Don't Quit Before Christmas

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This is great advice for employees, of course, but also for couples.

November and December are stressful enough, much less for couples who are having trouble. The reasons are obvious.

Thanksgiving and the December holidays are family celebrations. Couples are families, by definition, whether or not they have kids. So you’re supposed to spend your time together, and all the traditions imply that you’re supposed to enjoy being with family at this time of year. But if you're already having problems, it doesn’t feel like celebration. It feels like a prison sentence.

And you’re supposed to buy gifts - expensive ones. When you are in a rough patch in your relationship, giving gifts isn’t what you most feel like doing.

Plus, there’s the extended family you’re supposed to visit with during the holidays. It might be just merely awkward to pretend that you’re both doing ok, when you are far from it. Or maybe you’re expected to pull off an academy award-winning performance, masquerading as a delightfully happy couple to prevent explosions of familial dysfunction. Even worse, you might face outright hostility or a chilling reception from in-laws who know full well that things aren’t all sweetness and light with you and their precious loved-one.

So the pressure to give up on a relationship, to call it quits, to just end the misery so you can begin a new life in the new year is tremendous. It can be nearly overwhelming to imagine another round of pain in the midst of everyone else’s merry-making, and the relief you may have been imagining seems like it might be immense and immediate, delivered to the doorstep of your heart before January.

Don’t do it. No matter how bad the relationship troubles, splitting up over the holidays is a bad idea. (With the one exception of physical abuse, of course. There’s never a bad time to separate from someone who makes staying together a lethal danger.)

When you split over the holidays, you make a set of painfully poignant memories that will be revisited every single holiday for the rest of your lives. There really are anniversary reactions, powerful psychological revisits of traumatic feelings that recur simply because the calendar recycles.

If you have kids, breaking up over the holidays multiplies the misery exponentially. Not only will the pain of parental splitting be magnified by the sentimentality of the season, but every holiday celebration in their future will be tinged with trauma instead of tinsel. They won’t be able to forget; they’ll be reminded over and over, forever.

How can you hang on over the holidays?

1. Invest in hope as well as gifts. Give your marriage a gift as significant as those you give your family and friends. Fund some training, some therapy, some coaching, something for your marriage.

2. Remember that these are just months, a few weeks, only days. You can make your holidays feel routine as much as you make them feel special. If they’ve become increasingly painful, then let them be shallow this time instead of special. Relax into mostly routine, and avoid doing those special things that make the calendar have an aura. Make it normal, not special.

3. Agree to just get through till the new year. Preserving the specialness of your future holiday seasons, especially for the kids’ sake, may be one of the easier settlements you can negotiate with an estranged partner. If you get into a fight about this goal, it may really be a case of irreconcilable differences.

4. Tap your spiritual resources. Let the season be a time for renewing your religious faith, your spiritual heritage. Take comfort in the eternal and the transcendent, and remind yourself that just as you are not your job, your education, or your body, neither are you completely or even essentially defined by your relationships. You are both more and deeper than that.

5. Rely on family and friends; they may also welcome and comfort you during the holiday seasons.

6. Perhaps you might also consider letting the spirit of the season seep into your psyche. There might just possibly be some kindness, some grace, some love that kindles from the celebrations of these months. Perhaps not, but you have so little to lose if you loosen up your inner Scrooge, and there might be much marital merriment to gain. Perhaps you might say something like, “We have many problems yet to solve, but we can celebrate what love there has been, and what might even bloom again.

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