Maintaining a balance in life is very important. Too much of anything at all isn’t healthy for us and that includes too much time spent with our spouses after marriage. Yes, spending too much time together with your spouse can hurt your marriage.
We might disagree to the above statement and protest, saying that the more the time we spend together the better we get to know and understand each other. We’re partially right when we think so. Why?
Because, the curiosity to get to know and understand another person comes only when you don’t have all the access you want, to that person, so that the craving to see them, have them around, spend time listening and talking to them, deepens. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” they say.
PREVENTS ONE FROM GROWING INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS
Spending time only with your spouse can bring boredom to your marriage after a point in time. It is healthy to be able to seek our satisfaction and enjoyment in other things and other people, apart from our own spouse.
LACK OF PRIVACY CAUSES RESENTMENT
According to research by eminent marriage psychologists, lack of privacy in marriage is the driving factor for feelings of resentment to arise. Every individual even when they are married must have the freedom to pursue their own interests independent of their spouses
TOO MUCH OF EXPECTATIONS
Spending most of your time with your husband or wife will cause you to expect too much out of them because you haven’t opened yourself up to other sources of relaxation and enjoyment.
INABILITY TO HAVE ALL OUR NEEDS MET
It is absurd to expect to have all our needs met by one person. Imagine that there is a food festival going on in town and your spouse is at work doing a double time, and so you can’t have them attend the festival with you. For times like these you must have your friends and family around.
FEELINGS OF POWERLESSNESS DUE TO OVER DEPENDENCE
Depending on your spouse for everything will give birth to feelings of powerlessness and weakness within you. You’ll unconsciously have a feeling of as though you are inferior compared to the both of you, in your marriage.
THE BURDEN OF BEING SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANOTHER’S HAPPINESS
This is indeed a burden for either of the spouses, who are made to take on this kind of a responsibility. This sense of burden will risk feelings of resentment within the concerned person which will express itself eventually in time, once they get exhausted with bearing the burden of another individual’s happiness.
QUALITY OF TIME SPENT IS COMPROMISED FOR QUANTITY
You might spend every weekend of the month with your spouse and yet feel as though you haven’t spent enough good time. You feel this way because you are compromising quality over quantity.
Spending as much time as you can together doesn’t ensure satisfactory time. What you should rather do is make whatever little time you spend together worth your while.
Spending time together after days at a stretch will leave you with so much stuff to talk about, that you haven’t shared in days, go to places you haven’t visited in a pretty long while. That is what is called choosing quality over quantity.
Do you think spending too much time together does hurt a marriage? Have you faced similar situations in life? If you have, how have you dealt with those?
