When your marriage appears to be stressed out and depleted, should you divorce? At some point, almost all married couples encounter marital problems; inevitably, some of those problems can put a marriage at risk. And if you also often fret about stubborn problems in your marriage, should you divorce?
The following talks about the most common reasons for divorce and gives you advice accordingly:
(1) Do you feel insecure?
If you often feel insecure in your relationship, especially if you often suspect that your spouse has an extramarital affair without proof, you should realize that too much insecurity can lead to your marriage crisis (e.g. arguments, fights, separation, and divorce). The feelings of insecurity can cause a series of negative emotions, such as resentment, anger, and jealousy; that is very unfavorable for a long-term relationship. And if you often feel this way, sooner or later, you and your spouse will feel tired of your insecurity and its related symptoms, and then the relationship will keep deteriorating until the divorce.
So, should you divorce because of your constant insecurity? Is it possible to stop being insecure?
Being insecure is a reflection of your negative mindset; as long as you are determined to improve your thinking patterns and make best efforts to work on your outlook, your mindset can become more positive and optimistic. Whatever your past experience was, whatever is happening to your marriage now, you must make a drastic change to reconsider yourself and your marriage. When you admit that you often feel insecure in the relationship without good reasons, generally, you should focus your energy on improving yourself instead of your spouse.
In particular, if your spouse ever cheated on you, understandably, you may still feel insecure even though he/she has made significant corrections; in such a case, you might go on to read the posts below to fix your insecurity:
How to save your marriage after your spouse cheats.
How to forgive betrayal and move on in your marriage.
(2) Is your marriage sexless?
If you have long been in a sexless relationship, probably you are also suffering from all sorts of relationship problems. A healthy sexual life helps strengthen the marital relationship both inside and outside of the bedroom. No doubt, it is a great help for keeping the marriage alive to facilitate open communication, enhance mutual trust, and find the unique quality of you and your spouse during sex. But when you always fail to maintain a healthy sexual life, the results are just the opposite – Your mutual trust can decrease greatly, your mutual connection can decrease gradually, and you may feel as if you lose something that a man/woman deserves in the relationship. As we all know, due to the lack of sexual intimacy, finally numerous sexless marriages end in divorce.
So, should you consider divorce when you are struggling in a sexless marriage? Can you repair it?
Whether you have no sexual desire or your spouse doesn’t want sex, there must be an underlying reason behind it. To move your relationship forward, you have to pinpoint the reason and fix it in order to bring sex back into your relationship. In many sexless marriages, one or both spouses have the willingness to improve their sex life, but they just don’t know how to do, after all, a sexless marriage can be a very complicated issue. If you also have this trouble, the posts below might give you some insights:
What causes a sexless marriage – Why does a marriage become sexless?
How to keep sex alive in your marriage – Common mistakes in bed.
How to survive in a sexless marriage – Is a sexless relationship doomed?
(3) Do you have different habits, values or beliefs?
Conflict often arises when your spouse differs with you in values, beliefs, and habits in married life. Especially if you and your spouse have vastly different beliefs, it is very difficult to relate to your spouse when it comes to the discussion about your dreams, desires, and plans for your future. Disagreements over these topics can easily lead to resentment and hurt. When the disagreements between couples on important issues become irreconcilable, their marriages head toward a breakup.
Should you divorce because of the sharp division between you and your spouse? Is it possible to avoid divorce in this situation?
Even though your marriage gets started with many common values, beliefs, and habits, inevitably one or both of you adopt new thinking as your life goes on. Hence, you need to accept one thing – It is very normal that you and your spouse may go down separate paths one day. But as long as you can both stand together on common ground in crucial marital issues, you can survive in such a marriage; remember, the essence of marriage life is a continuous process of seeking common ground and reserving differences on all kinds of life issues.
In married life, it is necessary to accept your spouse’s way of thinking and allow him/her to be the person who he/she wants to be. Keep in mind that no one wants to enjoy being controlled by someone in the long-term relationship; so if you are kind of controlling and you often get in his/her way, your marriage will be placed at risk. And hence, if you don’t want the divorce, you should learn to accept your spouse as he/she is, respect his/her thoughts and opinions, and support him/her as much as you can.
For more tips, you might go on to read the posts below:
How to deal with marital conflict – Resolve conflict in marriage.
How to fight fair with your spouse – Fight in a healthy way.
6 tips on how to make up with your spouse after a fight.
(4) Do your family and friends have a negative influence on your marriage?
Some friends and family members of spouses, especially in-laws are also non-negligible factors of influencing marriages. Don’t overlook the influence that your or your spouse’s family members and friends can have on your relationship. For instance, if your spouse is unwilling to come with your family to enjoy a specially prepared dinner because your spouse feels that they are hard on him/her, then that may put a strain on your relationship. For another example, maybe you or your spouse have also ever resented about the excessive interference from your in-laws; and it is not odd for problematic couples to decide to get a divorce under the pressure from a spouse’s family members and even intimate friends.
