Why Your Spouse Wanting a Divorce Doesn’t Mean It’s Over
Is your spouse talking about divorce—and you’re scared it means you’ve already lost your chance to fix things? Things may not be as bad as you think.
I’m going to tell you why your spouse wanting a divorce doesn’t actually stop you from reconnecting or even reconciling. I’ve helped thousands of clients to reconcile with separating, divorcing, and cheating spouses.
I don’t believe that everyone should try to reconcile with a rejecting spouse. There are many times when a marriage is badly mismatched. If you add that on top of a badly damaged marriage, reconciling is not likely, and not your best choice.
However, if you and your spouse are not badly mismatched, but have become very distant, then it is very possible to reconcile. Stay with me and I will tell you why that is and how you can get started today.
Don’t give up because of what he or she says
Even people who don’t change their minds easily, do change their minds. The best example of that is people who decide to divorce though once they decided to marry “till death do you part.” But some people think when their spouse says they are done that there is no chance and so give up on the relationship.
Here’s how this often looks in real life. A woman feels like she’s been emotionally punched in the gut because her husband mentioned he is considering divorce. She quickly begins to take steps to improve their relationship. She stops all arguing and pursuit, focusing on helping her husband to feel relaxed with her. Her husband relaxes, but tells her that “he is done with the marriage and that it is too late to improve it.” She then begs, pleads, and argues with him for three hours–undoing her progress before she gives up. If only she had continued to build her relationship without reacting to her husband’s feelings or decisions, she may have been able to reconcile. It wasn’t her husband’s decision that derailed her–it was her decision to give up based on what he said.
Reconciling is not the same thing as preventing separation or divorce
A lot of people before working with me were having a hard time reconciling because they were putting all of their efforts into convincing their spouse not to divorce. Trying to convince someone to do something they don’t want to do is not a good strategy for reconciling. In fact, it’s not a good strategy for any relationship. In fact it’s not a helpful strategy for accomplishing anything.
Reconciling means restoring love and commitment. That doesn’t happen by convincing anyone to do anything. It happens by following a series of relationship building steps, just like you did when you first met your spouse. I don’t think you met and then started begging him or her to marry you or go to counseling to work on problems or to see if the counselor could somehow convince him or her to fall in love. Those behaviors would have driven your to-be spouse away and rightly so.
When does reconciling happen?
A common question people ask me is how long it takes to reconcile with a rejecting spouse. For me, the question is like a single person asking how long it takes to get a disinterested acquaintance to marry.
Hey Jack, there’s this woman I really like. She doesn’t like me at all. How long will it take to get her to marry me?
Some people would tell that guy to forget it. The fact is, many people who were not initially interested in each other became interested in each other and got married. Just about 100% of married people in fact.
So, how long does it take? Well, you can get married to a needy person within a week. For a secure person, it’s not likely to be less than six months. And, if they are currently dating someone else, then add three months on to that. Even if someone ends another relationship right away, it still takes time for them to get over the other person.
For reconciling, it’s the same numbers. Not one week, unless your spouse panics and wants to make up right away. I never see such people, but there are probably a lot of situations like that. Reconciling with a secure, rejecting spouse takes at least six months–nine months if there is an affair. Those are minimum numbers. Reconciling might never happen
Divorce doesn’t prevent reconciling, but other things can
In my experience, reconciling depends on the ability to reattract, reconnect, and be secure. Re-attraction and reconnection create the renewed interest, and being secure is what gets re-commitment. Spouses are only going to reconcile in order to keep someone they value and would otherwise lose. That means using good boundaries once you have again become valuable.
These are the very same factors responsible for getting married in the first place. You need to be desirable. You need to help the other person feel the two of you are similar in enjoyable ways. And the other person needs to have some fear that you might slip away if marriage doesn’t happen. Some people naturally have a lot of that fear. They are the needy people full of abandonment issues who are willing to marry quickly. For others, it is necessary to have good boundaries, not be overly available, not be willing to just date or live together without getting married.
Secure people commit or re-commit in order to keep someone they highly value who they would otherwise lose. Their initial decisions don’t change that.
Everything I help my clients with has to do with becoming more valuable and/or using good boundaries. Everything else is like pedaling a bicycle with a broken chain–not fun to ride and not getting you anywhere.
Why doesn’t divorce prevent reconciling?
Whether the divorce happens or not depends on when the relationship is rebuilt relative to when the divorce happens. Some places have a mandatory one or two year wait before a divorce can happen. That greatly increases the odds of reconciling prior to divorce. You would start that process by agreeing that divorce isn’t a bad idea, given how your relationship has been. That helps to get you to square one instead of being in the hole with arguing and convincing.
The same thing goes for places where divorce can happen quickly–sometimes in as little as a day. You still need to agree that divorce isn’t a bad idea (I help my clients to craft empathetic messages to do that). But, much of your relationship building is going to happen during the process of divorce and after that.
If it only takes one month to divorce and at least six months reconcile, that means it will be at least five months after you divorce before you reconcile. A divorce proceeding does not need to interfere with the reconciling process. It will though, if you take an oppositional or argumentative stance.
Do people remarry each other after divorce?
Some do, but most don’t. The main reason that most don’t is that even if they have done a good job with the re-attracting and reconnecting, they are unwilling to walk away from the relationship. That means their spouse can continue to enjoy the advantages of being independent, while still having all of the benefits of the relationship. That’s true for both people, though. That’s the main reason. It has nothing to do with it not being possible.
People only commit (or re-commit) in order to keep something valuable they would otherwise lose.
I don’t know if there is a Christian obligation to remarry since divorced people are still considered married anyhow. This is why the Bible tells us that if we divorce and remarry another, we are committing adultery. As a relationship coach I am most concerned with helping my clients to rebuild a loving, monogamous, and committed relationship.
Divorce is a symptom and not a cause
Divorce isn’t something anyone wants to do. It’s what they believe they need to do in order to have something better. People don’t really want a divorce–they want what they believe they can have after they divorce. If you restore the relationship, the divorce is no longer desired. Don’t spend your time staring at the smoke when what you really need is to gather more firewood.
The right goals for reconciling
The right goals for reconciling don’t include preventing divorce. They are actually the same goals we need to have everyday. My goal today isn’t to make sure my wife doesn’t want to divorce me. My goals are to behave in desirable ways, to show love, and to help her enjoy her time with me. Those are process goals.
Process goals mean enjoying the relationship as you go along. That’s what single people do and doing that leads to marriage. That’s what people need to do to reconcile as well–focus on being desirable, having behavior which is attractive for the current level of the relationship, being empathetic and agreeable, and not pressuring or pursuing.
If you can do that, then the relationship will build. But, asking your spouse to call off a divorce before love is restored will create the same problem as trying to get a single person to marry you before they are in love with you. You will get rejection. Many people give up at that point.
As long as your relationship is growing, there is no reason to give up on it.
But you will have to develop your relationship a lot before expecting your spouse to give up freedom and all others to be with you only for the rest of his or her life. That is only natural.
Getting all the way to reconciling
I would be glad to help you reconcile. My Re-Connections Coaching Package will help you with the process of attraction, connection, and security. This will help you to rebuild your relationship regardless of whether your spouse wants to divorce or not.
It is okay if you give up on your relationship because you truly think it is the best thing to do, but don’t give up because your spouse wants a divorce–that can change.
