Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Sometimes, when you have done everything that you can do to ask your spouse to change, you feel as if you have to do something much more drastic to finally get results. When you’ve begged, pleaded, and tried to reason and it hasn’t worked, you feel like there’s no cards left to play – except for maybe veiled threats or manipulations. We often save this strategy for the very end – until we have tried everything else. Because most of us know that it’s not ideal. But we don’t know what else to do.

Someone might explain it this way: “for the past two years, our marriage has gone from bad to worse. When my husband lost his father, it hit him very hard. Instead of talking about it, like I wish he would have, he changed his life and started to live recklessly. He started going out with guys at work who are bad news. His work performance suffered. He started ignoring me at home and just being a bad husband. He was sarcastic and almost mean-spirited. He challenged me when I told him that he was going down a troubling path. Then he started going with these bad friends to the race track and I found out that he had been gambling. He started being an absent-parent to our children. I have told him repeatedly that I am at the end of my rope with my marriage. I have told him that he has to change. But all of this fell on deaf ears. Last week, he forgot our anniversary. This made something in me snap. I told him that I wanted a divorce because I felt that our marriage was too far gone. I honestly was playing a game because I fully expected for him to beg me not to do this and to promise that he would change. I especially expected this because I knew that my husband would not want to take a back-seat role in his children’s life. Much to my shock, he came back to me after a couple of hours and announced that I was right and that he agreed with me. He said that it made him sad to admit that we were thinking about a divorce. But he stressed that if he were honest with himself, he had to admit that it was probably the best thing. I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned. This was not what I wanted. I think at this point he’s expecting me to go to an attorney to get the process started. So now I either have to admit that I was playing games or file for the divorce that I never wanted. What do I do now?”

This is a tough one, but I think that you might have a couple of options outside of the two that you have listed. I’m not an expert in this, which is why my first suggestion is that you see one. You mentioned how important your children are to your husband. There is nothing wrong with asking your husband to go counseling for the benefit of the children. Many parents go to counseling when separating or divorcing in order to learn how to navigate this in a healthy way for your children. You could even tell him that you’re not going to file for divorce until a good deal of this counseling has already taken place.

I have known couples that have gone in for counseling for their children and have come out with their marriage saved. It may not have started out as their intention, but as they worked through their issues for the sake of co-parenting, they looked around and asked themselves why, if they had erased their issues, were they moving forward toward the divorce?

Also, this counseling might be a real turning point for your husband, who has likely never dealt with the death of his father and is still struggling because of it – which is why you are still seeing this behavior.

The other alternative is to just tell him the truth and then try to transition into counseling. Here is what it might look like: “I was not honest with you before, but I’m going to be honest with you now. When I told you that I wanted a divorce, I was just trying to scare you because I didn’t know what else to do. I was hoping that you would change. This wasn’t the right thing for me to do, but I didn’t know how else to bring about change. I don’t truly want a divorce, but I want for things to change. You said that you were sad about the divorce, so if we both negative feelings about it, why don’t we try to get help before we go that route? Why don’t we try a short course of counseling? If it’s going well, we can continue and we try to save our marriage. Isn’t it worth it to try before we just walk away?”

The hope is that the counseling will help with both your marriage and his individual issues, but I think that because the marriage is being negatively affected by issues that he hasn’t been able to process, a professional is best qualified to deal with this and would be most effective in helping you turn that corner.

This is much preferable to just going forward with the divorce you absolutely don’t want because you feel the need to see this through rather than trying something else or admitting that you weren’t completely honest.

I actually get a lot of correspondence from people who reluctantly divorced and now deeply regret it. I believe it’s easier to save your marriage before it ends than to try to get back a divorced spouse.  But that’s only my opinion. You can read my own struggles with this on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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