911, relationship rescue required at Maple and Oak Lawn to resuscitate a bored couple who have ceased having anything to talk about and meet more because it’s a habit than out of any real desire.
Specialists are en route to the scene now, please stay on the line until they’ve arrived.
The above paragraphs seem a bit absurd, but in the age of reality television it’s more likely that somewhere there is a show just like this. With shows like the Bachelor and Wife Swap out there doing cattle calls to create tension or allowing couples to see how good they have it by pairing them with someone else’s spouse, relationship rescue might seem a worthier cause.
Sensationalism aside, relationships do sometimes need rescuing and not just in the sense of an abusive relationship where one party needs to be saved from the other and definitely not like the wife of a movie’s hero being kidnapped and he has only 123 minutes to locate her. Some couples, which have become so comfortable and so acclimated to their relationship and their routine, find themselves speaking to each other on matters excluding their children, finances or household chores, less and less.
It’s that point of a relationship (whether it’s marriage or not) when the comfort level has erased the spark. Passion may be less intense or more infrequent. Stolen lunches less appealing than an early bedtime or even more desperately that a day away from your partner seems more preferable than trying to fill up the silence with all the things that aren’t being said.
This isn’t about couples that have nothing in common or about who should divorce or separate. This is about couples that have so adjusted to living together or being together, they forget what it was that brought them together. While a hallmark of a stable relationship is the comfort factor, that comfort zone does bring with it the threat of boredom or worse — it encourages one or both in the relationship to take the other for granted. When that happens, the relationship is in desperate need of rescue and not by outside intervention but by the people involved.
The rescue doesn’t need a 911 operators or special ops gear, it needs common courtesy – such as remembering to always ask, not assume, of the other partner and to remember to thank them. It’s easy to say ‘thank you’ but a lot of people forget to do it. Inject a little romance, if the routine is for the first person home to make dinner, and then surprise them with a night out or by bringing in a particularly favorite food. Leave little notes for each other, if schedules are so different that one of you is up and gone long before the other even wakes, then leave a note taped to the bathroom mirror, inside a shoe or even on the coffee pot.
One of the worst things that can happen when someone begins to take the other person for granted is they begin to ignore them. You can’t be in a relationship with someone who ignores you or whom you ignore. The point of a relationship is to share with each other, good and bad, interesting and boring, tedious and exhilarating. So don’t let your relationship crash on the rocks of running too hard in every area of life except the one you come home to every night. Rescue the relationship with a little creativity and never forget how you got into the relationship – it’s a roadmap if you find yourself stuck in the cul de sac of life on how to get back.
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