Divorce has reached the epidemic stage. Did you know that more than a million marriages end in the United States? Multiply that by 10 or 20 and think of the havoc these broken homes are wreaking financially and the children being born to these couples who have decided their marriage is no longer worth saving. Imagine the difference if only half of these marriages could be saved? And imagine the difference in your own life if one of those marriages saved was yours.
Is your marriage in trouble? If so, do you think it is possible for your marriage to be saved? No one knows for sure, but please don’t give up without doing everything you can to save it before you give up and join the millions of people who head for the divorce course every year.
Here are four steps you can take that will go a long way toward saving your marriage, and you can start working on them today.
1. Stop trying to blame.
If you are honest, you will have to admit that there is a lot of guilt in your troubled marriage. Trying to put all the blame on one person or another isn’t going to help anything, even if you blame yourself. What will help is to start planning how to avoid situations in the future that lend themselves to the “blame game.”
2. Be open to change and take responsibility for putting that change into action.
Even if your spouse says they are not interested in continuing the relationship, go ahead and institute changes in your own life that can show you that the marriage is worth saving after all.
Examples of such a change might be recognizing behaviors in your own life that irritate your spouse and determining to change those behaviors. If your spouse engages in behaviors that make you angry, decide that he can and will learn to ignore and perhaps even eventually accept those behaviors just as he might accept the same behavior in a casual acquaintance without comment.
As situations arise that you recognize as causes of conflict, continue to make changes that help you avoid the situations in the first place, or replace the situations with things that are mutually acceptable.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Find an expert on how to deal with troubled marriages. If the expert has helped others, he can help you too. Too often we are ashamed to admit the mess we have caused in our marriage or assume that our particular problems are insurmountable. A good marriage counselor has seen cases far worse than yours and has been successful in helping marriages even more troubled than yours.
4. Don’t wait to take action.
The longer you wait to do something about your troubled marriage, the more troublesome it will become, so don’t wait. Problems usually don’t go away on their own, as can be seen from the millions of divorces that occur each year in the United States alone.
Can you save your troubled marriage? Most can if at least one party involved cares enough to take action. Will you be the one in your case?