In my part of the world, a lot of people get married when they're young. While most of us are physically mature enough to start a family by fifteen or so, our brains don't fully develop until we're about twenty-five! Getting married before that point gives us a pretty good chance of making an immature, short-sighted decision. We're naively hopeful at that point and often uneducated in the tenacity and work it takes to thrive in a long-term relationship. In a culture that doesn't value community input for our mating choices, we are left to pick out the best partner for the rest of our lives with an undeveloped brain?!? Pretty ridiculous.
But we do it. Some people make it a solid fifty years or so. But more than half of us do not. I would also guess that many of the 50% that make it aren't necessarily happy with their choice, but they stick with it for one reason or another, sometimes for survival.
Marriage & Emotional Immaturity
What happens if you get a few years into your marriage and realize that your partner is actually not maturing along with you? What if they're stuck? Many adults are physically adults, but not emotionally adults. Whether because of trauma or lack of accountability, they stall out, continually dependent on others. An adult who realizes this has the chance to grow up, but may still not decide to.
The terms emotional childhood, emotional adolescence, and emotional adulthood are used to describe and define the level of emotional development a person has reached. Being an emotional child is normal for an actual child, but for an adult, it's problematic. Adults stuck in emotional childhood or emotional adolescence do not take full responsibility for themselves, their needs, their emotions, or their behaviors and disproportionately rely on others. Marriage and emotional immaturity can be a really tough combination, especially for the emotional adult left to manage the emotional child.
What if you're married to one of these underdeveloped adults? What if they don't realize it, but you do? Are there steps you can take to encourage an immature partner to grow up? You don't own them, so you can't force the process, but you certainly can hold them accountable for the work they need to do in order to thrive in life and partnership with you equally. Your graceful feedback is fodder for change.
Being married to an immature adult can be lonely and frustrating. Only two emotional adults can achieve actual intimacy between them, otherwise the caregiving is mostly one-sided. Sex can happen in these marriages, but it is often purely physical or mechanical. Connection between emotional adults and emotional children is unsatisfying at best. Many of these relationships become sexless or have only obligation-sex.
Creating Emotional Accountability in Marriage
So how can you gracefully and gently hold your immature spouse accountable? The first step is to admit your own feelings about the marriage. Being in the parentified spouse position for a long time can make you into an emotional robot, just doing the things that need to be done to help your family survive. If your marital patterns are going to change, that frozen heart of yours needs to melt.
Seek Support
Inside your marriage is likely not the best place for these feelings to surface for the first time. You may have even tried expressing them at some point but lost heart in the emotional meltdown (or shutdown) of your spouse that ensued. If your spouse is an emotional child, your marriage likely isn't a safe atmosphere to express vulnerability and be gently caught. You need a safe, boundaried friend (one you're not sexually attracted to) to share with or a paid professional trained to care for emotional needs, like a counselor. That friend or counselor needs to be one who can hear your story without making judgement or trying to make your decision for you.
Admitting your feelings out loud about this can be a really hard step if you've been taught by your culture to protect your spouse from outside judgement. In conservative culture, this might have been taught by teaching you to "not dishonor your spouse," even though, in this case, the spouse is actually the person who has dishonored themself. It can feel shameful to admit what might feel like a failure of a marriage.
It's important to remember that feelings are experiences that happen to us. They are contextual, not agentic. You don't choose to be hurt, angry, lonely, or tired. Those don't have to be correlated with a condemnation of the person who has triggered them. It is not your fault that you feel this way; it is a reasonable product of your circumstances.
Have the Hard Conversation
Once you've figured out how you feel and have appropriately gathered support for yourself, it's time to start treating your spouse like the adult you need them to be. Gentle and kind, but direct. Coddling them would only be a continuation of the problem. Emotional children need protection from some of the harsher realities of the world. Emotional adolescents need a lot of space from the needs of their parents. Emotional adults have to face the reality of their (agreed upon!) responsibilities. They can handle confrontation and learn from it. They can manage their own emotions and make an action plan to address difficult issues.
It's time to confront your spouse. Keep in mind that your goal is to move from the position of parent, to the position of equal. In relationships between equals, both people are allowed to have feelings. Both people are allowed to have limits. Both people are allowed to have needs. And in a marriage, both spouses have a reasonable right to expect their partner to pick up their half of the emotional burden.
When you step into this confrontation, you have to be ready to hold your ground as an equally vulnerable human, whose feelings and needs matter just as much as your spouse's.
This is a potential formula for how to approach the conversation:
Lately I've been feeling __________ in our relationship. (I.e. overwhelmed, exhausted, lonely, etc.)
I feel like I am carrying more than my fair share of the emotional weight, meaning our relationship isn't a safe place for me to have a bad day. If I stop doing the work to keep us stable and afloat, I'm afraid we will sink or drift apart completely.
I need to be able to be a human too. I need to be able to have a bad day, to be weak, to fail at times, without being afraid that we won't make it if I'm not managing it all.
This is a reasonable expectation for marriage.
Would you be willing to work on this with me? Would you be willing to do your own work (e.g. go to counseling) so that you can carry your part of the emotional weight?
This can be a really painful thing to hear as an immature spouse. It can be scary and humbling. They may momentarily fall apart or throw a fit. But a person who is willing to do the work you are asking for is ready to grow up. They will go to counseling as an individual and will eventually (when they build up the capacity) go to counseling with you as a couple to work on repairing what is broken between you.
Making Your Choice
A person who is NOT willing to do this work (or perhaps worse, says they're willing to do the work, but doesn't) is stubbornly choosing to remain an emotional child. If you are the one who continues to push for healing, sends them countless articles, books and podcasts, or schedules their counseling for them, you are choosing to remain in the parent position. You are enabling the cycle of immaturity and it will not change.
Everyone gets to choose their own hard. Maybe a dysfunctional marriage is the hard you choose. But choose it honestly. Tell yourself the truth, including the truth about your enabling of it. Spending energy on resentment or bitterness is costly to the heart. Remaining lonely puts you at risk for affairs, even if they are only emotional ones. You will have to find new ways to take care of yourself within the parameters of your values if your marriage is really just a commitment to a decidedly life-long child.
I hope the best for you. I hope that your confrontation is productive. I hope that your partner is humble enough to acknowledge their immaturity and do something about it. If things don't work out, I hope that you have a supportive community: people who love you as you are, who do make safe spaces for your to be a human and have real limitations, where you can access the grace to heal regardless of your spouse's choice.
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