Friday, September 13, 2013

Help Me Fix My Marriage

I struggled with titling this post.  I wanted to put Mending Broken Bridges or Healing My Marriage or even More Than Just a Band-Aid.  Although a title may be hard to come up with I want to speak on the importance of finding peace with your spouse, soon to be ex, or ex-partner.

The world would be a better place if there existed a room where a couple could go to get it all out of their system.  Here are some facts that apply to most divorces that I’ve found to be true.  There will be pain and suffering.  There will be murky waters and unexplained questions whose answers never come about.  Peace will eventually arrive.  And understanding is the guest that has an invitation to the party, but no one knows if or when it will show up.
 
Alright, in this room a couple has as long as it takes to get all of that out of the way.  The wife asks why the affair arose.  She gets all the information she wants so she can have closure.  The husband might ask about the way his wife treats him or doesn’t treat him a certain way.  The point is, the couple gets all the pain out of the way.  They scream at each other, they cry, but they repeat themselves until the other person has the answers to the questions they need an explanation for.
Session two in the room consists of planning.  She tells him she is getting the house and child support.  He tells her he is keeping the boat and getting to see his children three weekends a month.  They can fight about the plans and try to adjust them to fit both their wants, but they come to an agreement on how life will go forward.  If she says she is getting the house and he disagrees, then he will be ready to fight against that in court and she will be ready for the fight.  But they both know the plan and where the future is heading.
Session three in the room deals with healing.  Both parties calm themselves and look past all the “things” in life and say their apologies.  If the husband isn’t sorry for anything, then he voices it.  The wife can react in any way she wants.  This session takes all the maturity each adult has learned over a lifetime and they practice it with sensitivity.  This room is starting to sound like it belongs on another planet. 
Here’s my point.  Watch a movie, read a book, talk to someone about the years after a divorce.  It may take one or fifteen, but there will come a time when that princess you married that became a witch during the divorce turns into an acquaintance.  She mothers your children and you talk to her about the kids and other day to day “stuff”.  The anger and jealousy is gone.  She is just another person walking this earth.  That will or should happen one day.  Getting to that day shouldn’t take so long.  If you could press fast-forward or enter that magical room, then you could both go about your separate lives without all the drama, intent on hurting, suffering, etc…
If the years that we look back on and say, “Yeah, those were pretty rough,” could become weeks, then maybe this wouldn’t happen.  “Children from fatherless homes account for 63 percent of youth suicides, 71 percent of the pregnant teenagers, 90 percent of the homeless and runaway children, and 70 percent of the institutionalized juveniles. They account for 85 percent of the children with behavioral disorders, 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of all high school dropouts, 75 percent of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers and 85 percent of all youths in prison.”  (http://www.divorcesource.com/ds/main/u-s-divorce-rates-and-statistics-1037.shtml).
You’ve heard the phrase, “Man up, men, and be a dad.”  Sometimes that’s hard when a vindictive woman is pushing the man further and further from the family, so “Man up, women, and let the man be a dad.”  Whatever the situation is, the children need both parents to be key roles and not second-rate actors in the play of life.
So, help yourself fix your marriage by creating this room to communicate all the broken feelings and get to work on repairing them.  Mend the broken bridges or construct new ones where clear understanding can travel often.  Heal the wounds with more than just a Band-Aid, so the sores don’t remain.  With maturity, press fast-forward and get to the point where dad can be dad, mom can be mom, or bygones can be bygones.

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