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Midlife Divorce Decisions: Knowing If You are Ready to Cut the Marital Cord
When you made those wedding vows standing at the altar and looking across at the person you were in love with, you would never have envisaged that their might come a time where you no longer wanted to share your life together.
As someone like thetexasdivorcelawyer.com will confirm, there are times when you decide to cut the marital cord and put an end to a relationship that may have lasted for a number of years.
Mid-life crisis
This much-talked about phenomenon affects people in a whole host of different ways.
Many of us get to a point roughly about halfway through our life journey where we feel the need to evaluate what life has delivered for you so far and what lies ahead.
The old clichés about having a midlife crisis invariably surface if you decide to buy a sports car or have some cosmetic surgery done in an attempt to recapture your youthful feelings and energy, but it is also a time in your life where you might decide to evaluate exactly where your marital relationship is heading.
If you met your husband or wife in your 20’s for example, you are both likely to be a different couple to the one that fell in love all that time ago. Career, family and various different life events will all help to shape and change your outlook on life and might just cause you to wonder whether you want to carry on being married or whether you have grown apart too much and need to cut your ties.
Slowly drifting apart
Some relationships might suffer an immediate and terminal shock, such as when a partner has been discovered to have committed adultery, but a common scenario is what you might call a slow crawl effect, which is where you just seem to be slowly drifting apart over many years.
Financial problems, a lack of shared interests and a tendency to argue more frequently, are the sort of problems that can take their toll on a relationship and when you reach that midlife point, it might just make you take stock of the situation and make a decision that divorce might be the best option.
Heading into the unknown
Some couples might persist with a relationship that has clearly failed for a number of years, which are often spent with both feeling unhappy, mainly because they are unsure what divorce involves and how it will affect them emotionally and financially.
This fear of the unknown is understandable and can cause apprehension as you prepare to face a new chapter in your life and head in a new direction.
If you have explored and exhausted all of your options and believe that you need to get a divorce, it is normally a good idea to talk discreetly to others you can trust who have faced the same situation, and also get some confidential legal advice, so that at least you know what lies ahead before you decide to take the plunge and start divorce proceedings.
Wanting different things
It might come as a surprise to learn that it is estimated to be the woman who is more likely to initiate the divorce proceedings, and the average age of the person going through a divorce is likely to be somewhere between 45 and 54.
It is not uncommon for one or both of you to have been considering the idea of divorce for a reasonable period of time, but there are normally certain complications that are likely to make you hold back until the timing is right.
The common reasons for delaying a divorce include waiting until the children are old enough to cope with the breakup of the family, financial considerations, and in some cases, religious reasons that mean divorce goes against their beliefs.
Time to adjust
If you have given the relationship every opportunity to succeed and attempted to heal any obvious rifts that exist between you, but you feel that a divorce is now the best option, you will need to prepare for what lies ahead and give yourself plenty of time to adjust to a new chapter in your life.
Getting a midlife divorce or at any time for that matter, is definitely going to be emotionally challenging, but provided you get sound legal advice and take your time to work out what you want in the future, you can hopefully find a positive way to move on after you have cut the marital cord.
Jamie Black is a therapist and life consultant seeking to get everyone living true to themselves. He writes about the big things in life, and urges everyone to live the life they are meant to lead, even if that means making difficult decisions.
