Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Can This Marriage Be Saved?  This column was introduced in Ladies Home Journal Magazine over 50 years ago. It’s still considered the most popular and most enduring women’s magazine feature in the world. Is it really a surprise when you think about the conversations you’re having with friends or the increase in divorces after we hit the 15-year marriage mark. 

All relationships have their ups and downs, especially marriages where you are intertwined in everything from living arrangements to parenting to finances.  Questioning happiness along the way isn’t uncommon, but what happens when the weeks of questioning turns into months and then years?

In this episode, we’re going to discuss the stages of marriage and explore the questions you can dig in and ask yourself to identify what’s really going on in your marriage and understand, ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Start off by asking these two questions:

• Are there parts of your marriage that make you happy?
  
  
• Where are you feeling unfulfilled within your marriage?

Ways to start fixing it:

• Be reflective: Fixing a broken marriage isn’t a blame game, and you need to recognize how you’ve contributed too. Be ready to do the work necessary to make personal changes to your own behaviors.

• Lay it all out there: Stop pretending, it hasn’t worked thus far and if you’re going to have any chance to right the marriage, you need to move forward with a clean slate so be open and honest about everything that you feel and need.

• Listen without deflecting: It isn’t comfortable hearing what YOU’VE done wrong and sorry ladies, you’re not perfect either. Listen to learn. Listen to heal. Listen to patch.
  
  
  
  
• Become aware of negative thought patterns: When we’ve been in a marriage a long time, we can easily fall into old habits or fall into old thoughts about our partner.  It’s time to look at him/her with new eyes, and a varied perspective.  See them from an outsider not with all your baggage. 
  
  
  
• Find new ways to connect. 
  
  
  
• Set a goal together: Maybe it’s a retirement goal, maybe it’s a goal to redo the bathroom, setting a goal together and then building toward it every day can reconnect you.
  
  
  
• Be present: Slow down, appreciate each other, make a point to have physical contact, make a point to ask questions that spark conversation, debate and intellectual curiosity.

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Join Our Facebook Group Just Gen x — The Resting Mind  

Articles + Podcasts: 

The Truth About Mid-Life Marriage (podcast)  

When You Can't Avoid Having a Difficult Conversation (podcast)

I’m so freaking angry I could scream! (article) 

3 ways to prepare for a difficult conversation (article) 

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