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Marriage At Mid-Life - Stagnation, Resurrection Or Resignation

2,217 views · Published 10 January 2017 · 31:16 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: Mark Smith Family Tree Life Coaching · 2017 · People & Blogs

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Mark Smith shares from his 30 years of marriage counseling experience the options that face most middle aged couples - Stagnation, Resurrection Or Resignation

Mark E. Smith, MSW is the Founder and Director of Family Tree Life Coaching. He previously worked as a highly respected therapist and author in the Indianapolis area for 32+ years. He now practices as a Life and Relationship Coach. He offers coaching for individuals, couples, families, family businesses, executive leaders, pastors, and therapists. He has world class coaching expertise in Affair Recovery, Relationship Issues, Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome, Sexual Addiction, Abuse, Trauma, Complex PTSD, Anxiety, Mid-Life Issues, Shame and Abandonment Issues. If you need a safe, courageous, cutting, marriage-jolting healer, he is your guy. You can contact Mark Smith at [email protected] and 317-507-8866.

You are well past your 40th birthday, you danced the night away at your 25th high school reunion, the last of your kids are in high school themselves, you are still looking pretty good and you are lonely as hell.  There is a wall between you and your spouse that seems a mile thick.  Listen to an unknown poet’s lament of mid-life marital disconnection and hopelessness…

                                   The Wall 

Their wedding picture mocked them from the table 
These two whose lives no longer touched each other. 
They loved with such a heavy barricade between them 
That neither battering rams of words 
Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.
Somewhere between the oldest child’s first tooth
And youngest daughter’s graduation
They lost each other.
Throughout the years each slowly unraveled
That tangled ball of string called self
And as they tugged at stubborn knots
Each hid their searching from the other.
Sometimes she cried at night and begged
The whispering darkness to tell her who she was
While he lay beside her snoring like a
Hibernating bear unaware of her winter.
Once after that had made love he wanted to tell her
How afraid he was of dying
But fearing to show his naked soul he spoke instead
About the beauty of her breasts.
She took a course in modern art trying to find herself.
In colors splashed upon a canvas
And complaining to other women about men
Who were insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called the office
Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures
And buried himself in customers.
Slowly the wall between them rose cemented
By the mortar of indifference.
One day reaching out to touch each other
They found a barrier they could not penetrate
And recoiling from the coldness of the stone
Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies it is not in a moment of angry battle
Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting exhausted expiring
At the bottom of a wall it could not scale.

Does that sound painfully familiar?  Have you grown so far apart that you don’t even feel married any longer?  Is intimate connected love making non-existent or almost so?  That is so sad.  You are way too young to live like that.  For the mid-life marriage mired in bone chilling stagnation I would like to present some additional options.  Life is just too short to continue to live the way that you are living.  If you blink once or twice you’ll be 60!  In my opinion the other much preferable marital options are either resurrection or resignation.

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