Indifference - A personal relationship conflict

Indifference is another very common disturbance of the personal relationship of marriage to come up for consideration in marriage counseling. It is also apparently very common in many marriages for which no counseling is sought. It is often a slow insidious “disease” of marriage, and it shows itself in many different ways. There may be a lack of common interests and cooperative activities, a lack of interest in or even awareness of the feelings, the needs or the rights of the partner or the children, or there may be a neglect of the essential responsibilities concerning the house or the financial necessities. Each may gradually come to go his own way and live like boarders in the same house without any real companionship.

Indifference is a less dramatic, but a far more serious disorder of marriage than hostility, and a much more difficult one for the partners to deal with, because the necessary motivation has generally been more or less destroyed. While hostility is the emotional “opposite” of love and is apt, like all emotions, to be changeable; indifference is the “opposite” of the “goodwill” aspect of love, the sustained and sustaining bond of marriage, and it is more likely to be an established attitude, less open to change. When indifference comes into the marriage the deep emotional needs of the partners for affection and companionship are frustrated, and the stage is set for strong urges for either of them to seek the fulfilment of such needs elsewhere. This of course will tend to make the situation still more difficult and complicated.

When indifference or withdrawal of companionship are discovered in the counseling the counselor will seek to discover and to help the partners to understand something of why it came about. It may be that the original decision to marry was based on inadequate foundations or motives, and then the partners need to work out their ideas of how they can find ways of building better on what resources they have or can develop. It may be that one or both have personal inadequacies that may be overcome to some extent with patient help, or that their marital relationship has become upset by misunderstandings or failures, or that pressures from their environment have proved overwhelming. Any or all of these possible determining factors will need to be explored in the counseling, together with their relationships as children with the significant people in their lives.

One specific kind of indifference merits particular attention, the fairly common reaction of wives when they return home after childbirth. The emotional strain of pregnancy and the confinement, and the intense stirring of the maternal instinct through contact with and nursing of the eagerly anticipated baby may leave little emotional energy for a time for her to offer to the husband. In some cases, of course, when the baby is not greatly wanted, there may be still more emotional strain, with the addition of feelings of guilt and frustration, together with some apprehensiveness about the mother’s ability to carry the job of parenthood through satisfactorily. In either case the newly returned mother of the first, and even more of the second and third child, may feel a kind of indifference to the advances and even the needs of her husband. If he does not understand this it may well bring considerable hostility on his part from the “injustice” of being “treated like that “when he has been denied some of the normal relationships during the later months of his wife’s pregnancy.” If the husband can accept his wife’s temporary indifference, even though he may find it hard to understand it, and can support her in the difficult task of settling down to a radically changed household, with a new baby and sometimes also with one or more jealous toddlers, she will generally negotiate the readjustment that is necessary without much delay, and their personal relationship will be strengthened through the experience of going through the difficult period together.

Situations of this kind may be very much more difficult when they are complicated by any “parent fixation” on the part of either husband or wife. Unless this can be faced and dealt with the indifference will more likely become fixed, and the barriers will grow steadily more impenetrable.

Tags: Counseling