Now you are puzzled about whether you should save your marriage or not? As regards this critical problem, nobody can help you make the final decision but you; that is to say, others outside the relationship just can assist you in evaluating the state of your relationship.
To assess your relationship’s save-ability, first, you might answer the personal questions below:
(1) Do you still view your spouse as an intimate friend and teammate?
Any healthy marital relationship is based on more than romance and sex. Like many problematic couples, you may ignore a key point to keep a marriage alive – friendship is also at the core of a healthy marriage. Friendship in marriage is known to maintain emotional and physical intimacy. Obviously, happy couples are not only lovers but also intimate friends. When you feel that you and your spouse are nearly friendless, the lack of friendship becomes a factor contributing to an unhappy marriage.
Surely, the two of you are bound to go through all sorts of overwhelming difficulties, such as financial stress, affairs, aging, and ups and downs of raising a child. During the process, the two of you should not co-exist in your married life; instead, you two should be the most intimate friends that bond together as a team.
By the way, can you recall the last time when you and your spouse had a friendly interaction or smile/laugh at each other? If you realize that a long time has passed since that time, it is time to get the friendship back in your marriage. The lack of feelings of friendship can make it hard for both spouses to support each other, thereby resulting in a lot of vulnerabilities that spouses will feel that the married life is so disruptive and uncomfortable.
As the friendly ecology in your marriage dies, the two of you tend to have worse and worse feelings for each other. Probably, your spouse often deliberately picks on you although you indeed have some flaws and faults, and you feel that your spouse no longer treats you as an outsider or even an enemy instead of an intimate friend. When you complain that your spouse treats you badly, probably your spouse is also feeling that you are also not treating him/her fairly and friendly, but you may have not realized it.
So should you save your marriage when you feel you just co-exist instead of being intimate friends?
No doubt, love without friendship can’t last long, but it is worthy to make efforts to save such a marriage by reviving the friendship. No need to quit your marriage too early.
The following is some opinion about how to cultivate friendship in marriage:
Marriage means that a couple should strive to work as a team when dealing with life issues; teamwork spirit is one of the essential parts that make a marriage work; so as a couple, we should be always communicative and supportive for staying in sync with each other. Remember, the team is more about “WE” instead of “I” and “SHE/HE”. The deterioration of a marital relationship is closely associated with the emotional shift in mindset from “WE” to “ME’. In married life, the best method to overcome the emotional separation is to learn to be good friends with each other again.
Good friends take each other seriously and are particularly attentive to each other, no matter what happens. What does that mean for you? An example may make this point more clear: when your spouse makes a mistake, you could have given him/her a sharp scolding like “WTF, are you crazy?”, but you choose to respond in a friendly and positive manner (for example, you say to him/her “How should we avoid it in the future days?”)
Friendship can change over time. As time goes on, we start to deeply know the bad side or downside of our partners, such as our partners’ small and big failures, flaws, and faults; surely, all of our friends are not perfect; nor are we. Hence, as a couple, we should learn to be more forgiving of each other.
For more tips on how to build teamwork in your marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
How to be a team with your spouse – Develop teamwork in marriage.
(2) Do you still feel chemistry with your spouse?
Have you been in a sexless marriage for a long time? Over time, the sexual chemistry in marriage may fade away gradually; although no couples can always maintain the level of sexual intimacy that they had when they fell in love with each other, it should exist in marriage all the time. When it is non-existent in a marriage, the marriage hits the rocks inevitably.
There is no standard definition of how many times sex per week/month is healthy. In this aspect, you must be aware that the amount of sex tends to decrease as you two get older, so it is better to focus on quality over quantity. Ultimately, you should be honest with yourself based on your feelings about the present sexual interaction in your married life. Whether you need to initiate more sexual contact with your spouse or not is up to you, this does not just mean proposing to have sex with your spouse by making an underwhelming statement like “wanna have sex?”, you are supposed to be more creative to woo your spouse.
