Leaving With Love
October 30th, 2009 | by admin |
Have you noticed how many married couples are splitting these days? At first I thought it was just me noticing it more because it’s happened to me, you know like when you’ve just bought a new car that you thought was unusual. It’s only after you’ve ventured out a couple of times, beaming behind the wheel of your new ‘turquoise travelling toy’ that you realise how many other TTT’s are out there.
People are now choosing not to get married just to stay in their relationship longer. Or if they do decide to take the plunge they’re adjusting the marriage vows to reduce the pressure. Instead of promising to love through sickness and through health they’re promising to love through the occasional cold and certified health check.
I actually think it’s good that more marriages are failing. The way I see it is that it’s not that relationship breakdown has increased it’s just that more people are choosing to end a marriage that isn’t working rather than put up with someone they hate just because some stranger in a dog collar told them that they had to 30 years ago. There’s also the fact that I’m sure more people are getting married now because it’s so easy and they don’t see it as such a major decision as our parents did.
It’s not the marriage break up that’s the problem it’s the way couples go about it.
My wife and I decided to call it a day 2 years ago. We’d been together since we’d been at school at had become more like good friends than lovers. The stresses of raising a family had caused us to drift apart until one day we realised that we both had different goals and interests and it just made sense to follow those paths separately. Because we had a strong relationship that was built on trust we were able to communicate our way through the rapids of separation with the minimal amount of stress. Neither of us had got to the point where we’d jumped into bed with someone else so the trust hadn’t been broken.
If you don’t communicate your problems eventually one of you will have an affair. An amicable separation requires trust on both sides, sleeping with someone else is a slap in the face of that trust and will inevitably destroy everything that you’ve built. The way that we decided to split was quite unique, so unique in fact that I decided to write a book about it called ‘Leaving with Love’. Our main focus was to minimise the impact on our children which we have achieved.
If you’re in a similar position and are considering leaving your spouse then the main thing you need to make sure of, if you want it to be an amicable separation, is to re-establish trust. As long as you trust each other then you can communicate, get through it and still be friends when you get on the other side. Without trust you’re going down the creek without the proverbial paddle so make sure you hold on tight!
Paul Harris
http://www.articlesbase.com/divorce-articles/leaving-with-love-714970.html
