Anyone who has watched one of these very abundant day time TV shows (not least Jerry Springer) has seen the great variety of reasons why families can come between lovers and split them apart. But that is not always the case, fairly often the more families try to pull a couple apart, the closer the couple will pull together to the eventual exclusion of their families.
Not only is this not the families desired outcome but also not necessarily desirable for the couple concerned.
Being pushed together due to shared adversity and common enemy is not the greatest recipe for lasting and true love!
So what do you do if you are a loving parent, sibling or other extended family member and can see that your nearest and dearest is making possibly the biggest relationship mistake of their lives, what can you do to make sure it doesn't happen?
Nothing.
Nothing..I hear you ask...'what sort of advice is that?'
Ok, well this is a little something you can do, but it doesn't involve buying your son or daughter a single one way ticket to the Outer Hebrides or persuading them to join the Foreign Legion. Neither does it involve slandering your daughter in-law in the local press or 'paying her off' so she leaves your son alone!
Having been in 'one of those destructive relationships' the more my family had to say on the matter, the less I decided to tell them. When you judge and condemn a persons partner you are all-be-it unwittingly, judging and condemning your family member as that partner was the result of their decision and selection process. They will feel the weight of your words, may agree with them but not know quite what to do with them. After all, you only get to hear the bad stuff, there is lots of good stuff woven into the bad stuff that makes your easy advice of 'leave them' not quite so easy.
If your advice is brief and contains that one chord, they will stop listening. Afterall what is there to listen to, they've heard it a dozen times already.
Meanwhile, let's be honest here. If you had a son who's wife was cheating on him or a daughter whose husband was beating them, how many of you would suggest 'marriage counseling' over 'leaving them'?
Sometimes we as family are just too close to the problem, their pain becomes our pain and so a nice easy 'cut them out of the picture' solution seems like the best one..for us!
It might be the case, that the result of marriage counseling is that both parties do decide to split but part of that counseling process will involve thorough examination of the issues and dynamics of that relationship and a shared responsibility for the problems and the cure. This is a process we don't really go through when someone we love comes to us in pain. We just want to eliminate that pain source!
Our family don't provide all the facts, so when they come to you crying and tugging on your heart strings, listen then listen some more. Ask them some open ended questions that invite them to think about what they are doing and what they want and what the solutions might be. Help them to arrive at a decision themselves rather than dictating it and of course, be there to pick up the pieces if and when it all goes horribly wrong.
Remember that trying to force a decision out of your family member could result in them clamming up and avoiding you. This leaves you out of the loop and them even more isolated than ever, which makes it even less likely they will be able to cut free if cutting free is what is required.
You don't need to do nothing, just do it quietly by listening and subtly helping them to arrive at their own decision.
