Why Motivation Alone Is Not Enough To Save Your Marriage

by Mike Peters

Many people in distressed marriages want to believe that if they just tried harder, if they were more motivated to work on their relationship, then everything would be okay. I'm all for motivation, but after years of personal therapy with lots of different people in all kinds of different marriages, I want you to understand that motivation alone is not going to save your marriage.

Let me explain. Most people in a relationship are trying already. Very few people wake up each morning saying to themselves: "what can I do today to make my marriage more miserable?" But if that is what is happening day after day, then something else must be in play. I believe most of us do the best we can with what we have. The problem is not motivation. The problem is our frame of reference.

We come into our adult life with a map, a composite of everything we have heard, seen and experienced. It's all there: the good, the bad and the ugly. For many people, their map is the problem. Their map keeps taking them to places they don't want to go. Imagine that you and I were in a car and we were trying to get from Dallas to Chicago. We're very motivated, needing to get there as soon as we possibly can. We have a map and we are following it carefully. But as we keep following this map, we find ourselves in Toledo, Ohio instead of Chicago. It's very frustrating! How could this happen? We talk to someone in Toledo and they ask to see our map. They recognize the problem...our map is bad...lots of inaccurate information. They give us a different map. We look at the map and go "well, duh, no wonder we couldn't get to Chicago".  We follow the new map and arrive at our destination.

We come into our adult life with a map, a composite of everything we have heard, seen and experienced.  It's all there: the good, the bad and the ugly.  For many people, their map is the problem.

So now you see why motivation alone won't save your marriage.  Take a careful look at your map.  Where is your life experience taking you that you don't want to go.  Maybe your map influences you to become passive aggressive with your partner when a conflict occurs, because that's what your mother did with your father.  It could be your map that is creating that instinctive reaction of an angry outburst when things don't go your way, because that's what your father always did when he was mad.

Your map has a lot to do with the assumptions you make about what a relationship looks like. For instance, if your parents lived together in a traditional marriage, with very separate roles, and your partner's parents always did things together as if they were joined at the hip, you can see how that can create very different  assumptions about how things should play out in your marriage.

It's important to understand that, as adults, we are not held hostage by our maps. We can't use the map as an excuse for our problems.  We get to tweak them.   We need to learn how to keep the good stuff from our life experience and discard the things that are unhealthy. Then we can replace the negative with new insights and better tools that will help us get to where we want to be...into a happy, loving respectful marriage.