As we all know, a number of sexless marriage end in divorce every year; but a sexless marriage doesn’t always end in divorce; it is very common that a couple drifts into a sexless marriage at some point; and for most couples who are frustrated by sexual intimacy issues in their married life, eventually they can find a solution to those problems and get sexual intimacy back on track.
For more tips, you might go on to read the post below:
How to survive in a sexless marriage – Is a sexless relationship doomed?
Chemistry in marriage is not necessarily sexual; for example, the ability to make each other laugh and smile is also a part of chemistry in a relationship. Surely, sexual chemistry is always a necessary part of chemistry that helps maintain a happy relationship.
(3) Are you still willing to share intimacy?
Intimacy includes and transcends sex. Specifically, do you still cuddle? Do you still kiss each other goodnight or goodbye? Do you still hold hands when you go out together? Sharing intimacy is a manifestation of a multiple-layered bond with your spouse because intimacy must be built on solid and persistent connections physically, mentally, and spiritually. As to sharing intimacy with your spouse, it does tie into a wide range of aspects of your married life. Getting married means to start to have intimate ties with each other for the rest of your life. If you are not honest and open with each other, all sorts of intimate stuff (e.g. happiness, sex, and trust) will be in grave danger of disappearing.
Maybe, it is difficult for you to figure out whether the two of you are still willing to share intimacy when your marriage is in crisis, because it may just have been a period of time since you shared intimacy. And probably your spouse is pulling away from you and he is also not in the mood to honestly communicate with you. In such a situation, it is better to get clear about whether you two were often at odds with each other or you two were often not on the same page when your marriage was in a normal state; if so, probably the result will not bode well.
(4) Do you still share things in common?
Ask yourself questions like “do you still talk about some easy or fun topics sometimes when you stay together?”, and “do you still share interests?” Everyone can change over time; when both spouses change greatly, a big change can place undue strain on the marital relationship.
Anyway, it is important to retain common ground for some things in your marriage, whether they are small or big, like chatting about a TV play over coffee, going out together to watch an interesting movie, traveling together, working together towards affording a new house, and so on.
If you don’t have something in common, you can hardly have things to talk about, laugh about, and get excited about together, gradually you will easily feel as if you are just strangers sharing a home, thereby you may fear that the death knell of the relationship is about to come.
(5) Are you still kind to each other?
Kindness and generosity (here, the generosity includes generosity of both spirit and resources) are two prominent qualities that generally a happy and lasting marriage has. You may not have to show kindness and generosity in grand gestures; and your kindness and generosity will also be appreciated when you apply it to the household chores, like making your spouse breakfast, helping him/her look after the kids to let him/her have a night off and allowing him/her to sleep in.
So, should you save your marriage when you are no longer so kind to each other like before?
In this case, you may ask yourself questions like “Have I ever exhibited enough kindness and generosity to him/her?”, and “Does he/she still deserve my kindness and generosity?“. If you answer “yes” to these questions, you should practice showing your spouse kindness and generosity on a daily basis. If you answer “no” to these questions, it is urgent to take action to get affection back in your marriage; otherwise, your marriage will continue to deteriorate.
For more tips, you might go on to read the post below:
Tips on coping with lack of affection in marriage – How to get affection back.
(6) Have you tried to address existing problems?
This question sounds like a no-brainer, but it is worth consideration. Have you already confronted your spouse about those critical issues that are affecting the relationship, or are you too afraid to bring up any sensitive topic in the presence of him/her? Have you ever put all the blame on your spouse? Have you explained to your spouse how his/her actions hurt your heart? Have you ever accused your spouse of being a stupid jerk, or have you done a serious soul searching for yourself?
Should you save your marriage if you always can’t work together with your spouse to resolve problems in your relationship?
A piece of advice: you do not have to be scared of being misunderstood by your spouse. Just try your best to let yourself understand what you mean. In case a problem occurs in a marriage, one spouse can choose to discuss together with the other spouse and then take steps to handle the problem, or one can simply loudly complain to the other one who is the problem maker. No doubt, there is a remarkable difference between these two approaches. Displaying resentment, anger, and yelling do not qualify as effective attempts to solve relationship problems (even though you believe it can help address problems), so try your best to avoid expressing negative emotions or displaying destructive behavior when your marriage is being ruined by certain problems.
