I remember one night, after a bad fight, sitting in an old neighborhood bar and telling my best friend "my marriage is falling apart. What the hell do I do?" He sort of laughed at me, shook his head and asked me "are you serious". I didn't understand his confusion, it seemed pretty straightforward to me. Then he said something that made so much sense it was almost silly...
He said "What the heck are you doing sitting in a bar with me then. Do you think that's going to make your marriage any better?" After that, telling him my marriage is falling apart seemed sort of silly.
You see sometimes we look for the answers to our marriage problems in the most stupid places. Asking my best friend, who had never been married what I should do about my marriage wasn't going to get me anywhere. I guess what I was looking for from him was compassion and someone to point fingers with. What I got was a duh moment.
I left the bar that night, and went home. Of course things weren't miraculously better because I left the bar a little earlier that night. Things were still the same when I got home, my wife was still as tired of me as she was when I left the house. I was actually just as tired of seeing her as well. But what had changed was that I walked in the door determined to figure out a way to answer the question of why my marriage is falling apart.
I asked advice in a lot of different places over the next few days. I read a lot of stuff, some terrible and some outstanding. I'll tell more about that in a minute.
I asked people that I knew who had good marriages why their marriages worked, what their "secret" was. I asked others who had terrible marriages and divorced (like my parents for instance) why their marriage failed.
I even got a little sneaky and started asking my wife questions.
The most important thing I did was take serious stock in my life, took responsibly, admitted that my marriage is falling apart, and instead of blaming my wife decided that it was up to me to change things.
From the outstanding things I read, I started to take some very serious action steps and my marriage began to improve little by little, and soon after a snowball effect took place and my marriage saw some very dramatic improvements.
I was able to eventually to go from saying "my marriage is falling apart" to "my marriage is finally what it's supposed to look like...I'm happy!"
Until you know exactly what that feels like then you really don't understand how incredibly necessary it is to have this occur in your life. And the best part is that it's available to you regardless of how hopeless your marriage feels right now.
It's available to you even if you're saving the marriage all by yourself.
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