This is the question that constantly runs through your mind when your marriage has become completely intolerable and you don’t know what to do.
You can ask your friends, ask your therapist, ask a lawyer or two, but none of them can really answer the question for you. That is because the answer can only come out of your experience. How do you use your experience to answer that question?
What is essential, and what is missing in how most people think this issue out, is a process that allows you to access both your feelings and the objective facts.
The first question to answer is not, do I get divorced or not, but, what are my realistic options? They really boil down to these: 1. don’t do anything, 2. go to counseling, 3. do something that alleviates the pain for now but is not a permanent solution, 4. live separately and see how it goes, 5. get divorced.
How do you choose among those choices? Looking at the facts realistically (Perish the thought) is the first step.
Do Nothing:Sound good, but is that really going to work? The situation has becom intolerable or you wouldn’t be reading this blog. Burying your head in the sand will just leave things to fester until some sort of explosion occurs. Better to take charge then let things just happen to you.
Go To Counseling: A good marriage counselor can work wonders, but there are limits. Unless you both want the marriage to work more than you want to be right counseling is going to go nowhere. If your expectation is that the counselor will tell you spouse all that is wrong with him/her and all that he/she has to change, while you sit with a self-satisfied look on your fact, you are going to be disappointed. It is a rare marriage in trouble where it is totally the fault of one spouse. You will both need to work on yourselves individually and together as a couple if marriage counseling is going to work. You can find out more about marriage counseling here.
Do Something Temporary: Maybe one of you will move into another bedroom; maybe one of your will move downstairs. The problem is that doesn’t really address the real issues, whatever those issues might be. If it is money issues, living separately in the just puts more distance between you in terms of decision-making. If the issue is intolerable behavior, you are still going to be tripping over each other all day long.
If you have children, the fact that you are sleeping apart, or even living apart within the home, is very clear to the children and makes them fearful and incomfortable. The level of uncertaintly in their lives increases and the emotional pressure on them goes up. The children are extremely sensitive to the breakup of a marriage. If Mom or Dad is suddenly living in the basement, fears of divorce, dislocation, separation from their parents, come to the fore. What an in-house separation does is raise the fear level astronomically for the children — it doesn’t make it better — it makes it worse.
To be continued in next post.
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