5 Ways To Contribute To Your Partner’s Life

Posted by fxckfeelings on March 1, 2018

If your unhappy marriage is on life support, it can still be hard to pull the plug, especially when, like our reader who recently wrote in, you and your spouse have spent most of your lives together. That’s when you have to ask yourself what you expect from a spouse, and from yourself, to make a marriage worthwhile. Here are five major ways partners can contribute to each other’s lives and the life they share. If you find that you’re doing much less than your partner, you had better reinvest in the marriage or prepare for its end; if it’s the other way around, it’s time to let your marriage end and the rest of your life begin.

1) Financial Function

Money isn’t everything, but it counts for a lot, particularly if you find yourself paying more than your share of essential family expenses, like food, shelter, or, God forbid, bail. Of course, you may substitute childcare and household management as your contribution instead of earnings. But whether you’re investigating a marriage, the Baltimore drug trade, or a presidential election, the key is always to follow the money; that will give you a good measure of whether you or your spouse has paid a full share.

2) Putting in Parenting Time

Never equate sporadic “helping out” with the kids to taking primary responsibility for their feeding, homework, rides to soccer practice, etc. Yes, you should give yourself credit for the time you put into playing with your children, but make sure to give more credit to whoever worries about what’s in the fridge, when the dentist appointments are, and how to drop everything when school is cancelled or your child is ill. If you or your spouse can’t be relied upon to contribute more than occasional participation in your kids’ lives, then you can cross their importance as a parent off your value-added checklist.

3) Relationship Reminders

By their nature, long term partnerships get worn down by fatigue and our tendency to put out everyday fires, resent our spouses for whatever help we wanted and didn’t get, and then, exhausted by both the fires and the resentment, fall asleep. So a big part of the partnership job description is to invest, periodically, in a good relationship by making time to be together and find activities you both enjoy. If one or both of you can’t make that investment, you’ll become so overwhelmed with resentment that you’ll forget what you ever liked about each other in the first place. So if your partner can’t or won’t agree to make that investment, then your marriage may no longer have the strength to survive.

4) Intermittent Intimacy

While sex often becomes less important over the course of a marriage (or just over the course of one’s life), it’s not unusual for one partner to have stronger needs and then to feel ignored and unattractive if his or her spouse starts to avoid intimacy or doesn’t try to make something happen. So, for the one who is not that interested in sex anymore and has a partner who still is, making an effort to give pleasure is an important contribution, even if it means lying back and thinking of England. Not being willing to make a small physical sacrifice or to ask your partner to make one on your behalf, is a sign that caring and commitment are lacking. If you can’t change your feelings or your partner’s willingness to take one for the team, then it may be time to call the game.

5) Consider Complaints

As we always say, the real reason for getting married is always having someone to blame. An important part of any job, not just that of a spouse, is to be responsive to complaints. And while that doesn’t mean you have to agree with them or take responsibility for causing them, you do have to pay attention to them, examine their validity, and decide what, if anything, you can do to take remedial action. If you care about your spouse, you think hard about their grievances and determine whether you can improve what you do. In any case, try to negotiate differences without avoiding them or allowing them to trigger anger or avoidance. If, on the other hand, one of you doesn’t care enough to respond to complaints or manage them diplomatically, then that person isn’t doing the work required to manage basic marriage problems, and now those problems, and the future of your marriage, are beyond your control.