Divorce has reached the epidemic stage. Did you know
that over a million
marriages end in the United
States? Multiply that by 10 or 20 and think of the
havoc these broken homes are leaving economically
and on the children 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
your own.
Is your marriage in trouble? If so, do
you think it is possible for your marriage to be
saved? No one really knows for sure, but please
don't give up without doing everything you possibly
can to save it before giving up and joining the
millions of others heading to 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. Quit trying to place blame.
If you are honest, you will have to admit there
is plenty of blame to go around in your troubled
marriage. Trying to heap the blame all on one person
or the other isn't going to help anything---not even
if you blame yourself. What is going to 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 the
responsibility to put that change into action.
Even if your spouse claims not to be interested
in continuing the relationship, go ahead and
institute changes in your own life that may show him
or her that the marriage is worth saving, after all.
Examples of such change might be to recognize
behaviors in your own life that irritate your spouse
and to determine to change those behaviors. If your
spouse has behaviors that make you angry, make up
your mind that you can and will learn to ignore and
perhaps even eventually accept those behaviors just
as you 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 acceptable to
both of you..
3. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
Find an expert in dealing with troubled
marriages. If the expert has helped others, he or
she can help you, too Too often we are embarrassed
to admit the mess we have made of our marriage or we
assume that our particular problems are
insurmountable. A good marriage counselor has seen
far worse cases than yours, and has had success in
helping even more troubled marriages than yours.
4. Don't wait to take action.
The longer you wait to do something about your
troubled marriage, the more troubled it will become,
so don't wait. Problems usually don't go away by
themselves, as you can tell by the million divorces
every year in the United States, alone.
Can your troubled marriage be saved? Most can if
at least one of the involved parties cares enough to
take action. Will you be the one in your case?
