Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane:  I recently heard from a wife who felt a great deal of anxiety about the state of her marriage.  Although no one had spoken about a separation or getting a divorce, it had become obvious to her that the marriage was on a decline.  She said that she felt as though the “cards were stacked against” her marriage because they now seemed to have so many issues that were causing problems for them.  For example, they were from different backgrounds and practiced different religions.  Because of this, the wife felt that she’d never really been accepted by her husband’s family.

Her husband also worked long hours and seemed to put his work  ahead of his family.  They had two kids, but the wife said that he was pretty sure that her husband no longer saw her as a woman or a lover.  Instead, she felt he saw her as a wife and mother only.  This hadn’t done wonderful things for their chemistry or their sex life.  She felt like they were just sort of coexisting rather than connecting.  She said in part: “I’m really worried about the future of my marriage.  We just seem to have different priorities, backgrounds, and outlooks.  And my husband is always preoccupied with other things.  His face doesn’t light up when he looks at me anymore.  In fact, he treats me like one of friends or employees rather than his wife.  It seems as if the spark and the chemistry is gone and I feel like if we keep going on the path that we seem to be on, our marriage could be in real trouble and we might not have a future at all.”

It was obvious that the wife was experiencing a lot of anxiety and worry about her marriage, but if there was any good news, it was this.  The wife was taking notice of her situation BEFORE there were talks of a separation, a break, or a divorce.  Typically, when I hear from folks, their marriage is already facing the possibility of ending.  One of the spouses has usually either asked for a separation or a divorce.  This wife had the luxury of this not being the case with her.  She had an opportunity to improve things BEFORE she was in a situation where she was being forced to fix things with her back against the wall.  So in the following article, I’ll share some of the suggestions that would be applicable to the wife.

It’s Better To Take Action To Improve Your Marriage Than To Continue To Worry About The Future Of It: Although I felt that it was an advantage that the wife wanted to address the issues in her marriage before they became serious problems, I cautioned her against continuing to allow the worries to churn out of control.  She admitted that her husband often told her that she tended to see problems where none existed and worried endlessly so that she made big problems out of problems that were actually small.  She also admitted that sometimes her friends told her the same sorts of things.

Still, I felt that she should still take some action instead of continuing to worry.  You can’t always trust your husband’s perception of things as men tend to not see problems until they are so serious that they are impossible to deny. And if the issues were problematic enough to her that they were continuously causing her pain, then I felt that the best thing to do was to take some action quickly.  It didn’t make sense to just continue to feel anxiety.  With that said, you often will need to be mindful about how you address them, which I’ll discuss now.

Don’t Let Your Anxieties Set The Tone When You Address The Issues That Are Causing The Worry: I really could identify with this wife because I have a tendency to be a worrier myself.  And I know that sometimes, our anxieties can take on a life of their own and this makes us have a pessimistic outlook in which we overreach a bit.  So while I absolutely wanted for the wife to address and change those things that were worrying her, I didn’t want for her to do it in such a way that she gave them even more power or magnified them in her husband’s eyes.

Her first inclination was to sit her husband down and list all of the things that were troubling her and plead that he take her seriously and work with her to make some drastic changes. Although I could see why this appealed to her, I didn’t think that she would get the best results with this strategy.   You often get better results with small and realistic changes that don’t reply upon the efforts of a reluctant spouse.

It’s my experience (from when I was trying to save my own marriage and from the people that I hear from on my corresponding blog) that you will usually get the best results if you first concentrate on what you can control yourself.  Once you begin to get good results (and your spouse notices this,) then you will often have a much easier time obtaining their cooperation and enthusiasm.

So I felt it best that the wife begin the process on her own, at least at first.  She might try to take the issues that she’d mentioned and examine and prioritize each of them.  There wasn’t much that she could do about their different backgrounds.  And, their differing backgrounds, outlooks, and religions hadn’t bothered them when they were dating or were first married.  The reason for this is that, when you are first dating, you are so deeply connected and committed that you didn’t focus on those things that would interfere with the health of your relationship and with your happiness.

Frankly, sometimes, the best way to deal with the issues in your marriage that worry you is to first reconnect with your spouse so that you are deeply committed and connected again.  Because when this happens, those worrisome issues are so much easier to work through.  I felt that the more telling worry was that they weren’t connecting as a man and woman.  Yes, it’s easy to blame this on your job, your children, or your obligations.  But, regardless of the cause, I felt that if they could begin connecting physically and mentally again, all of those larger issues that had always been there won’t seem so large anymore.

Taking action and addressing these issues were, at least in my opinion, so much better than continuing to worry and to half expect for the marriage to continue to falter.  Because if she took this path, things could become so bad that the issues might be much more difficult to fix than they were right now.

I wish that I had taken notice of some of the issues that cropped up in my marriage years before things fell apart.  If I had, I might not have had to play catch up as I did when my marriage was in real trouble.   But despite that, I was able to take some actions that eventually saved the marriage.  If it helps, you can read more about that process on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com/

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