What Can We Learn from Covid-19 About Preventing Disaster in Marriage?

Learn How to Prevent Disaster in Your Marriage from an International Pandemic

Every day couples come across situations that they try to clean up and keep their partner's from finding out. Couples have much to learn about how to prevent disaster from understanding how COVID-19 began and how things were allowed to snowball out of control.

First let's consider a scenario that many couples can relate to.
Consider this story: Shlomo was driving home from work, focusing on a complex problem that arose. His head over-focused on how he might have done things differently, he barely noticed the stop sign on his usual route home. Luckily, a car coming from the other direction noticed his lack of attention and was able to hit the brakes. But not soon enough. The other car crashed into the front tip of the car, bending the front right-hand side of the car.

Rather than wanting to alert his insurance, or his wife, Shlomit, Shlomo decided to settle the other car's expenses on his own. He took the car to his usual garage. The garage said it would take a few days to put right and lent him one of their cars in the meantime. Shlomo was concerned about how Shlomit would react to this accident, so he decided to pay everything in cash and tell her that he and a work colleague swapped cars for a few days as his colleague needed a larger car. Naturally, Shlomit found out about the fiasco as fate would have it. The work colleague's wife, Sharon bumped into her at the local super-market. As one lie rolled into another, Shlomo found himself in a heap.

Let's look at what may have instigated the COVID-19 coverup and what generally makes people cover up their mistakes see what we can learn that may be relevant to our relationships:

Losing face/Shame - Feelings of shame was the first thing that got in the way of dealing with Covid-19 in an up-front way. When shame sweeps us away it blocks our ability to take responsibility. As shame floods our system, we can't think rationally. Our brain gets hijacked and we lose all sense of reality.

False Hope - Seemingly the authorities hoped and believed that if they didn’t report anything, it would go away. Despite the evidence to the contrary, they were hopeful that willing it away would make it go away.

Thinking things will resolve themselves on their own - This is a part of wishful thinking. It's a result of having false hopes.

Sweeping facts under the rug - The combination of shame and false hope leads to sweeping things under the rug, hoping things would simply resolve themselves.

Short term thinking - It feels too painful to consider how something a little bit painful, if left unattended, can grow into something insurmountable. What makes us ignore the small pains is this very thought. By ignoring what was happening in the moment, they authorities missed the big picture.

Failing to see the big picture - We are living the aftermath of missing the boat, ignoring taking care of the short term, immediate pain. Of course, had the authorities taken the messages seriously, and looked at the facts sooner, not only could they have prevented a national epidemic but an international pandemic.

Dealing with this on their own - The experts initially decided to deal with this on their own. They only turned to the international organizations for help once things got out of hand. Had they got the right sort of help at the beginning the situation today could well be different.

Taking a proactive approach, while painful in the short-run always has long term benefits. Here's what taking a proactive-preventative approach looks like:

Acknowledging there is a problem immediately

By doing this we have an opportunity to stop things in their tracks and prevent a small problem from getting out of control. No one wants to deal with the hard and painful things. We all hate filing taxes and paying bills, taking the car for a service, getting our teeth cleaned, but of course they are small necessary evils. While we all benefit from a clean and tidy home, keeping it that way is no small feat. By tending to the small painful things, we can prevent things from snowballing.

Assess the damage

Whenever we are confronted with a trigger or a challenge, it's easy to feel the charge and get outraged. Rather than jumping onto those hurt feelings and allowing them to bring us down, the best thing to do is take a step back, calm our nerves and see what the situation requires.

Find out what caused the problem

Most couples get into the blame game when they have a challenge to overcome. In the example above, at first blush, you might jump to the conclusion that Shlomo is to blame for getting into the car accident and hiding the damage from Shlomit. When you get to know them and their dynamic, you can see how in fact Shlomo chose to hide the accident from Shlomit as he is petrified of her. He walks on egg-shells around her when she is disappointed about something he did wrong. Shlomit gets very angry when things go even slightly askew.

Over the years, Shlomo has learned that the best way to deal with mistakes he makes is to hide, rather than deal with them head on. Even though he always gets found out, he has lived in hope that somehow each time things will be different. By zooming out and seeing the bigger picture it makes more sense why Shlomo would feel so much stress and fear about fronting up and sharing with Shlomit little accidents from the outset. It also makes sense how Shlomit may not understand Shlomo's decision to hide things from her.

Obviously, hiding and getting found out is not a workable solution for anyone. We've all seen this first-hand with Corona. By pausing, creating a safe space for each to hear and be heard you can get to the heart of the matter and prevent things from spiraling out of control

Consult authorities and experts

When we are in a mess, it's hard to understand how things got so massively out of control. We get too close to the problem and things get personal. This is how the feelings of shame and guilt take over and cause us to do stupid things. The more we get an outside perspective the wiser we are.

By going to couple's therapy, Shlomo got to better understand what made him feel the need to lie to Shlomit, she got to understand how putting pressure on him over the years caused Shlomo to holdback from being up front with her. She hadn’t realized how afraid he was and how lying appeared to be the only way to keep the peace. By each taking responsibility for their actions they were able to hear one another and take different steps going forward.

Carry out damage control by Communicating Up-Front

While chores and talking about the mundane stuff is not hot on our to do list, by checking in for regular discussions we won't fall behind in the grunt work that needs to be dealt with.

It's very hard to acknowledge when there's a problem. Our human tendency is to want to dig our heads in the sand or blame the problem on someone else. Once the problem has gotten out of hand there's little we can do to reel it back in. Often the damage that results from leaving a problem too long is so all encompassing, we don’t know where to start to get things under control. This is what makes people decide to "suddenly" get divorced. The marriage didn’t disrupt suddenly. The couple just let the challenges pile up, instead of dealing with them as they arose. They never learned the tools and skills they needed to deal with challenges in the first place.

Learn how to create a safe space to discuss challenges and support one another through difficult times.
By investing in learning good relationship bonding and skills you'll know how to prevent disaster before it hits the radar. It's best to take the opportunity while things are reasonably calm to create a relationship that will withstand the test of time.