When It’s Over: Dealing When Your Spouse Wants a Divorce

No matter how resilient a person you happen to be, divorce is often a painful process and a time in your life where your emotions will be seriously challenged in so many different ways.

Using a family law attorney who is used to dealing with these situations and knows the best way to handle what is a difficult scenario, will definitely help.

Here is a look at some of the things you might want to consider and look at when your spouse announces to you that the marriage is over and they want a divorce.

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Learning that it is over

There are numerous divorce cases that go through each year where the decision to separate and go your separate ways, is not a unanimous one.

It can be painful to hear and difficult to accept when you are told by your partner that they want to end the marriage, especially if you don’t feel the same way.

If you feel that you want to try and resolve your differences and still believe the marriage can work, you may consider the idea of attending some therapy sessions as a couple, to try and improve and save the marriage.

The problem with this proposal is that if only one person in the relationship is committed to trying to save the marriage, you could find that it is merely going to prolong the agony, if your spouse’s heart is not in it and they have already emotionally left the relationship.

One thing that might be worth considering is discernment counseling.

This therapy concentrates more on agreeing on the direction of the marriage and finding a way of progressing to the next step with greater clarity, even if that means agreeing to divorce.

Try to keep the love

It can be very hard to accept that the person you love doesn’t want to have an intimate relationship with you anymore.

It is far too easy to build up some negative emotions and look for arguments and maybe even issue ultimatums, but if you can somehow keep the love going until you have found a way to diffuse the tension and settle on terms for divorce, this will often be great help.

If there are children to consider, this makes it even more important to try and find an amicable way of resolving your differences, so that you may still be friends after getting divorced. Time is a great healer, so do try to keep the love going if you can, so that you might come out of the situation in better shape than you might have first envisaged.

Joint contribution

A fundamental point to consider about a divorce situation is that although there may be an obvious cause of the problem such as an act of infidelity, there are often a number of underlying factors that both of you will have contributed to the problems in the marriage.

If you can understand and address these issues in a sensible way, it can help you to form a positive co-parenting relationship after the divorce has gone though.

Divorce is never easy to contend with, but there are ways to make it a less painful chapter in your life.

Lewis Allan is a relationship and divorce therapist. Having seen his parents in an unhappy marriage which ultimately led to divorce when he was a teenager, Lewis knew he wanted to help people in similar situations when he was older. He now writes on the topic of divorce, betrayal and the quest for love on a selection of relationship and lifestyle blogs.