Who Can Help Me Save My Marriage?
Do you feel like you’ve exhausted every option you could think of on your own and you just want to storm into some marriage counselor’s office and shout “Please help me save my marriage?” Well apart from the shouting part, you’re actually on the right track, looking for advice from some other place rather than inside your own head.
Here are some places to look to find help to save your marriage:
Friends
If you have any friends who’ve managed to dodge an impending divorce, ask them how they did it. Don’t just think about friends around your own age either. Older couples can be a gold mine of advice on working through marriage difficulties.
Even if they seem to have a perfect relationship now, you might be surprised to hear what they’ve gone through in the past.
Of course, the problem with asking friends for advice is their experience is limited to what worked for them. What worked for them won’t necessarily work for you.
Online forums
The Internet is a great place to find information on just about everything and marriage is no exception.
The advantage of getting advice from forums is that you can ask questions anonymously and get opinions from a variety of people who’ll most likely have very different view points from you.
The drawback is that it’s unlikely you’ll get a truly useful response from just one “help me save my marriage” post. The lack of real-time interaction means you don’t get the back-and-forth dialogue you’d need to really get to the root of your problems and find a workable solution.
Marriage counseling
It’s one of the first thing well meaning friends ask when you admit your marriage is on the rocks: “Have you thought of counseling?” There’s a good reason for that. A professional marriage counselor has training in resolving marital conflicts and many years of experience working with different types of couples and problems.
The problem you usually run into here is that one spouse doesn’t want to go. Usually, that partner believes the marriage has already failed and any attempt to revive it is a waste of time and energy. If your partner feels that way, don’t give up just yet. Give it time.
Counseling can help, of course, but it’s not a cure-all. Did you know the average marriage counselor’s success rate is only around 30%? But 30% is a lot better than zero of course.
Self-help books
If you’ve been looking online for tips, you’ve probably run into a few of those ebooks that provide guidance for working through a rough patch in a marriage even when one partner is ready to call it quits. They may not seem like much, but in reality, the best of these can be surprisingly effective.
Most of these plans were developed by highly experienced marriage counselors who found a “formula” for what works, so they usually have a success rate higher than that of most marriage counselors.
Whatever you do, don’t fool yourself into thinking that the problems between you and your spouse will disappear all on their own. They won’t.
You need to decide where you’re going to go for sound advice on how to save your marriage and act on that advice as soon as possible. The longer you put it off, the harder it’s going to be to solve your problems.
Related posts:
Comments
Tell us what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!