Before Calling A Lawyer
In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage. -Robert Anderson
So, you are one step away from calling a lawyer. Yet, you feel some realistic confusion and are wondering: “Is this the best path to take for all concerned?” You have just reached a marker decade and you don’t want to live the rest of your life the ways things are going now. Perhaps you feel concerned that the impact of the divorce will be devastating for the kids. You may have the sense that you “love” your spouse but you don’t feel “in love.” You may have even fallen in love with someone else.(See Affairs)
Let me pass on some ideas that will help you before you take this step and as one client said to me, “pull the trigger on the marriage.” First, let me say that I know that you have not reached this point lightly. People may say that divorces happen too easily. Yet as you already know, your road even this far has been fraught with, guilt, shame, confusion, ambivalence, and fear about the future.
My goal is here is play the devil’s advocate before you take the final step of calling the lawyer. If you are at all unsure and have not called the lawyer, this could help you resolve the question, “Am I making the worst decision of my life?”
My basic point is that you may not know yet! Sometimes you may simply be making a decision at a time when you don’t have enough information. For instance, you may be suffering from a depression and blaming it on the marriage. Before you decide about the marriage get some help for the depression.
You or your spouse may be having a drinking problem. Without treatment, you don’t know what the marriage would be like without the presence of this often denied reality. You may be extremely unhappy with your job and have fallen in love with someone else in order to spice up a boring life.
If you are involved with an outside person, you will want to learn about the nature of the feeling “in love.” Scientists have discovered that this “in love” will occur in your brain and last from six months to two years in the context of a new relationship. After that the high from all of the amphetamine like substances racing around in your brain will fade away. At which point you will again need to work to replace the “in love feeling” with the “I love you” feeling which comes from a different part of the brain. This part of the brain helps you settle down, maintain a long term commitment and perhaps have children.
As you think about the marriage, just now, you probably are thinking that the two of you just don’t know how to communicate. If you are a man, you may feel that your wife just won’t be rational. If you are a woman, you may feel as though your husband never expresses his feelings.
Most couples that come to my office believe that they are just different and this explains why their relationship is not working. Yet repeatedly, I find that differences in couples lead to their becoming a great team if all cylinders are working. When they are not, couples usually feel pulled apart by those same differences.
This gets to the most important area that I think that might interest you. Whether or not you can maintain the “I love you feeling” or the commitment feeling rests on some very specific skills that can be learned. John Gottman researched this in depth by videotaping couples that had a high level of relationship satisfaction and compared those to couples with deep levels of dissatisfaction.
He reports that certain skills seem to make a huge difference in whether couples feel close to each other or not. For instance, how men handle conflict instead of avoiding it and how women approach bringing up their concerns, can influence whether any issues get resolved. Whether a couples fights a lot is not a predictor of divorce. Rather the ratio of good moments to bad makes the difference. In fact, many of the couples that never fight end their relationship with one member having an affair.
You can refer to other parts of this website to understand more of the basic principles of making a good relationship.(See Relationships) The point is simply this: the best time to decide on proceeding with a divorce comes after you have developed these skills and are using them. You cannot evaluate your relationship accurately until you are employing skills that will lead to increased intimacy and effectiveness as a couple. Trying those principles can help you know what you have together, particularly if you feel that you love the person but do not feel in love.
Relationship counseling can be an extremely effective way to slow down enough to make a good decision. Even if you decide to call the lawyer, you will look back on this time and know you gave it your best effort to make the relationship work. Besides, you will learn many new tools and resources to make a future relationship work better from the beginning. But perhaps, you will discover a new and exciting person that you have been married to all along.
