"I think I married the wrong person."
What happens when we find ourselves reckoning with regret over our partner choice and what to do about it first.
“I thought this was gonna be different.”
“My marriage feels empty.”
“I don’t even like him as a person and I doubt he likes me. He doesn’t even know me.”
“God, I’m so tired of being alone and doing everything by myself.”
“I changed and he stayed the same.”
“I don’t love him like that.”
“There’s gotta be something better than this.”
“There’s just something missing between us.”
“I think I married the wrong person.”
“I married the wrong person.”
Thinking you married the wrong person can be a surprising, scary, and unwanted place to find yourself in. Not knowing what the hell to do with what you feel on the inside is never an easy burden to bear, but the particular emotions that surround feeling like you made a mistake in choosing your partner, feel especially complex, and pervasively heavy. The inner turmoil, ambivalence, angst, regret, restlessness, disappointment, hurt, and denial, have likely built up enough for you to have sought out this article you’re reading now. So, holy shit. Welcome. It’s a big deal you’re here. It takes a lot of courage to be poking around trying to find something, somewhere that’ll speak to this feeling inside of you.
What just happened in coming upon this read, was finally an admittance that you have this feeling you may not know what to do with and you acknowledged it. You just gave this deep dark secret inside some light and this alone is a big fucking deal. Take a second, feel that. The fact that you found something here that someone is writing about, means others have felt it too. You’re not alone; it’s not just you. And this unnamed sensation on the inside, actually matters. Breathe that. Even if you stopped reading right now, and this is the farthest you get for some time, okay. You admitted it. You think you married the wrong person. If you’d like to keep reading, I’d like to tell you a few truths about this from my experience as a couples therapist and a woman who questioned the same thing as you:
One: Feeling like you married the wrong person is something so many people, especially women, walk around carrying yet won’t speak about aloud, not to themselves, and certainly not to a partner.
No one wants to admit they may have married the wrong person and in the space of this kind of contemplation, lies shame, embarrassment, guilt and a whole host of emotions that are intensely thick and difficult to move on their own. But it’s also a space where an insurmountable amount of anxiety exists because what would it mean if it were true? And what if the problem is me? Without anywhere to go, anyone to turn to, or any voice to the feelings on the inside, both of these questions are enough to paralyze you with enormous overwhelm. We will often avoid going directly to the source of emotions like this because we’ve assigned a tremendous amount of weight, size and meaning to them. What we don’t realize is that we don’t have to take them all on at the same time, we can break this down and we get to decide what it is they mean for us. The meaning you assign around the emotions you feel is entirely up to you.
Questioning your partner choice doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or with your partner for that matter (I can feel the eye rolls here, I know you were hoping I might say there is totally something wrong with your partner). It means there is something trying to shift inside of you. It’s restless, it needs to move and you want it to or it will move you. It’s a matter of time before the inside shows up on the outside and it will start to erode physically, emotionally and mentally in this and others areas of your life if it hasn’t already.
Being unhappy in your marriage due to the cumulative effects of bad habits like shitty communication and general malaise that marriage and life circumstances can bring, evoke different emotions and even potential resolutions than a deeply resonant and pervasive feeling that exists inside your soul telling you you’re not in the place you need to be.
Two: If you think you married the wrong person, and this is something that’s been coming up for you for quite some time, there’s a chance you very well may have. But there’s just an equal of a chance that you didn’t. You may be here for reasons you don’t realize.
Oftentimes, we get surprisingly comfortable in the emotions that keep us in place. This is called resistance. Resistant emotions like uncertainty and ambivalence aren’t enough to move the needle, they’re just enough to cause us to feel high-centered and when we’re high-centered we’re not moving anywhere. This pervasive sense of discontent happens when we live in an emotion for long periods of time.
