Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Some husbands who want a divorce are willing to take full responsibility for that wish onto their own shoulders. They will tell you that it is them who wants the divorce because of their own unhappiness. They don’t necessarily blame their wife for this. They know that it is their own discontent that lead them to this point.

Other husbands take the opposite approach. They will lead you to believe that they are pursuing the divorce because they are concerned with their wife’s best interests instead of their own. They will insinuate that, in the long run, it is going to be better for the wife if there is a divorce.

Here is an example. A husband might explain that being married hurts or injures his wife in some way and therefore, he feels that it’s best to part ways. The wife in this situation might describe things this way: “my husband has been very unhappy and has been acting a little weird for the past year and a half. He has sort of been seeking his best life. He has left two jobs. He has uprooted us and moved to a new town. He has tried to reconcile with his parents with disastrous results. He says that he knows that living with him is very difficult. He says he knows that he is bringing me down. He says he is sorry that I’ve had to leave jobs and friends that I love because he can’t seem to be happy and settle down. So he’s announced that he is going to divorce me because he knows that he makes me unhappy. Honestly, it is not him that is making me unhappy. It is all this seeking that he is doing. But, even with that, I’d rather be with my husband with all his struggles than not be with him at all. But I can’t seem to convince him of this. He acts like he is doing this for my own good, but I’m not sure that this is the case. Maybe he thinks that it is me who is causing his unhappiness. Maybe he thinks that if he divorces me, he will finally be happy, but he is too cowardly to admit this. How do I convince him that divorcing me is not the answer?”

You can certainly attempt to appeal to his sense of reasoning. You can tell him that instead of divorcing and taking away normalcy and a healthy source of support, you should try to work through what is making him so unhappy. My best suggestion would be to suggest that you both go to counseling with the goal of determining the healthiest way to address your relationship. But there may be a side benefit of this that you don’t necessarily have to announce.

The Underhanded Way That This Might Save Your Marriage: Sometimes when you go to counseling for a couple issue, you end up working through individual issues. It seems fairly obvious that your husband is restless or dissatisfied about something. And it also seems obvious that he thinks this dissatisfaction is so upsetting to you, that divorcing is preferable than continuing to expose you to it. But what if you could remove whatever ‘it’ is?

Sometimes getting your spouse to counseling in this situation is tricky. You don’t want to say something like: “well if you would get yourself straightened out, we wouldn’t have this problem. If you’d stop being so unhappy all of the time, we wouldn’t need to divorce.” This kind of talk will make him defensive.

You also don’t want to say something like: “none of this is hurting me. I’m absolutely fine with uprooting my life on your whims.” This isn’t true. And do you really want to keep changing your life as he’s searching for something that he might not ever find?

The better solution seems to be to get some help to address the restlessness because this fixes both issues. If he’s no longer restless, he’s more likely to stay put. Once that happens, he’s no longer hurting you nearly as much, so both problems are addressed – and hopefully solved. Quite frankly, people can be restless when they are depressed. And depression is something best left to the experts.

Nudging Him Toward What He Needs: In order for him to be open to change, you have to be careful about how you nudge him toward outside help. You might try: “I do really appreciate that you are so concerned about my happiness. But I honestly think that getting a divorce would produce the most unhappiness in me. It is not as if I am sitting here thinking about how awful my life and my marriage is. I love you and I want for you to be OK. I think that divorce is an awfully drastic solution that doesn’t even ensure that either of us are going to be better off. I think that it makes sense to look to outside help to help us figure it out. I’d like to see a counselor to get a second opinion about what is most healthy for our relationship. If what you truly want is for me to be less unhappy, I am telling you that this is what I want and that this is what I think might best address our problem. Will you agree to that? I think that it’s the best first step for us. And I think it’s a lot less permanent than a divorce.”

A good counselor can get to the root of what is causing all this restlessness in your husband. And that in turn should help with your marriage. But a divorce is very drastic. And frankly, many couples who divorce in search of happiness don’t even find themselves much happier than when they were married. The reason? It wasn’t the marriage that was the source of the problem. It was something individual, inside of themselves.

I know that this is tough.  But if he’s still struggling, it’s going to be hard to change his mind because he is not seeing things clearly.  Once you remove his struggles, he begins to see that removing his support system is not the best idea. But it’s hard to feel rejected as he pushes you away.  I went through the same thing during my own separation. There’s more of that my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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