Your marriage is stressing you out
and living like this seems unbearable, but breakups are heartbreaking. Especially when you have children.
You don’t have to jump to conclusions, and think divorce is the only solution, but at the same time you should force yourself into a miserable, toxic, or even traumatic relationship.
Even if you know you need to divorce and landed to this page hoping for a quick validation of your idea, please know that it needs strategy and a little bit of initial reflection.
Don’t worry, it won’t take months
Dedicating few weeks now to vet the situation, to learn your limits and weaknesses, will save you months of litigation and years of pain, let alone tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and money lost to your ex-spouse. That’s why my home page motto is “without making lawyers rich”.
It’s 4 milestones on a path to happiness — remember: the goal is not to divorce or to fix a marriage, the goal must be paving the way for a happy and fulfilling life. The first milestones are actually about understanding what action you need to take: divorce or change your approach to marriage.
4 milestones: a start-to-finish strategy
The first checkpoints along your path to happiness will be reached when you gain awareness of the situation. If you don’t walk past these initial intermediate goals, divorce will be a bleeding of money and fixing the marriage will be a delusional nightmare.
Step 1: You
It seems corny, but at the beginning you really need to forget everything else. You must forget you have children. You must forget you have a spouse. You must forget you’re called to pay bills. It’s like on a depressurize plane. You may have seen the personnel instructs passenger to put their oxygen mask on first, before helping anybody else. It makes sense, because if you pass out, forget about saving your life and paying bills.
In step 1, you need to check if you have the right understanding of relationship, of family roles, and if you are putting the right boundaries in place, if any.
Learning about boundaries and relationships and how to apply them, will help you to express clearly what the problem is. An unclear problem is impossible to solve.
Step 2: Them
Do you think you know your wife or your husband? Think again. We surely know what our spouses like, what makes them mad.
We write a manual for our spouse, and we expect they behave as instructed in it. But that manual is indeed our fantasy. The reality is we will never be sure of what they think, and we may not know how they operate.
Learning some patterns and cracking the code of what make them function (the way they do) is important to have a closure to what we are about to plan (e.g. a breakup). When we understand they really have a poor soul, or even that they’re literally evil, the decision of what to do next will be natural.
Not only that, knowing who you are about to confront will help you to predict how they will react and take countermeasures.
Step 3: Myth-busting
A little bit of education about divorce, the basics of family law, and forgetting the fictional depiction of divorce in TV is important to demystify and exorcise the scariness of a divorce.
You don’t need to fear the process and the courts. But in certain cases you do, because you don’t want to be blindsided by the bias of the legal system is some states and counties.
That’s not a lot of work
Actually, it can be relieving finding an answer to questions you always asked but never found explanation for, finding confirmation of concepts you always knew but nobody seemed to be in agreement with.
You may reach the first 3 milestones in as little a 3, 4, or not more than 5 weeks. Nothing compared to the years you’ve been questioning your relationship
Step 4: Negotiation
or lack thereof
In fact, you don’t negotiate with somebody you have relationship with. Nobody ever admits that, but it’s a conflict of interest.
There are so many other reasons why you need to learn when to negotiate with a divorcing spouse, and especially their lawyers, and when not.
Ones this is clear, you will save a lot, like a whole lot of time, in many cases years, of back and forth trying to make things smooth. But a breakup can never be smooth. And at the rate of $350/hr for the lawyers fee, every 10 minutes saved is a lot of money, let alone years!
Of course, it’s not all about money. It’s also about reducing stress. Less disagreements, less stress.
It’s too much to address here. Besides you still need to get to the first 3 milestones. If you want really to pursue the road to your romantic happiness
Take the first step
Let’s discuss in person the strategy to achieve your happiness. Stop being miserable and start enjoying a happy life with your children and a peaceful romantic relationship. Without feeling guilty. Without drowning in stress. Without ruining your children lives and well-being. But you need to take the first step.
If you’re ready to be happy
click above to check your Marriage Type, and schedule a free consultation to discuss the result and how mapping out the 4 milestones looks like for you.
