Is Your Wife Talking Divorce?
The journey towards saving your marriage is not easy. We offer you solid support through the following six tips. They may go against your instincts right now, but rest assured, your best chance is NOT adding more emotion and drama into the situation.
People usually keep doubts about their marriage to themselves.
Here we’re not talking about ordinary concerns about the relationship or even feeling in a stuck pattern—instead, we’re talking about worries about whether the marriage will survive. This is scary to think about. If you tell others, you might get unhelpful suggestions such as “just listen to your inner voice” or “make a pros and cons list”!
The doubts stay underground, coming and going, sometimes for years. Marital doubt is way more common than most people realize. And there are ways to get past it and get clear about the future of your marriage.
About 1 in 5 married people (22%) report having some doubt about whether their marriage will survive.
Marital doubt can take a lot of pathways: sometimes it just lingers at the same level, but more often people describe it like a roller coaster. Sometimes you feel confident about the future of your marriage, and then something happens that puts you in a gloomy, doubt-returning place. You talk your way back, reminding yourself that you love your spouse and that divorce would hurt a lot of people. But hours, days or weeks later, your doubts creep back. It’s anxiety-provoking and extremely unpleasant (to put it mildly). This limbo state of anxiety can seem to go on forever, draining your energy for the future.
It’s important to appreciate that marital doubt is by its nature a private emotion.
There is no big public sharing as there may be for career angst, or when a family member getting a scary medical diagnosis and you have a cadre of people to process your emotions. When you were falling in love, everybody knew. But now maybe you have just one friend or a counselor you’ve opened up to. Certainly not your spouse! Your anxiety grows from hiding such a threatening emotion and from worrying about the risks of “outing” yourself.
Many people in the marital-doubt camp are trying to figure out if their spouse is capable of changing. This leads some doubters to unconsciously create “tests” for their spouse, to see if change is possible. (“If I don’t remind him of my birthday, will he remember?”) When the spouse fails the test, the doubts are fueled.
Because there is no sharing, a doubter’s spouse has no idea what’s going on. Even if they sense the other’s discontent, they aren’t likely to see any threat to the future of their marriage. Every marriage has its ups and downs, they think, and they may also have gripes about the marriage (but not about whether divorce is in the future).
During this marital doubt phase, according to researcher Diane Vaughn, the doubter may ask about marriage counseling. This may be a great idea (and hey, we’re huge fans of marriage counseling!) but rarely do they come clean, at home or in the therapy office, that they aren’t sure about the future of their marriage. Why?
Marital doubters are scared and not ready for a crisis, so the work in the therapy room may stagnate. If you’re not sure your spouse can change, and if you believe that without the change you have no energy for the marriage, it’s no wonder the couples therapy falls flat, fast!
The average number of couples therapy sessions divorced people report having?
Just four sessions.
To state the obvious here, that’s not enough time to dig into issues and start to work on them. For these couples, often the excuses are that life gets busy, someone gets sick, someone feels on the spot in counseling. Basically, there is no real momentum to keep plugging away, particularly for the clueless spouse who thinks things are basically okay.
Sometimes the other spouse makes the argument that marriage counseling is unnecessary or that the time and money are not there for it. Especially if they are not seeing any warning signs about divorce! The doubter, perhaps also not sure about where marriage counseling will work, withdraws the request to start or stay with the counseling–and then keeps simmering.
Whether or not there is any attempt at couples therapy, some doubting spouses go into individual therapy. Sometimes it is a great experience, especially if the therapist helps them see their own part of the marital problems and offers ideas for self- change.
Other times individual therapy becomes a “bitch session” every week, with no real personal growth and a terribly one sided view of the other spouse. (Some therapists are not good at seeing the perspective of the spouse who is not their client.) But we think that the majority of doubters do wish for personal growth and don’t want to just attack their spouse.
When marital doubts linger long enough, people start to rehearse in their minds what they would do after a divorce. They imagine being single again, and they think about how to prepare for that possibility—just in case. This may mean starting a job, finding separate friends, or not making big commitments for the future, like upgrading the house.
This creates more distance in the marriage, something they don’t want, but the doubter’s dilemma is that verbalizing doubts to the spouse can propel them into crisis mode. They don’t know how their spouse will respond—constructively, nastily, or with panic? Now you may have two people in doubt—and bringing their worst selves to the situation!
But here’s the thing: the longer you prepare for the possibility of divorce without telling your spouse, the more blindsided they feel when you do tell them—and the more likely that your worst doubts are realized.
You may be wondering, then, how does marital doubt end?
In the three simplest “end game” scenarios of marital doubt, the following can happen:
– Doubt goes away, replaced by normal ups and downs of marriage but without the edge and anxiety about commitment and stability. You’re back in, with maybe just occasional flare ups of doubt. You may get there on your own, or with help.
