BlueCreek

For my wife and I the communication issues revolved around me bottling up my issues rather than being upfront with them, and my wife being unable to grasp what I needed from her to feel more loved. I finally sat her down and opened up to her and told her we needed to both change for our marriage to get out of this funk. Since I was the one that saw the marriage as being in greater trouble than her, I think I was more in your situation.

Improving the communication was actually more difficult than I thought it would be. I was so committed, planning everything out that I needed to change and focus on to improve myself, and I assumed after our long talk that my wife would be the same, so is so incredibly committed to nearly everything she does. But while my wife knew it was important, she just did not see it in the same critical light that I did. So she didn't put near the effort into it that I did.

And that's what really makes it difficult when both aren't equally committed. The one that feels more committed is easily upset and, as you said, frustrated that the other doesn't take it as seriously. You can easily start to pressure your spouse, but then that often back fires because NO ONE likes to be pressured into changing. And the slower they move, the less incentive you have to work on it yourself. It really is an easy catch-22 to fall into.

I think for me the first month was the hardest. I was dying for things to change ASAP and nothing seemed to happen. In that first month I vacillated back and forth between working hard on it and moping around when my wife kept putting our goals aside when anything important (i.e. what seemed like everything) came up. I had to fight hard to strike that delicate balance between pressuring her and reminding her that change was needed, because if I had just left her alone I'm not entirely convinced she would have worked on it at all. But I was mostly successful. I sat down with her once a week to acknowledge improvements, but point out where nothing had changed, and left her alone the rest of the week. Most importantly I tried hardest to work on myself in at least some small way, refusing to let my wife's slower transition to affect my duty to improving myself. It wasn't easy, but it worked. I'm a very patient person, and I figured I'd put seven years into my marriage with things not being so great, I could afford to invest the time needed to changing it. It really took about 3-4 months for me until she had really gotten on board as she saw me changing and our marriage improving, and it was nearly a year before I felt we had both really changed our marriage for good.