Should you divorce due to negative influences from the friends and family members? How to deal with them?
It is common that a spouse’s family or intimate friends have a dislike for his/her spouse, especially when the marriage is still at an early stage. And when there are contradictions between marriage and family or friendship, it is also a critical issue that whether a person should adopt the relationship advice that the family and friends offer.
However, if you are really sure that you are living happily together and you believe that you can have a bright future with your spouse, out of consideration for the protection of your marriage, you should have the courage to stand up to those family members and friends who have negative sentiment towards your marriage, and let them fully understand your thoughts about their influences on your marriage, and tell them that you don’t want them to go on to interfere with your marriage. Anyway, you must be aware that their comments/thoughts are just a reminder of goodwill generally; they will always stand on your side, regardless of the status of your marriage. So, make sure to express your opinion about what they think about your marriage in a kind and gentle manner.
If you can’t get rid of those negative external interferences, you will be more likely to get a divorce. Actually, when a couple bravely takes action to protect the marriage, they will feel unconditionally supported and loved by each other.
(5) Are you troubled by financial problems?
Financial problems are also one of the top reasons for divorce. No doubt, disagreements on family financial management between couples have ruined numerous marriages.
Some people don’t want to marry just because they attempt to avoid falling victim to financial problems that a marriage brings; they choose to cohabit with a person of the opposite sex for a long term rather than quickly marry and settle down; however, even if they do so, financial issues in their relationships are also going to become transparent sooner or later; understandably, if there is a partner who is always reckless with money or always plans financial management in a negligent manner, the overall longevity of such a long-term relationship tends to be badly affected. So, the outcome is the same for a bad money manager in a marriage.
Many people often have to worry about money after they get married. And there is a wide range of issues involved with money: a spouse may have already carried a heavy debt burden before marriage, but he/she did not let his/her spouse know it in time; a spouse may have an addiction to expensive substances; a spouse may insist on buying a highly expensive car first but the other one may insist on buying a house first; a spouse may often complain about the other one’s way of money management…
Should you divorce because of the severe financial problems in your relationship? How to deal with it?
Before deciding to hire a divorce attorney, you may follow the tips below to reduce arguments about money with your spouse:
- Be completely honest:
Remember not to keep financial secrets from your spouse, whether you have a poor credit card score, a hidden credit card, or other things that you bought without letting your spouse know.
- Plan a budget together:
When it comes to the family budget, couples need to get on the same page – Negotiate and agree on the budget. It is unnecessary to make an extremely detailed spreadsheet to strictly limit your daily spending. You and your spouse might work together on a simple spending plan for the next few weeks or months so that you both are more likely to agree to stick with it.
Whether your budget is broad or detailed, the most important thing is to set limits for those spending areas that can cause conflict, such as overspending on dining out, and spending too much on buying new clothes.
While discussing the first budget together, you and your spouse may feel tense and stressful because a brief or sharp disagreement is almost unavoidable. But as long as you are both determined to pursue a common goal – working together to spend less in the end, disagreements can be settled and you two can come up with a mutually acceptable budget.
- Plan for personal spending:
Be aware that money represents the power to some extent in a relationship; hence, each of you should have equal control over your joint funds rather than just enable one of you to have complete control over the budgeting and spending. Once one of you becomes a dictator of family finance, the other one tends to feel frustrated and disenfranchised.
The final word:
A vast range of marital issues have the potential to ruin a marriage, and surely, this article also does not cover all the related issues; but believe it or not, most of them can be solved in an acceptable solution; and in most cases, divorce is not the real way of solving problems, and it just means you are trying to escape those unforeseen or painful relationship problems; even if you divorce and then enter into a new marriage in the future, probably similar problems can occur to the new relationship because the root of those problems lies in yourself instead of others. So please value your marriage no matter how you feel about it at present. And as long as you want to have a long-lasting marriage, you have to learn how to get through one rough patch after another in your married life.
Even though you are really frustrated with your marriage problems, you do not have to jump to the conclusion that your marriage is doomed; in this case, you need to put your focus on yourself and try to change your mindset about your marriage, and probably your marriage is still worth saving, and it is also not too late to save your failing marriage. If you want to learn more about how to save your marriage life, you might go on to watch the video presentation below; inside it, Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience, offers the comprehensive marriage-saving guidance that may give you the confidence to restore your marriage:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
How to stop divorce and save your marriage – 7 marriage saving tips.
What to do when your marriage seems hopeless – Save your marriage.
What to do when your spouse wants to leave you – Save your marriage.
What not to do when your husbands says he wants a divorce.
What to know about the emotional & financial cost of divorce.