Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: This article is based upon my personal experience and research and will discuss methods you can use to hopefully change your spouse’s mind about seeking or going through with a divorce. It won’t discuss legal maneuvering or legal tactics because I believe if you are successful in using some of the prevention methods I will discuss, then you hopefully won’t need to worry about the eventual legalities. Instead, this article will tell you how to begin to restore the positive feelings and commitment necessary to save a marriage.

If you’re researching preventing a divorce, then it’s highly likely that either your marriage is in trouble or your spouse has asked for or indicated that a divorce is on the horizon. The good news is that your willingness to take action and research your next move is a very good sign. I am living proof that it’s entirely possible to rescue a marriage and prevent divorce when you’re the only one who wants to. I saved my own even though my husband was very sure he wanted to split up for good and wasn’t going to change his mind.

The Real Reason Many Spouses Seek Or Consider A Divorce: You may disagree with what I am about to write, but I’m going to write it anyway because I believe it to be true. People usually don’t want a divorce because of external reasons or stressors (like another person or infidelity, stress, money problems, or crisis events, etc.) All of these things are indeed symptoms or things that come out of the core cause of serious marital problems.

But, the real reason that people generally really want a divorce is that you and the marriage are no longer eliciting the positive feelings that your spouse had about themselves. Yes, you read that right. Often, the loss of feelings is not so much about how your spouse feels about you or the marriage. It’s really about them and how they feel about themselves. This is often mistaken for a “midlife crisis,” but if you need to put a label on it, it’s really an identity crisis.

When your husband or wife first fell in love with you, it’s likely that the positive feelings that you and the relationship elicited made your spouse feel attractive, lovable, powerful, competent, and intriguing. Who wouldn’t want to feel these things about themselves? This is very powerful. As long as the relationship keeps eliciting and bringing on these positive feelings, there is usually not a problem. But when these positive feelings start to diminish, so too does a person’s commitment to the relationship. What happens next is that they will then slow their reciprocation of the feelings and the actions that help strengthen the marriage. In a nutshell, they “check out” of your marriage, sometimes both physically and emotionally. After that, commitment and feelings of empathy start to give way. Once the commitment is gone, divorce is a very real possibility.

How Marriages Get Off Track. (The Path To Divorce): Think about when you were first dating your husband or wife. You likely lavished them with a lot of attention and affection. You listened attentively when they talked, cared deeply about their feelings and the outcome of their day, and would’ve moved heaven and earth to help them in any way you could to make their life better. They probably felt the same way and focused much of their attention and positive actions on you as well. The result was a very solid relationship that they valued so much, they married you. Think too, about how problems and issues were initially glossed over or not a big deal. Couples deeply in love want to and can quickly work through their problems because no one wants anything to interfere with the good stuff. But, what happens next (and what gets in the way) is so common that almost all marriages are guilty of it.

Eventually, we have to pay attention to our responsibilities like jobs, kids, running our households, and sometimes care for aging parents. We sometimes no longer have the time or energy to pour all of our attention into our spouse. There’s only so much of us to go around.

While I completely understand this, I also know that without a doubt it leaves your marriage vulnerable. What happens is over time your spouse begins to feel (often unconsciously) greatly disappointed, let down, and sometimes fears that you think he or she is not worthy of your time or attention. This, of course, contributes to the positive feelings your husband or wife had being replaced with negative ones. Over time, the spouse may start to equate these negatives feelings with his feelings (or indifference) about you and the marriage. Although this may manifest itself in infidelity, bitter arguments, and fighting, or “falling out of love,” the core reason is that the positive feelings about themselves (and therefore about you and the marriage) are gone and they can’t imagine or don’t know how to get them back.

How To Get The Positive Feelings (And Your Marriage) Back And Prevent A Divorce: The course of action you need to take to prevent the divorce will greatly depend upon the state and status of your marriage right now. If you’re already on the path toward divorce or your spouse has left, this process will probably take longer and require more baby steps – which thankfully, feed off of each other. Every tiny success will hopefully lead to another until you have your marriage back.

To truly prevent a divorce, you must get your spouse back on board and committed to the marriage. How do you do this? You bring back those positive feelings about themselves that we’ve talked about. Once the positive feelings about themselves have returned, so too, will the feelings they associate with you and the marriage.

Of course, you can’t be too obvious about this. If they see this as just a tactic to trick them into staying in the marriage, they may resist you even more or press for the divorce even harder. Take baby steps and focus only on creating positive feelings associated with you and the marriage and avoiding negative ones.

This means you need to resist doing anything that would elicit negative feelings in your spouse. So, don’t beg, debate, ask difficult questions, push their buttons, or try to communicate with them in a way that irritates them or makes them angry (at least until your relationship is back on solid ground).

Instead, your goal is to become lighthearted, fun, engaging, and to possess the qualities you know first hand your spouse values. Is this person starting to sound familiar? They should. They’re you. They’re the person your spouse first fell in love with. The person he or she would’ve moved heaven and earth for once upon a time. You need to find this person again because he or she can very well prevent divorce and save your marriage.

Once you’ve presented this person to your spouse and your spouse becomes receptive to you and the marriage, then you can eventually work on hashing out the issues that lead to talks of divorce. You shouldn’t do this though until you’re sure you’re back on track and have been for a while. If you try to work out the real problems too early, you could drive your spouse further away or elicit some of the negative feelings that you’re trying to avoid.

I had to use this approach when I trying to save my marriage (and was the only one who wanted to). I made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of mishaps along the way, but eventually, I was able to restore the positive feelings and prevent a divorce. You can read that story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com/