Your Spouse Should Not Be the Hardest Part of Your Life...

I see it all too often.  The partnership that was entered for love and support becomes a prison of criticism, angst and failing.  So many sweet relationships gone so wrong.  The solace they thought they would find, evaporating as if it was never even there. A grand illusion that now makes every day life harder and less rewarding.

How do we all keep getting relationships so wrong?

How do we turn unions into prison sentences?

How do we somehow end up married to someone who just makes our life so much harder?

I will get to that in a minute...

First let’s just underscore how many people relate to this comment.

Are you one of them?

Is your spouse the thing you must navigate around?

Keep things from lest you have a blow up?

Eggshell walk daily?

Be forced to relate to on the daily but find only angst and discomfort where you seek solace and understanding?

Sometimes we just need a reframe...

If your spouse can be identified as the hardest part of your life, perhaps it is time for a change.

And this gets me to my other point...

You find yourself in the situation you are in, married to someone who acts more like an adversary than a loving supporter, you are going to have to own that, at least in part, your decisions and choices got you there.  I have not had one client in 31 years that did not bear some responsibility for ending up living with someone who made everything harder.  We are not hapless victims, we are active participants...so we must figure out why we are making choices that make us miserable.

And most of us don’t want to do the work...

And so we remain mired in marriages that suck us dry of our vitality, energy and peace.  We trade those things because we are too afraid to leave, do not know how we will make it on our own, or because life just feels too overwhelming to add a divorce to the mix.  Sometimes, we are actually afraid for our own well being and safety.

But there is another way, and the other way begins once you admit to yourself you feel this way about your spouse.  That instead of being your champion and supporter, your spouse is your worst critic and fails to support you more often than not.

It takes a lot of courage to get married.  The joining together of your life with another, forever?  But we do it all the time, believing that this choice will be a foundational choice for the life we want.  More than 50% of us find, through great pain and anguish, that that one choice to marry that particular person is foundational in assuring we shall never have the life we want or need.  And sometimes that choice is fatal.

That is the bad news.  The good news is that you can make a different choice. You can leave.  But you need to be thoughtful, strategic and prepared.  There are smart ways to leave that seek to minimize conflict and strife and there are ways to leave that will assure you will end up mired in litigation for the next few years, bankrupting your spirit and your bank account.

If your spouse is the hardest thing in your life, perhaps give me a call.  There is a way out and into the life you thought you were forming with this person that has become the most difficult thing in your life...

Your life could change with a phone call...