Now your spouse has closed all doors and seems to become adamant about divorce, but you are sure that you don’t want to end your marriage. No doubt, saving a failing marriage alone is a painful and lengthy process. You may get overwhelmed and consider giving up during the process. Anyway, one thing is certain: it is possible to save your marriage even though only you want to.
Surely, saving a marriage covers a wide range of aspects; but like many things, you do not have to overcomplicate this process. As long as you can grasp basic principles for making a marriage work, you will realize that it is less complicated than you ever imagined.
And the following points out 6 general tips on how to save a failing marriage alone:
1 Be constant:
It is quite important to be constant in your efforts to heal the broken relationship. More specifically, you are advised to make continuous efforts to rebuild the connection with your spouse. Keep in mind that you should not attempt to connect with your spouse too frequently. Excessive connection attempts are a sure telltale sign that you are having an anxious orientation towards your spouse.
Understandably, when your spouse is unwilling to reassure or respond, you are desperate to hear back, or you are desperate to receive the assurance from your spouse. But if you attempt to reach out to your spouse out of anxiety and fear, you will only leave yourself in a very passive position in the relationship, and then you will lose a lot of control over marital problems. So you have to learn how to regularly reach out to your spouse without feeling fear or anxiety.
2 Be calm:
The more critical a situation is, the more you need to stay calm. Under the influence of great fear or anxiety, you can hardly make effective decisions or plans. More often than not, when you act out of anxiety or fear, your efforts are powerless or even in vain. However, things can be changed significantly when done in a calm and dignified manner. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not know how to stay calm when they are in the midst of a marital storm. For this problem, a good piece of advice is to make a feasible plan for self-care. That kind of plan should help you resist the urge to respond to negative emotions (e.g. anger, fear, and anxiety) in your marriage. And as we all know, troubled couples are often suggested to eat well, exercise, or seek a trusted person to share their pain during distressing times.
3 Be consistent:
When you do well in the two areas above, make sure to adhere to an effective approach consistently. As we all know, in daily life, people may have different attitudes and behave differently when confronting the same issue; therefore, the ways of dealing with marital problems vary from person to person; and sometimes, when it comes to how to take steps to save a failing marriage, you may find that your approach is different from others’, or conflict with others’; or even sometimes your thoughts are full of contradiction and then you have two contradictory approaches.
As explained above, you should be aware that marital problems are like broad questions without standard answers. Generally, as long as an approach helps solve problems, you can stick to it, without a need to frequently shift your approach from one to another. Remember, if you follow a plan that is shot through with inconsistency, probably you will end up confusing your spouse while you are carrying out it; and the more efforts you make under such a plan, the more confused you are.
In a nutshell, try to avoid inconsistency when you are thinking about how to save your failing marriage alone. Any inconsistency only makes your spouse think that you are unpredictable and untrustworthy. A few examples can make this point clear: one moment you are trying to connect with your spouse, the next moment you are trying to make him/her jealous; or one moment you are sending “one-way texts” to your spouse without thinking about his/her response, then the next moment, you are sending him/her redundant texts to attempt to receive his/her response as soon as possible; or one moment you are giving your spouse a “marriage path” letter, bearing your responsibility for a bad situation, and then the next moment, you are playing the blame game.
4 Find a new path:
If couples disconnect constantly, or if they stop improving themselves in their relationships, their marriages tend to deteriorate. And in the long run, such a marriage will come to an end because the couple will lose the direction of their married life. So, when couples are confused about how to save a failing marriage alone, maybe it is time for them to find a new path – imagine where their marriages are going to head, and look forward to the future married life. And couples should not just think about it for a while, they need enough time to ponder over it.
Common goals help marriages last a lifetime. But the pity is that a lot of couples have never understood the importance of setting common goals in their marriages. For many married couples, this is an issue that has not been paid enough attention to before they got married.
When a couple decides to get married, they spend a lot of time, money, energy, and efforts in celebrating a short-term wedding. And meanwhile, most of their relatives and friends just congratulate them and send them best wishes, without sharing their views or experience about what a couple should try to do to live together happily for the rest of their married life. And in today’s society, more and more couples get married early without much forethought.
