Paperwork almost done, but not me!

[AnotherStander]

I don't know what the future holds. Even staring in the face of a d, my hope is still strong. I know I shouldn't put much faith in statistics, but hey I am optimistic. They say 14% of d's are reconciled. So out of 100, 14 make it.

I think MrBond was the one that posted this, but it's a good article about the fallacy of divorce making things better:

http://www.americanvalues.org/html/r-unhappy_ii.html

An interesting quote:

Call it the "divorce assumption." Most people assume that a person stuck in a bad marriage has two choices: stay married and miserable or get a divorce and become happier.1 But now come the findings from the first scholarly study ever to test that assumption, and these findings challenge conventional wisdom. Conducted by a team of leading family scholars headed by University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, the study found no evidence that unhappily married adults who divorced were typically any happier than unhappily married people who stayed married.

And do people who stay in unhappy marriages stay miserable or even get worse? No, quite the opposite:

Even more dramatically, the researchers also found that two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later. In addition, the most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of 10 who avoided divorce were happily married five years later.

So what is the magic trick that most of these couples who stayed together used? Prepare to be shocked:

In the marital endurance ethic, the most common story couples reported to researchers, marriages got happier not because partners resolved problems, but because they stubbornly outlasted them. With the passage of time, these spouses said, many sources of conflict and distress eased: financial problems, job reversals, depression, child problems, even infidelity.

Did you catch that? They did NOTHING!!!!! They just stuck it out, and the problems either resolved themselves or became less important to the M. So how does this dovetail with DB'ing? DB'ing emphasizes working on OURSELVES. NOT on our spouses. It stresses the importance of setting all R, M, D and S talks aside and not talking about it at all. Why? Because with the passage of time these things tend to resolve themselves. But if we beg, plead, pressure and push, we force a conclusion before enough time has passed for things to resolve themselves, and that conclusion is rarely reconciliation.