We all make mistakes in life. Some are easily corrected while others are not so easily mended. The act of getting married is not so much about committing to another, but about merging one’s life with the life of another. You accept every aspect of that person’s life as you would your own. What should you do when you realize you have made a mistake in judgment?
Many of us are aware of the potential problems we will face when we choose to accept our partner in our lives. Our deep emotional bond with this person may cloud our judgment from the reality of those issues. Differing life goals encompass a wide range of issues that distress married couples.
Simply agreeing to give up your dreams and plans in support of that of your partner will not vanquish your desire to live out those dreams. The bond between you and your partner is severed in that moment whether you choose to remain in the marriage or not.
The ideal of being equally yoked is often quite different in reality. While one takes a role of dominance and the other assumes a role of submission, but this is only personality characteristics. Your submissive wife may be infinitely more qualified to handle the family finances than you are. You may be more suited toward working a low paying job while she goes on to college. We cannot always choose our strong points.
Perhaps, this wasn’t your ideal plan for the marriage, but building upon the strengths of a family is a mutual benefit. Marriages suffer when issues of pride and self defeat divide the partners. We tend to think marriages fail because one partner feels held back. A marriage can be fated to failure when one partner chooses to free the other to experience their full potential.
Staying in a distressed marriage solely for the children is admirable. It is not ideal and perhaps some would argue this is not a good enough reason to stay married. Children alter the priorities of both partners significantly. From the moment of conception your priorities, and that of your partner’s, shift toward raising the children.
Regardless of what you have been told, an ideal home family structure for a child involves both the biological mother and father. If it were any other way, we would all be capable of conceiving children asexually, but children only require this structure for a short while during those crucial developmental years.
They are capable of dealing emotionally with a divorce once they are old enough to remain home without parental supervision. This also greatly reduces the complications of divorce. Negotiating custodial rights can be amicable considering the children are old enough to tend to themselves and perhaps travel from one home to the other on their own.
Granted, there are a myriad of other valid reasons divorce would be warranted, such as domestic violence, adultery and prolonged substance addiction. But we have addressed the more common factors that constitute what would be considered irreconcilable differences. Properly addressing such issues greatly reduces the emotional as well as the legal ramifications typically associated with divorce.
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