The Loving Truth

She Waited 10 Years: Why We Stay

• Sharon Pope • Episode 178

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I share the story of a woman who followed my work for 10 years before she reached out, hoping the next blog or podcast might fix her 20-year marriage.

Once we finally worked together, she and her husband became more connected than ever.

I talk about why we wait: saying it out loud makes it real.

The unknown feels scary. We hope things change on their own. We want a guarantee. We worry. We don’t know what we want. We don’t want to do the work, and doing nothing feels easier.

But that wait creates distance and piles on resentment, and our behavior gets worse.

Our problems don’t age well.

If you’re stuck, you don’t need a decade. Sometimes you have to leap before you can see the ground.

Struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you’re serious about finding that answer?

Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Loving Truth Podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host, relationship expert, and certified Master Life Coach, Sharon Pope.

SPEAKER_02:

Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. This particular woman waited 10 years. It's not often that I work with someone where they tell me that they have followed and engaged with my work for 10 years. Like it's not uncommon that they might follow and engage with my work for a few years, but 10 years, it is a long time. And I'll tell you, at first, I was flattered. You know, my ego loved it. Like, oh, she loves my work. She's been engaging with it for so long. But on the heels of that, like right on the heels of it, it sort of hurt my heart. Because I was like, she was engaging with, you know, another blog post, listening to another podcast, watching another one of my YouTube videos or something like that, thinking that maybe the next thing that I say will be the answer or will be the thing that will help her in her struggling marriage. And so she struggled in her marriage for 10 years, to the point where then 10 years later, she was ready to call it quits. She had decided that if this didn't work, it was pretty much done. She was gonna call it and she was gonna end the marriage. And they'd been married more than 20 years. And so she invested in herself. We worked together, we overcame the challenges that she had in her marriage, and now in these are her words, she said, We're more connected than we've ever been. Which I love that for her and for her husband, but she sat on the sideline and struggled for 10 years. So I wanted to explore why do most people stay stuck in the struggle? In terms of when they're struggling in their relationship, why do they why do you just stay there? Why wait 10 years? The research has shown that the average is about six years, that we'll stay stuck in a marital struggle for six years before we reach out for help. And the problem is that during that time that we're in the struggle, things don't get better. Right? Our problems don't age well when they're just left alone. They tend to get worse. So it made me think about well, why do we wait? And certainly one of the th the reasons why we wait is that the thought of talking about our struggle somehow makes it more real. And that can feel scary. And that can feel really uncomfortable. And I understand that, right? Sometimes speaking it out loud makes it real. So, for instance, I saw a study recently where, you know, there were more than 50% of women that were struggling with a low sex drive. Only 10% of them thought that it was a problem. And it was something like less than 20% of that 50% reached out for help from a trained professional. Like they might have, you know, gone on to Google and tried to talk about it or tried to find answers there. But actually, like talking about sex, even with a trained professional, felt way too uncomfortable for the majority of people. And I sort of get that as it relates to sex. But when it comes to the struggles in your marriage, I mean, can we just normalize for a second that first of all, everyone struggles at some point in their marriage? Everyone. All couples are going to hit some speed bumps. That is the nature of living life that close alongside another human being. But the idea that if I if I don't speak it, then it doesn't really make it true. I had a client recently, we were talking, and she said, you know what's funny is all my friends, when we were in our 30s, we would all complain to each other about our spouses. And she said, now in my 40s, we don't talk about our marriages at all. And I said, you know what, that's really interesting. Because my hunch is, is that in your 30s, it felt like I'm gonna complain about it, but it's not really that big of a problem. And now in our 40s, they probably have a lot of the same problems that you do, but we're just not talking about it because it feels scary to talk about it. Because it's gotten more real. Or somehow they've just either, or they've settled in and they're just like, yeah, this is just what it's gonna be, and I'm not gonna complain about it. But most people, if you think about it, like when things aren't the way we want it to be, even if we don't do anything about it, we'll at least complain about it. So my hunch is that many of her friends have fallen into that category of like, I just don't