In any relationship (including marriage), there are three spaces: its personal, its personal and their common. These three spaces concern anything: friends, time, interests, values, territory.
Here she has time for her ladies' affairs - to go shopping, make a mask, chat with her friends. And he has his own personal time - to play computer, go to football with friends, just lie down and do nothing. Plus, everyone has a job to do. And they also have a common time they spend together, whether it's a family dinner, going to the cinema or the theater, a trip to IKEA for new chairs.
Family psychologists believe that in a healthy relationship with a couple of people, there is a "I", "you" and "we". And for each couple - its proportions. Someone, for example, has a large personal space, and they need everyone in the room to be able to be alone. The other couple don't need it, because they don't have that kind of need. And it is quite enough for them to have their own territory in another form (everyone has their own space on the Internet, in books, at work).
The common makes us a couple. It allows us to preserve our personality, to be together without losing ourselves.
As everyone has already guessed, problems in a couple begin when the fragile balance of personal life and common life is broken. As a rule, it is a male tendency to protect one's own jealously, to defend one's autonomy. But to merge into one whole, to dissolve into a loved one and create more common things - it's female.
That's about this "female" in the psychology of relationships, I suggest we talk. We are biologically embedded desire to create a common - relationship, home, family, children. But sometimes we do not even notice how this instinct makes us unhappy. And at the same time our partners.
Of course, we want to spend more time with our loved one. But every time you refuse to meet your friends in order to be with them, you give up a piece of yourself. It happens every time you change your plans, give up your own goals, sacrifice your time for the sake of "our time".
The meanest thing is this: as long as you do it, you don't think it's a sacrifice at all! You do it voluntarily, on your own volition. You don't think you'll charge him when it turns out that you're wasting all your time on the general life, and there's no more time on yourself. When it turns out that you no longer have any friends or hobbies of your own. When you suddenly look at yourself and realize that your interest in life has disappeared somewhere, and you used to be quite different...
It's happening gradually. You're slowly and faithfully giving up what you've been doing to yourself. You melt, you melt and... you disappear. And it turns out to be very, very difficult to get back at yourself. The partner is already used to it, he will start to make quite fair claims: he does not understand why you suddenly become "selfish". He is angry and protesting. And you are afraid to lose him, because you have nothing else left, it seems to you that without him you will not be able to. And it seems that there is no way out of this trap.
In such a situation, there is a great temptation to fall into the position of a victim of circumstances and accuse your partner of "giving the best years of my life for you". Only the woman did it herself. Even if she had a selected tyrant who forbade her from seeing her friends, dancing or working from the very beginning, it was her choice whether or not to obey him. You can get yourself back into it. Slowly, in small pieces. Just like I lost it.
This is, of course, an extreme. But it is not so rare. And we all sometimes feel that the relationship is skewed. Maybe everything is not so critical, and you have something "your own". But I lost some of it. It's hard to understand where natural and normal concessions and compromises end, without which the couple will just fall apart, and where the process of losing themselves begins.
The desire to create a common goal and the desire to become one with a loved one, never to be separated and do everything together are two different desires. One of them is mature, the other is childish, infantile.
Psychoanalysts say that we all want to return to early childhood, when the closest and beloved person was with us all the time. But when we get older, we gain the ability to endure separation and cope with differences. Our adult part sees it this way: love is "I will not give you the last one, otherwise I will be angry at you for my own sacrifice.