What Is A “Micro-Break” In A Marriage?
“It is very rarely the massive blowups like infidelity that are eroding relationships.”
Ending any relationship, especially a marriage or a commitment to a long-term partner, is hard and never taken lightly. But while such relationships may sometimes end with a cataclysmic bang, more often than not that big event is the result of many, many smaller events that led to something far more dramatic.
In a recent post, Instagram creator Abby Eckel (@abbyeckel) explained the concept of “microbreaks” as being the main cause of why some relationships eventually crumble.
“Microbreaks in trust are what truly erode a relationship,” she begins. “It is very rarely the massive blowups like infidelity that are eroding relationships. It is those tiny little breaks that add up over time that ultimately will make a relationship crumble.
“Every time they say that they’ll do something and they don’t do it, and you have to eventually follow up: that’s a microbreak,” she continues. “Every time they said that they would get up with the baby, and the baby wakes up in the middle of the night and you find yourself shaking them awake, you’re asking them to get up [and] they are either pretending they don’t hear you or the baby or suddenly they’re too tired: that’s a microbreak. Saying that they’re going to change their behavior after a blow-up argument, and then maybe they do for a short period of time but ultimately revert back to that behavior that caused the blow-up in the first place: that’s a microbreak.”
Microbreaks, she explains, aren’t simply disappointments, either. They can serve to affect the other person’s behavior in response to this eroded trust. Eckel says these small but routine breaches of trust “go hand in hand with women suddenly becoming control freaks.”
“Women don’t become control freaks overnight,” she says. “Women are not born control freaks. We are made to control situations that you have lost our trust in. ... We are left with no choice but to do things ourselves because you don’t do them.”
So say a partner says “Don’t worry about X: I’m going to handle it”... and then they don’t. What happens when the other partner reminds them of their promise?
“Suddenly we’re a nag,” Eckel says grimly. “And then on and on and on the circle goes. Every time you say you’re going to do something and you don’t, that is a microbreak in trust. And those are the tiny ones that add up over time that truly erode a relationship. Because that soon makes you an untrustworthy and unreliable person.”
The idea resonated with many commenters, who shared their own unfortunate experiences with the phenomenon.
“The reason for micro-breaks in the home is fundamentally they don’t believe they are responsible to follow through,” said one. “It’s something nice to do if they feel like it.”
“This is them showing you how unimportant you are in their lives,” adds another.
“THIS,” declares a third, “is why 70% of divorces are initiated by women!”
Relationships aren’t always easy: a good relationship essentially requires you to juggle your needs, your partner's needs, and your family's needs all the time to make life run smoothly. It can be a lot and plenty of us are going to mess up from time to time. Forget to call the plumber, mow the lawn, or get the milk from the store when we said we’d definitely swing by after work. In those instances the best you can do is apologize and do better next time... but the key there is doing better next time.
Microbreaks can be mended and mended easily — they’re microbreaks, after all — but if one spot in a foundation keeps breaking over and over, no matter how many times you patch it the whole thing is eventually going to come down.