In most cases when your marriage hits a rough patch, you should focus on how to save the relationship and move forward.
But in some cases, such as below, it is inadvisable to continue maintaining the relationship:
(1) Are you in an abusive marriage?
Are you constantly afraid of offending your spouse unconsciously? For example, you dare not remind him/her when he is doing something wrong. Are you afraid of your spouse’s reaction to things that you make a mess of or make him/her unhappy, such as coming home late, going out with friends of the opposite sex without asking for your spouse’s permission, and cooking dishes that your spouse doesn’t like? Maybe you are not physically afraid of your spouse, but you just feel like that you walk on eggshells whenever you are around your spouse, worrying about what you do or say that may unexpectedly “set him/her off”.
If you find out that your relationship status conforms to the description above, you will have to admit that you stay in an abusive relationship.
Should you save your marriage if you have an abusive spouse?
There exist no set of circumstances where you will feel afraid of your spouse; as long as your spouse is at your side, you may feel an unreasoning sense of nervousness or fear. And if you continue to shy away from confrontation with your spouse and meekly do whatever can pacify him/her, the relationship will be bound to come to an end. So, you should stop living your life in fear of him/her, be brave enough to let your spouse see in totality how arrogant and domineering he/she is, clearly state that you want him/her to make changes instead of going on allowing him/her to act like a bully.
Saving a marriage seems like common sense to the majority of problematic couples. But there can be some cases in which saving a relationship may not be the best option. For people who have an abusive partner, generally, it is better to end the relationship than staying in it. A spouse should not be conditioned to accept any form of abuse, whether it is verbal or physical abuse.
Abuse not only directly causes great damage to the spouse enduring abuse but also affects other family members; in particular, it is hard to estimate how much damage domestic abuse can do to children. And it is also cruel to let a child grow up witnessing abuse. Despite how scared you are in your marriage or how much hurt your spouse has hurt you, maybe you still choose to stay in the relationship in consideration of the wide, negative influences of taking your children out of a stable and customary environment, but you may have overlooked the negative effects of abuse on your children, the following is a brief explanation:
Children will easily copy what they see their parents say and do, and parents’ abusive behavior is also not exceptional. If your children are constantly exposed to violence and abuse, probably they will think that violence and abuse is a good solution to problems; it is an instinct that children model their parents’ behavior and attitudes, whether they are good or bad; and many important lessons children learn about their life actually happen while their parents are doing things to each other, and its effects are much more powerful than parenting. Compared with children in happy families, children who grow up in an abusive marriage are found to have relatively few opportunities to live happily later in their adult life.
(2) Has your spouse’s betrayal become a habit?
Another single, justified reason for ending the marriage is serial infidelity. If your spouse incessantly cheats behind your back, it can be cited as a legal ground for divorce. Not only does it betray the mutual trust, but it inflicts staggering pain on you. If you realize that your spouse’s betrayal seems to become a habit and you choose to forgive him/her again and again, a scandal will probably come to light sooner or later, and you will only suffer more.
If you still insist on staying in the relationship where your spouse’s infidelity occurs frequently, you have to reflect upon why you married him/her from the very beginning.
The final word:
Only you and your spouse really know the ins and outs about your relationship status; if you hesitate about whether you should save your marriage or not, you might as well seek marital counseling. Even though your spouse is not willing to attend with you, after consulting an experienced marital counselor/therapist, at the very least you can attain further clarity on whether your marriage is worth saving from where you stand.
Of course, in most cases, it is worthwhile to make your best efforts to save your marriage, and divorce should be the last option. If you want to seek more marriage-saving tips, you might go on to watch the video below to follow comprehensive, step-by-step guidance by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
Should you divorce your spouse – Most common reasons for divorce.
Is your marriage worth saving – Is there hope for your marriage?
What to do when your spouse wants to leave you – Save your marriage.
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
What a healthy marriage looks like – How to maintain a marriage.