Quotes found on Divorcebusting (7)

[Ready2Change]

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I am going to give you the secret to saving your marriage.....I was an information gathering machine. My #1 GAL activity was reading self-help books, both personal and marital. I paid for private counseling sessions with some of the experts......Of all the experts' advice, there was one tactic that worked more than any other. It seemed the most counter-intuitive of all of the tactics....

So what was this counter-intuitive tactic that seemed to be the most successful at saving marriages? Do you want to know the one thing you can do above all others to give you the best chance at saving your marriage? Here it is:

Stop trying to save your marriage.

That right. Of all the advice I received about things I could do. Things I could say. Tactics I could employ. The one that got the most praise for actually working, and the one that worked best in my sitch, was to NOT try to save my marriage. Letting go. Giving up. Telling her that while I didn't agree with the choice she was making that I would do nothing to stand in her way. Dropping the rope. Moving on. That was what worked the best!

I remember the first chink in the armor of her resolve to leave the marriage. It was as we were leaving to go to Christmas dinner with her family. "I said, wow it just hit me that this will be the last time I celebrate Christmas with your family." She immediately launched into this diatribe about how she didn't want to say anything about leaving until after the holidays because she thought that once all of the holiday fanfare died down that maybe she would have a change of heart and not want to leave. And then she could spare us all of the pain and drama (remember I initiated BD).

The second time I saw her having doubts was once I established a boundary about if we were going to stay together I could only do so if she was open to complete transparency. She then said "Okay then I need to get my resume together." I offered to help her, and offered to buy her any books she wanted on resume writing and interviewing. She spent the next half day working on her resume, with my being completely onboard with her decision, until she came out of the office in tears talking about how she knew Ding was wrong, and that God hated D, and that it would be better if we could work things out.

Every time I pursued, pressured, chased, tried to get her to stay.............that was when she resolved to leave. Every time I showed her I was perfectly fine with her leaving, and even endorsed it, she start having second thoughts.

Newbies. DROP THAT ROPE. Get a life. 180 on your poor behavior for yourself. Detach from your WAS. Do all of that, but above all stop trying to save your marriage. By doing that you just might save it anyway.