When Your Partner Changes Right After Marriage

What you see is not always what you get.

• Partners may not be who we thought they were.

• Partners may not look closely enough at each other.

• Partners must empathize and be more authentic with each other.

In all my years of treating couples, one of the most common complaints has been that one partner has changed in some significant way immediately after marriage. Of course, the partner who complains is the one who feels betrayed, tricked, ripped off, or made a fool of. He or she might say something to me like: “I think my partner put on a show for me just to close the deal or get me to the altar. Now I find I have married a different person.” I see this most often in the context of:

• Affection - “Before marriage, my husband treated me like a princess. Nothing was too good for me. Since marriage, however, he has treated me as if I am a burden to him. I am totally confused. Even my friends cannot believe his sudden shift in attitude and behavior.”

• Children – “Before marriage, my wife told me that she wanted at least three children. After marriage and our first child, she changed her mind.”

• Sex - “My wife used to be kinky and suddenly she has become a prude.”

• Travel - “Before we married, my husband was adventurous and spontaneous. Now he says he is bored with traveling and wants to stay at home and work on his hobbies.”

• Work - “Before we married, my wife was career-oriented with a nice salary. But as soon as we married, she told me that she was tired and wanted to retire. She knew how important a two-income marriage was to me, but decided to make a unilateral decision.”

The partner who breaks the spoken or unspoken marital contract usually presents as feeling justified in their position. They even resent being challenged by their shocked and confused counterpart. It is easy to understand why the bewildered spouse is upset. After all, “what they saw, they did not get.” But it is much harder to understand their counterpart’s resentment.

After seeing hundreds of these couples, I have come to two conclusions: 1. The spouse who made a seemingly sudden shift was never happy or satisfied with the role they were playing prior to their marriage. They were in conflict about their identity, or what they wanted out of life. Winnicott (1960) might say they were not being their true selves. There could be many reasons for this, but the one I find most often is that they were never allowed to be themselves and so they adopted a pleaser identity. “Whatever I have to be or do to please others in the moment, I can be;” and 2. The spouse who feels tricked is not as fooled as they think they are. Because of their own needs, these individuals may not look closely enough at their potential mates, and in a sense, do not get to know who their partners truly are. This mistake could serve to unconsciously replicate their history of not getting their needs met.

For couples to work through a dynamic such as this, both partners will first need to empathize with each other and decide if they still want each other as they truly are. This will usually take some compromise and the willingness to accept some loss. If they can do this, they will then have to re-contract, but this time it should be based on authenticity.

Stephen J. Betchen, D.S.W. - Blog -

References

Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of the true and false self. In L. Caldwell & H. T. Robinson (Eds.), The collected works of D. W. Winnicott (Vol. 6, pp. 159-171). Oxford.