Dismissing your partner's words and needs produces no instant damage. It piles up for years — until it detonates as a divorce.
One of the main reasons, I think, is dismissiveness and inattention towards the words and needs of the person you love.
In theory, you’d expect two people who love each other and decided to build a family to listen and stay open.
In practice, most people argue about the same things over and over and never try to get to the root causes of it.
But why does a person make a mistake and then repeat it day after day? Because they don’t attach much weight to it. We often don’t see the immediate result of our mistakes. They accumulate for years until they explode into irreversible consequences.
For example, a wife keeps trying to talk to her husband about current problems. Instead of listening carefully and trying to understand, he waves it away and decides it’s all trivial female chatter driven by a surge of emotion.
It’s just hormones, he thinks — stay quiet for a bit and she’ll calm down. Nothing serious.
Later, when she files for divorce, he’ll be sitting with a psychologist saying how foolish and closed off he was to her words, and how deeply he regrets it now. But it will often be too late, because he spent years dismissing his wife.
Or the reverse: a man tells a woman about his problems or needs and is left alone with them, while she keeps hammering him about entirely different, minor things. Then he files for divorce and she’s in shock.
Being able to hear each other and stay attentive to the needs of the person you love is what makes a relationship long and happy.
Have you ever been in a relationship where you weren’t heard or understood? Have you run into that kind of dismissiveness?