If my husband wants to get a divorce, does this mean my marriage is really over?

The other day I received an email from a woman who wrote in part: “My husband has finally filed for divorce. Does this mean my marriage is over? I wonder if I should throw in the towel and give up the fight, because frankly, I have no more fight left.” He was a bit confused as to what she really wanted the result to be. The words she was using almost indicated that she was tired of the whole thing and she felt that perhaps it would be the right decision to let the marriage come to a natural end. But, when I asked him some follow-up questions, she indicated that she really wanted the marriage to work, but he felt that she had tried everything and that she was tired of going around in circles with no real solution. Ultimately, I told her that since everything she had tried was only making the situation worse, she would have to completely change tactics if she wanted to save her marriage from divorce. I will talk more about this in the next article.

Your desire for a divorce doesn’t have to mean it’s officially over, but it does mean you have no hope that things will ever really change.: There are many men who come across my blog while researching divorce. Some write to me and share their feelings. I can tell you that the vast majority of them indicate that they are giving up because they just don’t know what else to do. They tried everything they could think of and there was never any lasting change. Over time, the harsh reality has set in that this is the way things are and that despite what both of you may say or do, nothing really changes for the better. Sure, there may be some temporary improvements, just enough to get everyone excited, but in the end, both of you are back to sabotaging patterns and behaviors that leave you dissatisfied and frustrated.

Women are often surprised to learn that it is the perceived ability to change that they must overcome, not the fact that their husbands do not love them deep down or the external stressors that many blame for their divorce. Often it is the fact that you are tired of muddled through and that your hopes are dwindling. The repetitive motions and disappointments start to pile up so much that you start to think it’s better to start over than to continue the same way.

Change course and find something that works to save your marriage: Your first step is to identify what you’ve been doing that hasn’t worked. In the case of my reader, I had actually tried two tactics. First, she tried what I call the “hard ball” tactic. She had taken a somewhat combative stance, insisting that her husband was quite wrong. The involvement was what I really expected from a relationship that was over a decade old. People get busy. Children and jobs require most of our time and energy. You’re doing the best you can, and he shouldn’t be so selfish as to imply that you’re not.

Of course, unsurprisingly, this was not met with a warm welcome from her husband. Nobody wants to be told that he is wrong or that he is selfish. When it became clear that this was not going to work, she made a drastic change and tried what I call the drastic or desperate tactic. She began to act in a way that had not been typical of her, telling her husband that she couldn’t live without him and begging him not to leave her. The problem with this is that her husband knew that she was being insincere because during their entire relationship, he had never been subservient before. He didn’t buy this and it didn’t ring true.

Try the middle-of-the-road tactic to save your marriage:To be successful in saving your marriage for the long term, you need to find a solution that you can live with and be excited about. Remember when she said she “didn’t have much of a fight left?” Even using these words is an indication that what he was making of her was not desirable to her and certainly wasn’t giving her much pleasure or anything to look forward to. So she, in a sense, she’s beaten before she even starts playing the game.

You have to find a solution that will hold up and be credible over time. I often advise people to sit down with their spouses and agree that you are not happy either and agree that the marriage is stagnant and stuck. You can honestly see why he wants a divorce and it makes you sad to see how opposite this is to how you used to interact with each other. In fact, this bothers you so much that you’d like to try taking small steps and see if you can salvage the relationship, even if it ultimately ends in divorce.

The reason you move so slowly is because if you are too strong, you are likely to encounter resistance and doubt. You want to appear as non-threatening as possible and set yourself up for success. He’s likely to accept that you just want to make it easier for both of you (and the kids, if you have them), since you’ll be working together rather than against each other.

He may resist at first, but if you show him rather than tell him that genuine change can happen, over time the perception will start to change that this is your real problem in the first place: that nothing will really change, so it’s better than cutting. your losses now.