Saving Your Marriage

Saving your marriage, especially when one of you doesn't particularly seem to want to, can feel like a very tall order indeed.

One way to look at it is that once you decide that saving your marriage is something that you want to try to do, then you enter into a series of personal explorations to be able to answer the important questions involved that are very likely to have positive effects on the rest of your lives together or apart.

Even if you can't make the necessary corrections to start healing this realtionship, you had better know what went wrong so that you don't just repeat the same mistakes in the future with someone else. There's no better way to accomplish this than for the two of you to try to make the necessary repairs right here right now.

The questions and introspection involved aren't easy, but not doing them can be just plain dumb. Some examples of topics on which you need to know where stand include your beliefs on

• The importance of marriage
• The importance of keeping the promises that you made when you married
• Each person's needs to keep themselves safe
• The well being of children
• How the opinions and attitudes of family and friends are affecting your choices
• How long is a reasonable time to work at it before you give up

What a person "should" do if their partner

• Is an alcoholic or drug addict
• Is having an affair
• Has had an affair in the past
• Has an anger problem
• Is abusive
• Is in jail

- - - - - -

When your marriage is in trouble, there is no shortage of people who know just what you should do. They mean well. They want you to be safe and happy. They don't want you to feel like they are siding with your rotten spouse. But, they cannot really know what is best for you! Only you can figure that out.

Find a variety of resources and tools for undertaking this mission and then see which ones work for you. It is your life, your marriage, your challenge when all is said and done.

Save Your Marriage

Frankly, when someone tells me that they want to save their marriage, I can't help but cringe and wish them good luck. Must be something about my own beliefs that probably would be good to work on, but the idea of "working on" a relationship is to the end of that relationship and the getting a house in the suburbs with a golden retriever is to having kids in some circles.

Maybe this comes from my male perspective. I don't know. Much of the talking and listening approach to such endeavors is a decidedly feminine undertaking.

Still, ending a marriage is nothing to be taken lightly. I don't care how many divorce attorneys are divorced and how many divorce service ads imply that if you just get through this, things will be so much better.

Once you get "through this", you are both who you were before you started, but you have a lot less money and a whole new set of problems to cope with.

Anyway, there must be a more productive way to look at saving your marriage than the one I have carried in my head and heart like a virus where it seems like a long, hard, slog that is ultimately doomed anyway. There are lots of good reasons to believe that it need not be that way.

There have been some really excellent efforts to spell out in usable terms how to save your marriage which I have been studying. And, I am impressed.

Save Your Marriage . . . .before it's too late!

Something about the concept of saving a marriage just never seems to quite settle in with me. I've written some thoughts about it here and other places such as my website www.better-relationships-over-50.com and at another site called www.alumbo.com


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I guess we don't fix the roof until it rains or change to the snow tires until a storm is on the way. I don't know.

Seems like we should probably start saving our marriages before we get home from the ceremony.