– Doubt turns to crisis when it’s shared with the spouse prior to a decision to end the marriage. Sometimes the crisis leads to real change, with counseling help or on your own as a couple, and the doubt goes away. Other times it leads to divorce, but with enough time for the spouse to understand what’s going on and for both of you to try to save the marriage if possible. This shows the benefit of sharing doubts with the spouse before deciding to divorce—it gives them a chance to respond well and for reconciliation to occur—even though it’s scary because you don’t know how they will react.
– Doubt is not shared and turns into a sudden announcement of divorce–a kind of “Dear John” discussion: “I am leaving you. I have a lawyer and I suggest you get one.” This is, of course, the most heart wrenching for the other spouse and can lead to bitter divorces and troubled shared parenting later. However, it might be necessary if the other spouse is a threatening person who could do grave harm if told in advance.
If you or someone you know is having marital doubts, there is hope for understanding what’s going on, gaining more clarity, and getting off of the roller coaster of emotions!
Once upon a time when divorce was rare, most people were driven to divorce by one of the “Triple A” problems: Affairs, Addictions, or Abuse.
Divorce meant someone was chronically cheating, repeatedly drunk, or physically violent.
Desertion was the fourth reason for divorce in 19th century America when husbands would go west and disappear. Affairs, addictions, and abuse are what I call the “hard” reasons for divorce because they represent dysfunctional behaviors that impact the human dignity and safety of the spouse and usually the children. In their full bloom forms, they are intolerable to live with over time and still have a healthy life. But as we’ll talk about in a minute, the presence of one of the Triple A’s does not mean you have to rush to the divorce court; there still may be hope.
Nowadays we live in the era of the “soft” reasons for divorce. In my research, which is similar to that of others, the top explanations people give their divorce are: growing apart (55% of people list this as an important reason), not able to talk together (53%), money (40%), personal problems of the spouse (37%), not getting enough attention (34%), sexual problems (24%), and differences in tastes and preferences (23%).
Not that these “soft” problems are trivial or easy to live with—they can cause a lot of pain—but they are a long way from the Triple A’s. In fact, some people learn to live with problems like these, accepting the limitations of their marriage and their spouse, and living a healthy life. Others get help and experience improvement in the soft problems if both spouses work at it.
Here I want to talk about the hard problems and what you can do when your marriage has one. Unfortunately, they are still common. In my research, infidelity was listed by 37% of divorcing people, alcohol/drug problems by 22% and physical violence by 13% (including 18% of wives). This is a lot of couples, and you can be sure that they have a lot of the soft problems too.
It’s a common misconception that an affair dooms a marriage. How many people have you heard say, “If my spouse ever cheated on me, I’d be gone?”
In fact, affairs differ a lot. Some are one-time lapses that the cheater feels terrible about and is unlikely to repeat. Why blow up an otherwise good marriage in this case? Other affairs are less about the marriage than about someone’s psychological crisis—a choice of an affair as a kind of medication for personal pain. On the other hand, some affairs are part of a repeated pattern of infidelity that the cheater does not want to give up. Again, it’s motivation to change that matters most.
I once met a British lord who wondered out loud about the fragility of modern marriages.
He said, “A frightful thing these young people are doing: throwing away a perfectly good marriage simply because they fall in love with somebody else.”
He was expressing an old-world view here: if your spouse cheats on you, slow down, don’t throw anything away, and see if the marriage can be repaired.
Little known fact: research shows that infidelity is not a factor in the success of marriage counseling. And the presence of infidelity does not make the average divorcing spouse less pessimistic about reconciliation. It’s terribly hurtful, of course, but many couples recover if they are willing to try to heal. Affairs are only fatal when someone won’t try, or give up trying to change. Many couples get help and have stronger marriages as a result.
There are a number of effective treatments for addictions, and lots of people go on to live healthy lives and have good marriages. What blows up marriages on the part of the one addicted personal is denial, blame, and an unwillingness or inability to follow through with treatment and support systems like AA.
What destroys marriages on the non-addict spouse’s side is the unwillingness or inability to come to terms with how distorted he or she has become in the presence of the addiction, for example, by enabling the addiction, being codependent, and creating coalitions with other family members. Both parties have to sign up for getting help to make major changes. When that occurs, it’s a beautiful thing, and some of these marriages are marvels of honesty and intimacy.
There is more likely to be immediate danger, and abused spouses (particularly women) often feel they deserve the abuse. Here’s how I see the issue of responsibility: the choice to be violent or use coercive control is 100% the responsibility of the abuser. Why? Even if you’ve been a difficult partner (who isn’t sometimes?), there are always other ways that your partner could have responded other than to hit or intimidate you. So you’ve got to seek help and decide not to take it anymore. If you think this stance puts in you danger, then you have to leave.
