Emperor Empress Syndrome: Why Marriages Fail

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

In society today, we see many marriages that start strong and where the love is palpable between the partners. Marriages that more than endure and seemingly thrive for years.

Children are "successfully" raised and career and economic goals achieved. The man rises to an influential position in his profession while the wife excels at home and in community service, or perhaps in her own career.

Sometimes the rare and extremely energetic woman will find success in her own career as well as these other spheres.

They each develop their own "worlds", spheres of influence and networks of communities which they know and in which they are well known.

As they grow into those separate worlds, they may tend to grow apart in a number of different ways, corresponding to their karma, and the development of the various subtle bodies, which mature at various times of life, often from the teens to age 50 and beyond.

The ways a couple can grow apart are many when they inhabit different worlds much of the time, day after day: Sexual attraction to another; emotional dependency on or living vicariously through, or being best beer buddies with another; opening one's heart to another as an exclusive arrangement; mental attunement to a like-minded community with standards and customs alien to one's partner; spiritual development in one partner that outstrips the development of the other partner.

Commonly, such a couple reaches a crossroads when their children are entering puberty and teenage years. Each has invested a great deal in their separate worlds.

Often, the male has ascended the commanding heights of his profession, emerging as an Emperor of his domain. The female often has attained substantial recognition herself, for her talents, her creativity and her "people magic". She is often a leader in her community, in her own way, a center of attention, a magnet and a template for others around her who share her aspirations, her zeal for life, and her steadfast determination.

 As the most intense child-bearing years are now over, both partners have a natural inclination to assess their current condition, as to whether or not their needs are being met, whether or not they are fulfilled in their life so far, and so forth. To all appearances, they are the Emperor and the Empress of their world. They have attained success.

So why can't they get along? Where did their love go? Where did their love go wrong?

This is sometimes called the midlife crisis. As part of this reassessment, partners often find that when they compare their current relationship to the relationship they had when they married, they find their current situation lacking.

Lacking in passion, lacking in shared mental maps of the world, lacking therefore in shared values.