Furthermore, couples need to set a series of long-term and short-term goals for a happy marriage. And those goals vary from couple to couple. And whatever goal a couple sets, they need to learn to work together as a team.
5 Improve yourself overall:
Practically speaking, when you have no clue as to how to save your failing marriage alone, there must be one thing you can do: focus on yourself and improve yourself – develop yourself into a higher caliber person. Be honest with yourself, you have to admit that there are some places that you can improve in your relationship; more exactly, you must have some good places where you haven’t maximized your potential, or where you haven’t “showed up”.
In reality, a vast number of divorces are due to inertia: as many spouses always attempt to avoid their weak points or bad habits rather than improve them, their inertial builds up over time. Probably, you also have such a problem: after you have been married for years, you may think that you have “settled down”, so you start to ease up yourself and stop improving yourself; if you are a procrastinator in the aspect of self-improvement, your attractiveness to your spouse will wane; and as you float through your life in this way, you tend to lose ground in the relationship, or the relationship enters a state of stagnation gradually.
It is always a tough task for you to change yourself greatly, and probably you are antagonistic towards this idea. And at this time when you have to change yourself, maybe you come up with a question: “Why should I have to make continuous efforts to change myself? Why do I have to pay more?” It seems unfair, but don’t think that way. Now that you want to save your marriage, you might as well be the one who makes the first move – improve yourself overall to make yourself more attractive to your spouse than before.
We each have a notion of what kind of person we would like to be; and at the beginning of your marriage, you must also desire to become the best version of yourself for your spouse, but your soul may slack at some point. That is against your original intention. So, keep improving your inner self, and strive to bring out the best in you. In doing so, your spouse will become more satisfied with you, and you will have a better chance of saving your marriage.
6 Rebuild the connection:
We human beings are designed for connection. And it is natural for a spouse to crave more attention from the other one when he/she feels disconnected in the marriage. And marriage is easily troubled and stressed by a lack of connection. The longer the disconnection remains in a marriage, the more the marriage suffers. If couples have been chronically disconnected and unhappy, gradually the feeling of distance can turn into disdain. Therefore, to get the relationship back on track, it is a must that couples should rebuild the connection as soon as possible.
And when you are feeling disconnected in your marriage, you inevitably feel reluctant/embarrassed to contact your spouse. And this feeling leads to a series of patterns that drive you two apart, such as going to bed at different times and leaving for working without saying goodbye. No doubt, constant disconnection strangles and starves your marriage. But the more disconnected you feel, the more necessary it is to rebuild the connection for improving the relationship. To revive the marriage, one of you has to take the first step to try to connect with the other one.
Moreover, when you two feel disconnected from each other, probably each one of you wants the other one to be the first to try to contact one. In this case, you two may think that the one who reaches out to the other one first means he/she loses this round of the battle; if so, you are keeping score in the marriage. To save the failing marriage, you must stop thinking that way. Keeping score is completely self-centered and only causes external conflict, and you must be aware that there are no winners in the game of keeping score. So you do not have to feel embarrassed to show your willingness that you want to reconnect with your spouse and that you are ready to open your heart to your spouse anytime.
By the way, if you want to learn more about how to stop keeping score in your relationship, you might go on to read the post below:
7 basic tips on how to stop keeping score in marriage.
The final word:
When you are trying to save your failing marriage alone, you should invest enough in personal growth and self-development. And you should have confidence that you can fix your marriage by improving yourself greatly, regardless of how your spouse currently feels about the relationship.
If you need more expert tips on how to save a failing marriage alone, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
4 basic tips on how to get through a rough patch in a marriage.
6 tips on how to make up with your spouse after a fight.
What to do when your marriage seems hopeless – Save your marriage.
How to keep your marriage alive – Maintain a happy long term marriage.
What to do when your spouse wants to leave you – Save your marriage.
What should you do when you are separated from your spouse?
Causes of marriage failure – common reasons a marriage fails.