Preventing a divorce can be a tricky thing to do as it is a journey fraught with dangers, and navigating your way through troubled seas of arguments, hurt feelings, broken hearts and the countless small niggles of married life seems overwhelming to the point of desperation for many men and women. Finding out how to prevent divorce, therefore, becomes a confusing grey area where logic and solutions seem to mean nothing as raw emotions bring everything crashing down.
The trouble often is that the confusion becomes so great that we throw up our arms metaphorically (and sometimes physically!) in defeat and either stop caring or revert to our baser instincts where fear and anger take hold; this just makes matters worse. To make sense of this confusing minefield of marital distress, we must first realize that we can make things simpler than they seem by focusing on the one central aspect of a marriage ... Love.
If you keep the belief that you are still in love and that love is the driving force for your marriage, then you can start to develop that same attitude in your partner even if it seems like he or she has no interest in it all. However, to do this you must first learn to defuse hostile situations so that the right environment can be found to actually communicate properly without tearing each other’s head off. Here are a few tips to help to get to this situation.
Stop the Hostility
The first barrier is the hostility that develops within problematic marriages. Both people have hit a point where they will not back down as they feel hard done by and do not want to lose the argument to save their face and to prove a point that is probably not really the issue at hand. The problem is that everyone seems to be keeping score and wanting to be right, wanting to WIN, which is a poisonous attitude in a relationship where you are supposed to be working together and understanding each other on a level of intimacy that only lovers can reach. If you can leave the ego at the door and learn that keeping score does not matter, you may take some barbed comments but you will find your partner will not continue to attack if you do not attack back. Only when the hostility is gone will you be able to talk properly.
Uncover the Real Issue
Most arguments seem to revolve around small insignificant things or "niggles" such as household chores, minor money matters or small personal habits. You probably know that this is not the real reason or might be baffled as to why it is a problem, but all these niggles either have a kernel of truth to them or are a signal of some other larger marriage threatening problem.
For instance, a wife yells at her husband for neglecting his chores and children because he is going out with his friends too often. The husband feels he is a good father, and while is not prompt with chores, gets them done in an orderly fashion and yells back that he needs some time to himself too -
Is this argument really about the children or chores however? While the wife might seem to be strong willed, she might be feeling very threatened and insecure because of the time her husband spends away from the family. The husband may also feel suffocated by the home environment but cannot find a way to express this so he blows off steam with his friends instead. Or there could be many other reasons but they are not the things being talked about! Once you calm an argument down, however, you have the ability to navigate your true feelings, as painful as they might be to express, when they are aired in the right atmosphere then you can find out how to prevent divorce for the right reasons and with the right decisions.
So if you are prepared to be the one who saves your marriage, even if you think your partner does not want it, click here to find out a step-by-step formula that a group of expert marriage counselors have compiled that has already mended thousands of relationships.
PRINT ARTICLE
Source: Content provided and maintained by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and TwoOfUs.org