But recent research shows that there are two kinds of intimate partner violence: ordinary partner violence and intimate terrorism. The latter is the coercively controlling kind where a man intimidates and dominates his female partner, with or without physical violence. This kind of domestic violence is about 10% of abusive relationships.
Ordinary domestic violence, on the other hand, usually involves both partners hitting, and it arises from lack of impulse control and the inability to handle conflict that escalates into screaming, insulting, and eventually violence. Usually, both people feel bad about the violence and go through long periods where there is no violence. And there is little in the way of coercive control. But ordinary domestic violence is still a dangerous thing emotionally and physically. Adults and children are harmed, sometimes permanently. That’s why it’s a hard problem that undermines health and human dignity.
So, if you are facing intimate terrorism, most experts agree that you have little choice but divorce, doing so as safely as you can, using all the resources you can access.
But if yours is ordinary domestic violence, there is more hope. We now know that marriages like yours can be restored to health. The key, as with other hard problems, if the level of motivation and energy that you and spouse bring to getting help and making changes.
1. Ask yourself if the presence of infidelity, addictions, or abuse in your marriage is compromising your own well-being or that of your children. If you decide “yes,” then ask yourself:
2. Do you want to try to save your marriage? If you decide “yes,” then proceed with the next steps.
3. Convince yourself that there have to be major changes and that you will not stay unless there are. This will empower you to put everything on the line.
4. Before talking to your spouse about the changes you want him or her to make in order to stay married to you, do two important things:
5. Then prepare to deliver probably the most complex and important message of your life, along these lines:
6. Listen to your spouse’s response, which may be:
7. Listen, don’t get into a long argument about anything specific (like how much your spouse drinks, or whether the last affair was sexual or whether the last violent episode was more your fault), and repeat what you said before, in different words.
8. At the end, ask if he or she will get help with you—that’s the action step you are looking for.
9. If you don’t get buy in the first time, end the conversation, and ask if he/she will think about what you’ve said.
10. Bring it up again in a few days or a week, in the same way. This is essential for your spouse to take your seriously.
11. Don’t give an ultimatum with a specific date, but increase the intensity of your challenge over time, repeating that you can’t go on this way, and saying that you are not feeling heard.
12. If you ultimately don’t get buy-in for change, then tell your spouse that you have made the sad decision to leave the marriage. Be prepared for the possibility of a turnaround at this point, but know that you can’t count on it.
It’s commonly believed that when people enter the legal divorce process, they have come to accept the reality that divorce is inevitable.
Even therapists and lawyers tend to assume that once divorce papers are filed, ambivalence about divorcing is over and the only task ahead is to help couples have a constructive end to their marriage. Recent research shows that these assumptions are not founded. In fact, many divorcing people aren’t sure they want their marriage has to end.
The first empirical study on attitudes towards reconciliation during the divorce process was conducted by Doherty, Peterson and Willoughby (2011), who surveyed a sample of 2,484 divorcing parents.
They found that about 25% of individual parents indicated a belief that their marriage could still be saved, and about 30% indicated an interest in reconciliation services.
That study was replicated by Hawkins, Willoughby and Doherty (2012) who found similar levels of belief that the marriage could be saved (26%) as well as interest in reconciliation services (33%).
A third study (Doherty, Harris, and Wilde, in press) asked about specific attitudes towards the divorce in a sample of 624 individual parents who had filed for divorce.
The study found that just two-thirds of participants were certain they wanted the divorce. The rest were ambivalent or did not want the divorce. Parents who were not certain about the divorce were highly interested in help to save their marriage.
Keep in mind that this study, like the other ones mentioned, were conducted with people who were well into the divorce process. Unpublished data from clients in initial consultation with lawyers has found that half of initial clients were ambivalent about getting divorce or didn’t want the divorce; only half were certain.
Other surveys of divorced people have found indicators of ambivalence about divorce. Several surveys reported that half of divorced individuals wished they had worked harder to overcome their marital differences and avoid their divorce (see Hawkins & Fackrell, 2009, for a summary. Hetherington and Kelley (2002) reported that in 75% of divorced couples at least one partner had regrets about the decision to divorce one year after the breakup.
In a qualitative study, Knox and Corte (2007) found striking levels of rethinking among currently separated spouses. They reported:
“Clearly, one effect of involvement in the process of separation was a re-evaluation of the desirability of initiating a separation to the degree that they would alert others contemplating separation/divorce to rethink their situation and to attempt reconciliation” (p. 79).
In summary, research now shows that divorce ambivalence is widespread among people who have entered the divorce process. It’s not over just because the legal divorce process has started.