want to speak it out loud because that makes it more real. But here's what I'm gonna tell you is that the moment you speak it out loud, the moment you you pull the truth out of the shadows and you just put it in the middle of the room, now you can deal with it. Now you can make some choices about it. And it's not as scary as what lives in our heads, usually. So that's one of the reasons why people wait. Another reason why people get stuck is fear, certainly fear, in all of its forms, but maybe there's a fear of the process, of like, I don't know what the process would look like. And because it's unknown, that feels really scary to me. And so I think I just won't take any steps towards that process that could help me get unstuck because I don't know what that looks like. And the unknown is always scary. Our brains don't like the unknown, right? Our brains like familiar. Sometimes we just have hope. We just sort of cross our fingers and hope that things will magically get better, that this is just a time period, and things will change on their own. And who knows? Like for some people, I don't know, maybe change magically happens. For most people, I have found that things don't magically change. I mean, when you keep doing the same thing, you should expect to get the same result, right? So most things don't just magically change. Certainly when it comes to our relationships. They don't get magically better over time. And if you've been struggling for years, if they were gonna get better on their own, wouldn't they have gotten better by now? Certainly you don't have to wait 10 years to just see, like maybe it's just a phase. Like everyone's gonna have a phase, of course. But if it's a decade, I mean, come on. We don't have to wait a decade. Sometimes our brains will tell us we need a guarantee. Like, I'm not gonna take a step forward until I know for sure it's gonna work. And so I take no steps forward because honestly, there are no guarantees in life. I mean, except for, I don't know, birth and death. There are no real guarantees for any of us in this life. And so not having that certainty keeps us from moving forward into a solution. I was speaking with a client recently and she was talking about how she knows, because she's moving through a divorce, that she's changing and evolving and growing. And she knows she's becoming a new version of herself, but she doesn't know who that person is. And so she was asking me, she's like, Sharon, how do I step into this new version of myself when I don't know who it is that I'm becoming? And I was like, you can't know. You can't know the outcome to that. And so the only option is to leap before you can see the ground. The only option is to take steps forward without knowing exactly where those steps are going to lead. And isn't that true for most of us in most of our lives, no matter what it is we're trying to accomplish? I feel like that's the case. And outside of birth and death, there's no real guarantees. But if you can get to the place of where it's like, okay, there's not a guarantee, but I'm not the first person to walk this path. I'm not the first person to deal with this struggle. And other people have come through it. Other people have followed a process, and maybe I could find my way through it the same way that they could. Like, that's the thing that could give you some comfort. Sometimes the thing that keeps people stuck is just generally worrying, knowing that like this is gonna cost me something. It's gonna cost me money, or it's gonna cost me time, or it's gonna cost me energy or effort. And while those things are true, we don't have to worry about them. Worry is about fear of the future that you can't control. And so worry feels like it's productive. It feels like you're doing something good, like you're worrying about the future, so you're thinking about all the outcomes. But mostly that worry is part of what keeps you stuck. Sometimes people stay stuck because they just don't know what they want. Like in the case of a struggling marriage, sometimes people are, they're like, I'm not going to get any support or help that I need to move through this until I know whether I want to stay or go. When I'm like, that's the first order of business. That's the first struggle to get through. You can't get to how to make the marriage feel great or how to move through the divorce peacefully until you know what your decision is. And so if you don't know what it is that you want, the first order of business is to figure out what it is that you want. And is what you want the outcome that you want? Right? Sometimes we just want out of the pain, and so we think the only answer is to get out of the marriage. And sometimes that is the right answer. And sometimes it's not. And sometimes the reason that we stay stuck, if we're really honest, is because we just don't want to have to do the work. Right? We we want to have a great marriage. We want a marriage that feels loving and connected and feels really healthy, but we don't want to have to do the work to get it. It's a little bit of, there's a little bit of entitlement in there, right? It's like I want to, you know, look a certain way or be at a certain weight or, you know, lose 10 pounds, but I, you know, I really just want to keep eating ice cream. And so that's sort of like I don't want to change anything about my behavior. I