Felicia felt awful about her marriage. Of course, she felt that her husband was largely to blame. But she didn’t really care about assigning blame. She just wanted it over. Or actually, Felicia wanted her marriage fixed or cured. She just didn’t believe that fixing, healing, or curing her marriage was possible. And if it was possible, Felicia had no idea how to go about it.

Cost

A very wise clinical psychologist says that divorce is a high-cost solution. You should understand the high cost part. Divorce divides, disrupts, and hurts. Divorce has emotional, psychological, spiritual, familial, reputational, and vocational costs, and other costs if that list is not long enough. Divorce’s high costs come in part because one or the other of you may not be at all reasonable in the process. Spite is frankly a goal for many divorcing spouses, to destroy the other for the next twenty years. One way to avoid divorce is thus to count the high cost. Don’t see divorce as an easy solution. It’s generally not easy but instead hard. If you’re seeking a path of least resistance, don’t see divorce as that path. Count the cost, and not just to you but to your spouse, children if any, extended family, and community. You may ultimately be better off divorced, in one way or another, but if so, getting there can still be costly. Life offers many greener pastures. Reaching them, though, may make them far less green once you get there. You don’t get many chances at intimate relationships, maybe only one, sometimes even none. Count the one you have as a treasure.

Ambiguity

The same wise psychologist adds that divorce is a high-cost solution with low resolution. Low resolution means that divorce is hard to see clearly, hard to grasp. It’s squishy, nebulous, uncertain. You go in seeing it one way but come out seeing it a different way. And years later, you see it yet another way again. Divorce is definitive only in its definition, as the legal process to end a marriage. Divorce is not definitive in its cause, rationale, justification, or necessity. Spouses begin divorce proceedings and then call them off. See the voluntary dismissal form among the other forms at the end of this guide. Spouses begin and conclude divorce proceedings, live apart for a while, and then remarry. And then sometimes divorce again. Don’t do that, if you can possibly avoid it. A divorce proceeding is not the way to find out if you’d be better off remaining married. Try your very best to work things out in advance, one way or another. Proceed with a divorce only if you are sure that divorce is the right course, and right in the sense of the only reasonable, responsible, safe, and sensible course. Don’t let divorce’s low resolution, vague, and fuzzy contours lull you into pursuing it when you have other options.

Story

Divorcing spouses often see the symptoms without considering the cause. They’ll see the annoyances the other spouse spurs without looking at their motivation for being annoyed. An object, including a husband or wife, is only recognizable through a frame of motivation. Recognize your motivation to understand why you see what you see, including the annoyances. And when appropriate, change your motivation to change what you see. The story through which you see your spouse may be an old story, one that does not serve either of you well and does not account for realities. We enter marriage with one frame of reference, built on the marriages we’ve seen or imagined. We can grow in marriage, including improving or adjusting our frame of reference. It’s not necessarily that you need to lower expectations. You may instead need to raise expectations not only for your spouse but for yourself. Look carefully at the story you’re telling yourself about your spouse and marriage. See if you have a better, more authentic, healthier, and more real story to tell. The spouse you currently regard as a spoiler or curmudgeon might instead be your saint.

Boundaries

It’s hard to do in a strained marriage, but strengthening a marriage generally involves erasing the boundaries between the two of you. Marriage simply works that way. When you live together, you should be growing together, uniting in concordant actions until your rhythm together is as one being. You soon think not exactly alike but in integrated and supportive patterns. You soon act not exactly alike but in movements that begin to look like the dance of a single entity. Marriage broadens an individual being into a communion of two beings, creating something living that is larger, stronger, richer, and more beautiful, capable, and complex than either of you. 

Resolution

It’s hard living with someone who annoys you. And the annoyances, if you don’t deal with them, tend to get worse, not better. They can even build up over the years and decades into a deep-seated bitterness. You start with annoyance at the actions but end up disliking the actor. Resolve those annoyances, one way or the other. You may need to shift your frame. If it bothers you that your spouse throws her coat over the back of the chair in the entryway rather than hanging it in the closet, consider meeting your spouse at the door to take her coat from her and hang it up yourself. You’ll soon find yourself newly devoted to greeting and encouraging her when she returns home. But if the annoyance isn’t something you can resolve profitably on your end, bring it up with your spouse. If you’re not looking at the situation wrong, and instead seeing things right, and it still bothers you, then your spouse may need to correct it. Confront things that you don’t like your spouse is doing so that your not liking the doing doesn’t become your not liking the doer. Don’t live with someone who continually annoys or disturbs you. Change your view or help them change the action that bothers you. 

