As a minister, when I hear divorcees describe their ex-partners, they’ll say, “We grew apart,” or “We had different interests.” In my experience, regardless of what the spouse may be saying, what he or she is really thinking is, “I outgrew my spouse.” I’ve seen very few people file for divorce because they felt their spouse was superior, and they felt guilty for not holding up their end of the bargain.

Whenever there’s tension, conflict, or just silence in a marriage, both spouses tend to believe it’s mostly (if not completely) the other spouse’s fault. I shudder at the number of people who will rant for hours about what is wrong with their spouses without ever stopping to think about what they may be doing themselves to defeat the relationship. Talking down your spouse either means you’re too bitter to change, too much of a door-mat to change, or that you are too self-righteous to change.

That said, it’s not usually so black and white. At different times, we feel more critical of our spouse than others. I think all of us fall somewhere on a continuum between, “My spouse is the worst one alive!” and “I am not worthy of my superior spouse!” Put another way, we might describe someone as an aggressive jerk who can’t seem to admit mistakes on one end of the continuum. On the other end are the hapless victims who can’t see how they played any role in the bad things that happen in their lives.

You don’t have to be a “1″ or a “10″ on this continuum in order to be damaging your relationship. It is only when we develop some objectivity about our own weaknesses, as well as those of our spouse, that we find some peace of mind. When we can’t see our own faults, we have problems in marriage. Often, this scenario comes out in an interaction I like to call “The Blame Game.”

The Blame Game is simply our fight-or-flight instinct run amok. When we react instinctively to a real-or-imagined threat, our logic flies out the window. Our brain is flooded by the hormones that activate our bodies to fight or flee, and everything suddenly appears black-and-white. We blame the other person that we now “must” fight, or we blame the other person that we must now flee (or avoid).

Because the instinctive hormones of fight-or-flight have flooded our brains, we’re not “to blame” (so to speak) for our powerful fight-or-flight instinct. However, we need to take control of our instincts so we can get out of the Blame Game and avoid crashing our marriage.

There’s something about humans that makes us want to save face at almost any cost. We usually want to look good and be right. We like to win (or at least, not lose). Call it our ego or our pride, but we humans just hate to admit we made a mistake, or that we’re not sure. The more insecure we feel inside, the more easily we feel threatened. Our response to feeling threatened: a desperate attempt to present a confident, self-assured exterior.

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re in a bad mood, everything seems to go wrong and everybody seems to be a jerk? This scenario is simple evidence that your bad mood precedes how people treat you, not the other way around.

Likewise, people in a troubled marriage believe their spouse’s crummy behavior justifies the blame they feel towards their spouse. They can’t see how their own anxiety contributed to their irritability, which led to their negative perception of their spouse’s behavior and then to the criticism of their spouse, which soured their marriage. It’s a self-fulfilling process that takes place beneath our awareness.

We’ll talk more about how the Blame Game plays out in marriage next time.

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David Code is an Episcopal minister, family coach, writer, and founder of The Center for Staying Married & Raising Great Kids. Read more about his work at http://DavidArthurCode.com.

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