7 Deadly Habits To Avoid In Your Marriage

The way you think and react towards your spouse could make or break a marriage. Leave these deadly habits at the door and work your way to a happier life together.

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Every so often, my work takes me away from the monotony of the daily grind and requires that I travel abroad; not necessarily a terrible thing, until it so happens to also take me away from my wife and my two young daughters. That is when my wife might put on a distraught look, which I would misread as disdain, and complain, “Why do you always have to travel?” To which I might retaliate with, “You never support me in the work. My job is already hard enough as it is and you only add to my stress!” What had just transpired is usually the start of a slippery slope where we unwittingly descend into acting out any or all of the following terrible gerunds: Criticizing, Blaming, Complaining, Nagging, Threatening, Punishing, or Bribing.

If this is evocative of your own marriage relationship at one time or another, then you are in good company, as fellow practitioners of the Seven Deadly Habits. This somewhat morbid moniker was coined by Dr William Glasser, an American psychiatrist of the late 20th century. Over the many years of his psychiatric practice, he had observed a prevalence of problematic relationships stemming from a popular school of thought of his time, namely External Control (EC) psychology, where individuals believe they have the ability to control events and people around them.

In his book “Getting Together and Staying Together”, Dr Glasser explains that the reason why people find marriage unrewarding is because they practise External Control psychology. He says that 99.9% of people in the world practise this when they cannot get along with someone else. Although this is not exclusive to marriage, he says, it is when EC is practised within a marriage that it is the most ruinous.