Actions

When resolving issues, focus on actions, not character. Accusing your spouse of a character flaw is deadly because changing character is hard to impossible. And discussing character instantly gets deeply personal and wounding. Instead, name your spouse’s actions that annoy or burden you. Your spouse can often change the actions with relative ease. And avoid naming the habit or practice that annoys you, with phrases like you always... or you never.... Instead, request a change in the single act, like would you please... or would you mind...? It may take a little while for your spouse to change the habit or practice, and it may take a quiet second or third request. If you can avoid making a thing out of it, all the better. Your spouse will soon likely change the habit or practice. If the request rankles your spouse, ask them to tell you something that you’re doing that annoys them, and then treat their response respectfully. If it helps, explain why you do the things that annoy them, and ask them if they see a less irksome way you can accomplish that same aim. 

Argument

But don’t argue. Stop, the moment you realize that either one of you is arguing rather than discussing the issue with an earnest intent toward resolution. Agree to reconvene as soon as cooler heads prevail. Arguments don’t resolve issues. Arguments instead make winners and losers. And winning an argument is losing the relationship. If you’re better at arguing than your spouse, don’t use that gift and curse to your own advantage to win an argument. Instead, use your advantage to make your spouse’s argument for your spouse. Doing so may guide both of you to the resolution you both need. Taking your spouse’s side in an argument also aligns the two of you, naturally reducing the conflict and promoting the bond. Talk it out, not as combatants seeking victory but companions seeking solutions.

Deception

Avoid every kind of deception. Deceit, whether big or small lies, undermines everything in a marriage. It undermines trust, character, and communication. Don’t begin by trying to catch your spouse in large or small lies. Mistrust can itself undermine a marriage. Instead, first examine your own words and communications. Watch for your own exaggerations or convenient omissions, and put a prompt stop to them. Admit the truth, first to yourself, then to your spouse, on any current fact, circumstance, condition, or issue. The more honestly and openly you conduct yourself, the more your spouse should trust and respect you, and the more likely your spouse may be to adopt the same stance toward you. To learn the truth, you must first speak the truth. Even avoid false kindness. Practice kindness, but don’t let your kindness mock and highlight your spouse’s unkindness. Don’t hate on the pretense of loving. 

Confession

If you catch your spouse in a lie, don’t ignore it. You must both be accountable to the truth, not just you but also your spouse. But don’t attack your spouse’s character. Your spouse may indeed be a habitual liar. Yet you generally can’t change character without first getting to its cause. Instead, first try to understand, and get your spouse to understand, your spouse’s motive for the deception. Doing so may make it immediately obvious that your spouse didn’t wish to be accountable to you. If so, explore why not. Your spouse may soon see that accountability is the issue, while also seeing that accountability goes both ways. You may be able to demonstrate your accountability to your spouse, or perhaps not. Either way, you and your spouse are probably closer to a resolution. But also explore why your spouse engaged in the wrong your spouse covered up with the lie. Again, that discernment would only be a start to confession, accountability, forgiveness, healing, and restoration. Yet it would be a good start.

Counseling

The standard advice for how to avoid divorce is to get counseling. Listen to the standard advice. Why and how you get into marriage counseling, your choice of counselors, the methods they use, and how you conduct yourself through counseling, all matter a great deal to how successful counseling may be. Try it. If it doesn’t initially help, try a different counselor with a different approach. Get your own counsel if your spouse won’t join you or prefers their own counsel, too. Don’t hesitate to have more than one counselor of different types and with different approaches, if you find that you need different sorts of help. Good counselors are generally teachers, each able to share their own insights and each able to help you discover your own different insights. Counseling can help simply through the relationship, like getting to share your experience with someone who has a good listening ear. But also try to have goals and objectives for your counseling so that you can measure and see real progress. You need help with your marriage. Tell your counselor the help you need, and let your counselor help you set and achieve clear goals.

Possibility

In the end, avoiding divorce may not be possible. The decision to divorce is not entirely up to you. If it was, you might not be divorcing. In the case of marriage, it takes two to tango. If one walks away from the marriage, the dance is over. It’s not like you’re married to yourself. Self-marriage, or sologamy, is a peculiar modern trend, not a legal construct. Your spouse has volition and choice. If your spouse wants to end the marriage, and you can’t convince your spouse otherwise, then your spouse will be able to obtain a divorce. It’s not all up to you. You can only make your own decision and live with it, while attempting to influence your spouse’s decision. You may have great influence over your spouse, if it’s your spouse who is filing for divorce. You may be able to turn things around, or you may not. Try your best, whatever you discern your best to be, with the support and guidance of wise counselors.

Key Points

• Recognizing the high costs of divorce may help you avoid it.

• Don’t expect divorce to necessarily provide you with clear answers.

• Consider adjusting how you see your spouse and marriage.

• Try to reduce unnatural issues separating you and your spouse.

• Attempt to resolve annoyances and burdens creating conflict.

• Focus on changing actions more so than changing character.

• Avoid arguing to win, seeking instead to address issues together.

• Rebuild your marriage on truth, eliminating all deception.

• Help one another through confession, accountability, and healing.

• Seek counseling that offers clear goals and means to achieve them.

• Preserving your marriage requires commitment from both of you.

Read Chapter 6.