A marriage is the union by law between two consenting adults. It holds many myths and truths, some of which includes that marriage is all about love, marriage is heaven’s destiny, or even a marriage is the beginning of all things sweet and wonderful. Of course, there is a fare share of sayings about how marriage is no longer for life and love will be gone in a matter of time and that spells the end of the union.

Without breaking all the myths or finding out the whole truth, let’s look at the 322 responses who have voted for the one reason they feel is the main culprit that causes a divorce.

• Communication breakdown (35%)
  
• Extra-marital affair (21%)
  
• Love has gone (21%)
  
• Financial woes (11%)
  
• Insufficient knowledge to handle marriage (9%)
  
• External parties (2%)
  

What does this result tell us? Why does communication break down between a couple? The bridge that is supposed to convey messages of love, care and concern suddenly becomes nothing like what has been intended. What’s wrong?

As one of the NLP presupposition puts it: “You cannot not communicate”, we can see how this holds true in this poll. Also, another presupposition that states “The meaning of your communication is the response you get” all but wraps it up and gives the full meaning to this cause of divorce. 

Do we really understand what our partner is telling us, and not telling us? How do we find the courage to face squarely with conflicts and have the firm resolve to talk them through without putting a permanent scar on the relationship? How do we know if our partner really “gets it” when he/she says so? Do we have the ability to control our emotions when the situation becomes threatening?

Isn’t it ironical that while the number of vehicles for us to communicate goes up, the quality of our conversation goes down? How many of you would rather send a long sms asking for forgiveness than going to speak to the person face-to-face and give a sincere and earnest explanation?

The sad news is many people are not learning how to communicate better. The good news is they can learn how to, now that they are aware that when communication breaks down, there is a high chance that their marriage will follow suit.

Can a communication breakdown lead to an extra-marital affair? High possiblity! When one doesn’t get what he/she wants from their partner, the tendency to seek for it elsewhere gets stronger, especially when one party goes home and finds it almost impossible to interact with their spouse. Love slowly fades because the chance to nurture it is lost.  

Contrary to popular belief, an extra-marital affiar has got nothing to do with the third party as much as it has got to do with the couple themselves. When the bonding between a husband and wife is so strong and healthy, the chance for a third party to come in and create considerable damage is reduced to almost nil. Not one to say that this is impossible, but I’d like to advice couples who are going through such an unfortunate phase in your relationship to look inside first, before tackling outside problems.

When love has gone, there is no more reason to stay with each other for as long as we live. This must be one of the most popular myths floating around. Is it practical or reasonable to expect ourselves to be in love with our partners everyday? What happens to the times when we really don’t see eye to eye with certain issues and have the biggest fight in our lives? Or the times when we start to neglect each other as we focus on other deemed to be ”more important things” in our lives? Does love just go away like that? Or is it a result of a long period of non-loving acts done to each other?

It’s good that we can become more aware of the potential (or existing) challenges that we could be facing now or would be facing in future. Because sometimes, all it takes is to be aware. Then the next steps of making sure they don’t happen becomes much easier. And this is one of the breakthroughs that clients have gotten through my coaching programme.