What do you think of when you hear that a marriage is bad? When you think of two people on the brink of divorce, what scenes do you envision playing out in their home? If you watch a movie about divorce, I’ll bet that it’s filled with gut-wrenching, cringe-worthy fight scenes where both spouses yell that thing they’ve always felt but haven’t had the courage to say, and the marriage bursts into flames. Maybe there’s an affair or two mixed in there as well, and that’s what sent both spouses over the edge. When such an intimate, passionate relationship breaks apart, surely it does so with passion and fireworks too, right?

In reality, it isn’t that dramatic most of the time. The most common cause of divorce has been reported to be a growing distance and lack of intimacy between spouses. The vast majority of divorcees reported this to be true of their marriage. In a distant second place, destructive fights and outbursts were the next most common cause of divorce, and extramarital affairs were even further down the list in a distant third place.

The difficulty with movies about relationships is that they need to entertain us and keep us glued to the screen, and an accurate movie about divorce wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic.

It’s a sad but true reality that most marriages will fall to this same fate unless both spouses make their relationship a priority. Part of this includes having disagreements and arguments that once resolved, lead to more intimacy between each other. But, if spouses can’t really resolve their disagreements, they learn that there are certain topics that they cannot talk about, and they develop a truce marriage. And that’s the official term in marriage and family therapy theory, and this term bothers me so deeply.

The term “truce marriage” sounds so terrible to me because of what a truce is, a truce is formed between enemies, and that’s the worst way to relate to your spouse. This is simply not how marriages should be, the truce marriage represents a total breakdown of the system. The difficulty is that a truce marriage looks halfway decent, most of us would probably observe a couple who doesn’t fight much but also doesn’t experience a lot of intimacy and say that they’re doing all right. They certainly aren’t doing as poorly as that other couple who fights so much.

But, it’s actually the quiet, resentful couple who is more likely to get divorced. It’s very possible that they used to argue and disagree, but now they’ve withdrawn from each other because they’ve lost the trust needed to have hard conversations with each other.

Talking about divorce is one of the saddest topics for me to cover, but people need to know that quiet, respectful marriages aren’t the best marriages. If you’re married, you actually need to disagree sometimes and truly resolve your frustrations, rather than slowly drifting apart. And if you’ve related to this post, and you recognize that you and your spouse are growing apart and forming a truce marriage, you probably need to work with a good marriage counselor. Thankfully, there’s many of us out there waiting to be the support you both need, all you have to do is make that first call and fight for your marriage because you know that it’s worth it.

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