Couples who are parents of teenagers often feel at their wits’ end. Irritated, isolated, even disillusioned, they may reflexively blame their teenager for the strain on their marriage. Sure, a teenager can test a marriage: Teenagers can be moody, engage in risky behaviors and expose differences in parenting styles. However, there often is much more to the story.
Let’s look more deeply at what each partner may be experiencing and the dynamics that may be unfolding between them. Here, I’m focusing on couples who are in their mid-40s to mid-50s and who have been together for about 15 years or longer.
Factor 1: Depletion
Life at this stage often comes with multiple concurrent demands. Imagine a couple, each closing in on 50 years old. They are at the peaks of their careers, with more responsibility, pressure and opportunity than ever. One lays awake at night, crunching the numbers for college tuition and retirement planning. On the weekends, they divide and conquer, not just with parenting tasks, but also with caring for aging parents. One experiences hot flashes and brain fog; the other is exhausted after the same workouts he’s done for years. Both have little left to give.
Factor 2: Reckoning
Alongside of the depletion, there can be a quieter internal process of reckoning. At this stage of life, the couple sees the results of their earlier life: what went well or poorly in parenting, finances, careers and relationships. While there is pride in the successes, there can also be the heavy feeling of regret. When their 16-year-old shuts the door again and again, one of them wonders, maybe we were too hard on him when he was little and are now paying the price.
There can also be growing awareness of the approaching empty nest, and with it, larger questions about life: What will life be like when my child leaves home? Will I have to confront my mortality more directly? What parts of my life do I want to carry forward and what parts would I like to leave behind? These thoughts may not be too loud; after all, there isn’t much time for existential questions. But the thoughts can begin to surface, leaving an unsettling feeling.
How This Strains a Relationship
Tired and bewildered, a couple may have less space for the relationship. Instead, their focus shrinks inward. This isn’t necessarily unhealthy. When we are depleted and overwhelmed, we may need to turn inward and care for and reconcile what’s inside. However, if we get stuck and do not move through our inner experiences well, our relationship can suffer.
In a struggling relationship, a couple may feel like they are living parallel lives, both headed in the same direction of launching teenagers but, in the meantime, their internal worlds are separate. Arguments arise over seemingly minor issues. One person attempts repair, the other rebuffs. It becomes too easy to slip into discord and too hard to stay connected.
Couples may see playfulness, presence and intimacy fade. Regret may lead to resentment, especially when those regrets are entangled in a partner’s past behaviors and personality. Unresolved resentment hardens distance into an impenetrable wall. Questions about the long-term sustainability of the relationship appear.
Clearly, this doesn’t happen in all relationships. And even when it does, it doesn’t reflect that there is something fundamentally wrong with the connection. Rather, there are considerable demands tied to the life stage and new feelings and questions that may not yet be understood.
In every challenge lies an opportunity. Here, as couples begin to understand their own experiences and their relational dynamics, they can find new ways to support one another.
Where to Begin
Start with yourself. In couples therapy, we sometimes zoom in on one partner’s experience before zooming back out to understand the couple with greater perspective. You can begin the same way, by taking a closer look at what is happening inside you. An inward gaze can help bring clarity about what you are experiencing and how to make it better.
Here are some prompts for self-reflection: What is happening inside me at this stage of my life? Is there something that I’m grieving, fearing, wanting or re-evaluating? How can I care for what is going on internally? How have I been feeling in my body, and how can I take care of my body well?
Consider journaling, since it may be a way for self-reflection to become an active, forward-moving process. If it’s too much to process on your own, consider an individual therapist or connecting with a good friend, not someone that will leave you feeling more disgruntled, but someone who can help you with your own understanding.
This may take a few passes. With so much going on both externally and internally, clarity may not happen overnight. However, creating a space for yourself is often the first step in moving through internal and relational discontent.
Use this as an opportunity to create a process that you can lean on both individually and as a couple to transform dissatisfaction into deeper connection.
I listed self-reflection as step 1. In this step, you are expanding your understanding of yourself and identifying how to advocate for yourself. In future posts, I will describe further steps which collectively provide a process you can turn to when you feel disconnect or tension rising in your relationship.
Each phase of life comes with its challenges. How we respond to them can have a big impact on our relationships and the chapters that follow. It’s worth learning to respond well.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