just want to look different. And so we get it in that context. Like I want to be a multimillionaire. I just don't want to work very hard. We get it in so many areas of our lives, but for some reason, when it comes to our marriages, we just don't always want to do the work. We don't want to do the work to change. We don't want to do the work to think about how we might be able to do things differently, how we could create new habits. And you know, I always say, like, at least tell the truth about it, because once you tell the truth about it, at least we have something to work with. And so even if the truth is, yeah, I just don't wanna. I don't want to do the work. I want, I want them to do the work. I want him to do the work. I want him to change. You know why? Because change is hard. So I want someone else to do it. I mean, I get it. This is our human nature, right? We're just out here humaning. But that's one of the things that can keep us stuck. And the last thing that I would say is sometimes it's just because we stay stuck because it's easier to do nothing than to do something. And isn't that the truth with everything? If I do nothing, that's infinitely easier than taking steps forward. Like I want to be wealthy, but I don't want to actually have to do any work. And I don't want to take any scary steps. I don't want to have to invest or put myself out there unless there's a guarantee, right? That's the thinking that we are applying. It doesn't make an ounce of sense in these other areas of our lives, but it shows up here. And so we trade that short-term comfort of, yeah, I just don't want to do anything. It's easier to do nothing, but we trade it and we create long-term dysfunction for ourselves to the point where we will stay stuck for a decade or more. Because it's easier to do nothing. And a week turns into a month, and a month turns into a year, and one year turns into 10. And that's our human nature until we interrupt the pattern. So the problem is that our marital challenges don't age very well when they go unaddressed. Because think about it. You might start to argue more, or you're going to shut down more from your partner. And the more you do that, the more distance you create between the two of you. And then we get a little bit more resentful. Like I almost think of it as every step towards that disconnection that we feel is a little resentment. And each of those resentments, in and of themselves, is not enough to blow up a marriage. But when you compound a thousand of those resentments over the course of years or a decade, well, now all those resentments really pile up and it feels impossible to find your way back to one another. Plus, when you feel kind of hopeless in your marriage, does our behavior towards our spouse get better or worse? It always gets worse. Right? We get a little bit less patient, our tone is a little bit more biting or a little bit more sarcastic. We get a little bit more dismissive. We might even become hateful or abusive towards our partner because now we're we have so much resentment that now we've lost respect for them. And so now we don't even treat them with kindness or compassion. So look, this particular woman, she waited 10 years. And I believe that you know what the timing has to be right for everybody. I do believe that. And I believe that everyone's timing is different. Like I'm a fast action taker. And so my time frame is always much shorter than maybe the average bears, who isn't a quick action taker. But it also doesn't have to be 10 years, right? And so people either, when they work with me, they either take action right after finding me. Like they've listened to a few podcasts and then they take action and we start working together. Or they wait on average about two years and they realize that, oh, nothing's gonna magically change. Things keep getting worse. If I don't do something, this is all gonna blow up. Maybe now's the time. And so in that two years, things have gotten worse. And now the lift to try to solve this problem becomes bigger because the longer you wait, the bigger the problem. And so it feels like a heavier lift. It doesn't mean it can't be lifted, it just means it's a little harder. So I just want you to think about it. Like, how do you want to show up in your life? Are you someone who wants to dabble with the challenges in your marriage and just wait and hope? Or are you someone right now that's like, I am going to figure this out? This is the time. I'm gonna figure this out once and for all. So that I'm moving forward and another year hasn't gone by, stuck in this place of struggle and I don't know. Of just being stuck in this place of I don't know. All right, I hope that that is helpful for you. I hope it gives you something to think about, and I hope that if you decide that you need help and support to move through this challenge, that you don't wait 10 years, right? Whether that's with me or with someone else, or it's a DIY project that you're gonna do on your own, more power to you. But don't wait a decade. Okay. Until next time, take good care.

SPEAKER_01:

If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage, and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team. On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to ClarityformyMarriage.com to fill out an application now. That's ClarityformyMarriage.com.