Staying caught in thought (resistance and ambivalence) without speaking about what you feel will keep you in the same space for as long as you let it. If you’ve been in this space for a while, it’s pretty likely other emotions have squatted there too. Look around, see what else you can find. Are blame, contempt, regret, grief, or resentment present? While not pleasant, they can help give move you off-center and gain traction. Start with any emotion you can find that has some movable energy around it.
Three: There are differences in versions of wondering whether or not you’re with the wrong person.
Being unhappy in your marriage due to the cumulative effects of bad habits like shitty communication and general malaise that marriage and life circumstances can bring, evoke different emotions and even potential resolutions than a deeply resonant and pervasive feeling that exists inside your soul telling you you’re not in the place you need to be. Time and self-exploration, will help both of these things, but nothing can be done without courage. There is a lot of work that needs to happen here in this space regardless of what variation of “did I marry the wrong person” you may be experiencing. None are wrong, none are less important. All are imperative and vital to the fulfillment in your life.
Six months into her marriage, Jen recalls standing in her kitchen, watching her new husband put dishes into the cabinet above the sink when she describes wanting to blurt out, “I want to go back to Kevin.” Kevin was her first boyfriend, her first love, her first everything and while it’d had been four years since they’d been together at that point, she never stopped thinking about him, reminiscing about what it felt like to be with Kevin. By the time she and I started working together, almost 12 years had passed from that moment in her kitchen. She still dreamt about Kevin, spoke of him as her soulmate, and the constant pulling she had to him, never ceased.
Four: It’s time to get very clear about what it is you do feel. If you’re here and you think you married the wrong person, the only way to know, is to start working with what’s present.
Illusions of grandeur, wishing and hoping for change, living in a place of the past in terms of what once was either with your partner or someone else, those need to come down to the ground level to be explored so you can look and feel what’s going on inside your body when you unfold them. Instead of going into your head, wondering, “what happens if I find out I married the wrong person,” which takes us into problem-solving mode and out of our hearts and bodies, drop back into your body and start labeling some of the feelings you’re experiencing in the very present when you think about your marriage.
Speak truths to the feelings that exist inside of you, if only to you because you are the only one that actually can. What happens inside yourself when you say, “I married the wrong person” versus “I might have married the wrong person?” What do you feel in your body?
Keeping a narrow focus of what’s “right” versus what’s “wrong” makes it difficult to explore that there are many truths that exist within our selves. What do you feel if you shift from “right” and “wrong” to a more expanded view and less of a duality, or binary set of circumstances or outcomes? You’ve labeled what you’re feeling as a marriage issue, a partner issue even, when in reality, it may be too soon to tell. What happens if you ask yourself, “am I able to grow and expand in this relationship?” How does that land in you?
Lean into yourself so well that you begin to understand how emotions like ambivalence, avoidance, vulnerability and courage show up in your body, how they got there, and what to do with them if you want to move into a deeper emotional space.
Five: That “something’s missing,” that restlessness, that constant feeling of longing for difference or change, is a common feeling in relationships where there is a lack of deep connection and intimacy, a lack of being seen, a lack of feeling understood.
Sometimes this is very much about the partner you have and whether or not you can connect to this person. And sometimes you have to ask yourself if what you’re asking for, what you’re longing for, is also what you’re truly able to offer as well. Get super curious about how you show up in connection and vulnerability. Get to know yourself and your limitations, your level of awareness, your attachment style, the ways in which you feel connected in your heart. Lean into yourself so well that you begin to understand how emotions like ambivalence, avoidance, resistance, vulnerability and courage show up in your body, how they got there, and what to do with them if you want to move into a deeper emotional space.
Know when you’re at an internal limit that you have to work through, the kind of thoughts that keep you there versus allowing you to shift, the stories you build around yourself. Go there, because it’s the inside that you’ll be bringing with you everywhere you go, into every intimate relationship, this marriage or the next, and into every deep, meaningful moment. Go there, so that you can be the one and only person that can answer “did I marry the wrong person” with total resonance.