Look Beyond the Phone Book When Saving Your Marriage Is The Goal
As someone who has been through three failed marriages, I can assure you that there is nothing about divorce that is fun. When my first marriage failed (after I caught my wife cheating me with one of my best friends), I had all sorts of revenge fantasies and in those, the divorce proceedings put me back on top, with her getting a firm dose of comeuppance. It didn’t work out that way. Turns out that my wife’s lawyers presented a case of me emotionally neglecting her, leaving her with practically no choice but to turn to someone else for support. That’s not the way I saw things, of course, but the judge believed this version of events and I learned a very expensive lesson.
Marriage number two was probably a rebound relationship on my part, but it was fun while it lasted. I did see some warning signs that we were having Marriage Problems, but this time it was my wife who refused to acknowledge it or do anything about it. This time I got away without alimony, but I still had some pretty steep legal bills to remember number two by. With number three, I thought I had found true love. Turns out I had found someone who truly loved my beach house and my car; apparently, I was something to put up with in order to have access to those things.
Looking back on my track record, I wish I’d taken the steps necessary to make my first marriage work. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but if we’d sought help, I’m willing to bet we’d still be together and much happier for it.
Saving Your Marriage
You may think that after all you and your spouse have been through, and the years that the issues hurting your marriage have been festering, your relationship is ultimately doomed. Statistically speaking, that may very well be the case; at least if you live in the US, where it’s estimated that anywhere from forty to fifty percent of marriages now end in divorce. In many cases, seeking help through a traditional Marriage Counselor doesn’t seem to help all that much either. Many couples end up reliving the trauma of past transgressions during therapy and come out of the whole process angry with each other and in even worse shape than when they began. So if you can’t just flip open the phone book and rely on an ad that says “Save My Marriage” to put your marriage back together, where exactly do you turn for help?
How about yourself? By embracing alternatives to traditional marriage therapies, you can take control of the situation and work on improving your marriage, even without the active cooperation of your partner. Instead of being forced to sit in an office and confront each other as you rehash all the things each of you has done wrong in the past, or being forced to leave home for a weekend and take part in a torturous Marriage Retreat, why not focus your energy on improving your relationship. The past is the past; get over it! Listen to your partner and reconnect with them. You’d be surprised by how much just listening to each other will help your relationship to recover. For example, maybe your sex life became a little boring when the kids were born and you just fell out of the habit of looking for opportunities to connect with each other. Maybe it doesn’t bother you so much, but your spouse may be feeling lonely or rejected, or they may suspect that you’ve lost interest in them personally. All of this can snowball into someone doing something they regret like engaging in an extramarital affair. Simply communicating with each other can help to resolve the issue before it gets out of hand.
Traditionally therapy does work for some people, but if you want help that’s been proven to Save Marriage with much higher success rates, try looking somewhere besides the Yellow Pages.
Marriage Problems are far more common than many people realize. Salvaging your marriage may be more achievable than you realize, especially after you read a few of the articles that have been written recently about alternative Marriage Therapy (LP). In particular, an overview of the burgeoning California Marriage Counseling industry called “Five Years Later And Still In Therapy: Is My Marriage Fixed Yet?” has called attention to the questionable success rates for traditional counseling methods, noting that divorce rates in the US are the worst in the world. Another paper calls for alternative therapy to Stop Divorce from reaching epidemic proportions.