Dr. Kelly Flanagan is a therapist. His blog “Untangled” has a recent entry that touched me.
There are three kinds of marriages. In the first kind of marriage, both spouses are competing to win, and it’s a duel to the death. Research tells us it is better for children to have divorced parents than warring parents. The second kind of marriage is ripe with winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same spouse. These are the truly abusive marriages, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.
But there is a third kind of marriage. The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all — themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the most.
Isn’t this the same about life? There are people who always want things their ways and other who always yield. Their relationships, or life in general, are always relatively sad. A dominant person will eventually lose all other relationships except for with those who always yield. The result is always the same, they stopped growing and lives stopped changing. The ones who dominate always resist changes and his/her other relationships gave up trying anyway. Stagnation or mutual destruction are the only possible outcome.
Fortunately, most people have more open minds.