- Marriage is always hard, and it's tempting to ignore problems in your relationship and hope that they'll go away.
- But some problems could spell trouble down the road — and will only get worse the longer you put off addressing them.
- Those problems include experiencing a lot of dramatic downturns in your marriage, having a good "alternative" partner, and shutting down during conflict.
It's easy to brush stuff under the rug.
Maybe you didn't realize until recently that your partner's obsessed with earning money and you're not; or maybe the magic of that first year after the wedding is starting to wear off, laying bare a less exhilarating existence. Whatever it is, you're hoping that if you ignore it, it'll go away.
Below, we've listed nine research-and-expert-backed problems that probably won't go away — and that could portend disaster in your marriage.
A word of caution: Many of these problems are fixable (if you want to fix them, that is), so don't panic if you notice one or more in your own relationship.
SEE ALSO: One of the happiest countries in the world does marriage differently from most everywhere else
You were overly affectionate as newlyweds
Having to be practically dragged apart in the months following your wedding could spell trouble down the road.
Psychologist Ted Huston followed 168 couples for 13 years — from their wedding day onward. Huston and his team conducted multiple interviews with the couples throughout the study.
Here's one fascinating finding, from the resulting paper that was published in the journal Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes in 2001: "As newlyweds, the couples who divorced after 7 or more years were almost giddily affectionate, displaying about one third more affection than did spouses who were later happily married."
Aviva Patz summed it up in Psychology Today: "Couples whose marriages begin in romantic bliss are particularly divorce-prone because such intensity is too hard to maintain. Believe it or not, marriages that start out with less 'Hollywood romance' usually have more promising futures."
One of you withdraws during conflict
Sure, you're not screaming in a fit of rage — but if one partner refuses to talk at all during conflict, that's not a good sign.
A 2010 study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that husbands' "withdrawal" behaviors predicted higher divorce rates. This conclusion was based on the researchers' interviews with about 350 newlywed couples living in Michigan.
Meanwhile, a 2014 study, published in the journal Communication Monographs, suggests that couples engaged in "demand/withdraw" patterns — i.e. one partner pressuring the other and receiving silence in return — are less happy in their relationships.
The lead study author, Paul Schrodt at Texas Christian University, says it's a hard pattern to break because each partner thinks the other is the cause of the problem. It requires seeing how your individual behaviors are contributing to the issue and using different, more respectful conflict-management strategies.
You don't think about your partner when you're apart
Sorry, Bob who?
In 2007, researchers randomly dialed nearly 300 married people and asked them a series of questions about their relationships and how in love they felt.
Results showed that certain relationship characteristics were linked to stronger feelings of love. One especially interesting finding: The more often people reported thinking about their partner when they were apart, the more in love they felt.
The same study included a follow-up experiment with nearly 400 married New Yorkers, which found that difficulty concentrating on other things while you're thinking about your partner is also linked to strong feelings of love — especially for men.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider