fearing many things, especially a straightforward and honest conversation, or just humbly bending to acknowledge that they didn’t do their best regarding their relationship. Acknowledgment of errors made and regrets for having done that can be a magical healing balm when the human doing that dedicates themself to correcting the problem once and for all.

If you can’t be humble, face your flaws and mistakes, do the hard work a marriage involves, and have an honest and respectful conversation with your spouse about whatever, including your disillusionment, then maybe you weren’t cut out for intimate relationships and marriage.

The final stage of a relationship.

I have clients who are terrified of closeness with their partner, of touching them affectionately, of a negative reaction, or of starting things. Of doing the work that keeps marriages alive, of attaining and maintaining a deeper connection, the effective communication, the ongoing emotional connection, they allow the relationship to dwindle into fumes, then nothingness, all because they were too afraid to sit down and have a meaningful conversation of mutual understanding or to meet their partner’s reasonable requests for affection or closeness.

Anyone can say whatever they need to say to anyone if they do it with kindness, respect, and diplomacy. But most don’t, and most won’t. What can I tell you, people? The first step to keeping a marriage alive is honesty and keeping one another informed of how you’re doing in the relationship.

I want the world to be different than it is, and Buddha said that lack of acceptance of what is is the cause of all suffering. I have a hard time accepting what is in this case because I witness the anguish and hurt of couples deciding what to do with a romantic love that is on life support. So many of these situations could have been avoided by taking care of the relationship through loving and respectful communication, corrections, repairs, mutual understanding, working through power struggles, and building a solid foundation that can weather most storms.

I feel like a person standing in the middle of the road waving their arms, saying, “Do something, do something, before it’s too late!” I implore men and women to be better in their personal and romantic relationships, to put time into being a relational grown-up who can face things head-on, who will absolutely seek professional help when things can’t be worked out between you and your partner on your own, and to have your eye always on how your actions now will affect the future of the relationship.

Is it bad to want to make my work obsolete and unneeded, to want to put myself and all marriage therapists and divorce attorneys out of business? I know it’s a fantasy, but I think if we worked for positive change concerning a few things in our culture regarding a healthy relationship with ourselves and others, it’d go a long way toward achieving that. Instead, we all grow up traumatized human beings, become emotionally immature as a result of that, and go out into the world butting our heads with others in relationships, usually blaming them for our inadequacies. It’s a wonder any of us ever make it.

FYI: Becky is an Amazon product affiliate, and if you order something from her blog, she may receive a small fee at no extra cost to you.

She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and is the author of “I (Think) I Want Out: What To Do When One Of You Wants Out,” published by HCI Books, distributed by Simon and Schuster.

If you want a signed book delivered straight from Becky, visit her website store here. Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®.

She has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach — she is a licensed therapist in Texas and Arkansas. She also has a YouTube Channel called Marriage Crisis Manager where she talks about relationships. She has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom.

Education and support groups are available for individuals in a marriage crisis. For more information visit MarriageCrisisManger.com.

Becky is looking for individuals thinking about divorce, people who are cheating, and couples in crisis, or people with amazing personal marriage crisis stories to tell to appear on her video podcast. For information, contact Becky.

To contact her, check out www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

Disllusionment

Marriage

Divorce

Marriage Crisis

Marriage Counseling

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Written by Becky Whetstone, Ph.D. Marriage & Family Therapist

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Marriage & Family Therapist & HCI Books author, the Marriage Crisis Manager, journalist and former columnist, San Antonio Express-News.

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P. D. Reader

Mar 20 (edited)

The problem with this is that the unhappy partner is ready to leave the marriage, and their partner has no idea, which I view as a betrayal of the worst sort, right up there with a full...

Then there are the folks who tell the spouse and tell the spouse and tell the spouse and tell the spouse and it falls on deaf ears. When they finally file for divorce, the weeping, stunned spouse goes, "But you never said anything!!!"

If your spouse…more

121

P. D. Reader

Mar 20

So many of these situations could have been avoided by taking care of the relationship through loving and respectful communication, corrections, repairs, mutual understanding, working t...

Nobody is born knowing how to do this. People learn as children by witnessing it day to day in a healthy childhood home ... or they learn it later on the hard way. IF they can.

So we need to view people with SOME degree of understanding. If I grew up…more

43

EmmBee

Mar 22

Omg.... You just told the EXACT story of my marriage.... like, verbatim.... My marriage of 13 years has gone through all the stages you have described, starting with disillusionment and advancing to the detachment and death stage (which also…more

7

1 reply

See all responses

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