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This is the way the marriage ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. ~ With apologies to T. S. Eliot
We think of marriages coming to a fiery end with a great deal of screaming. I’ve seen that, but ending with a whimper is far more common. Years of problems have sucked all the life out of one or both spouses and when one walks away or hands over divorce papers the other can’t manage any anger. This is often true even when one would like the marriage to continue. There’s not enough emotion left for the marriage to fight for it, so they let their spouse end it with little more than a few weak words of protest.
This is why it’s often impossible to save a marriage once one person has filed or is ready to do so. The marriage has been brain dead and on life support for years, and the divorce is just pulling the plug.
Sometimes a man misinterprets the end of his wife’s “constant efforts” to change their marriage. He sees it as her finally accepting how things are, but in truth, it’s her accepting they will never change. If she has fought for change for years, accepting it won’t change means she has left the marriage emotionally. She may continue to go through the motions while she plans her escape or waits for the kids to be older, but it’s over. And her husband doesn’t have clue. In fact, the situation may improve from his perspective because she is now just playing a part, trying to keep him content until she can cut and run. Some women do this for a decade or more, and some deserve an Emmy for their performance.
If your wife is still fighting for a better marriage but is doing so more weakly than she did in the past, you need to take drastic action IMMEDIATELY! Get help and do it now. If she won’t go with you, go alone. This is like finding out you have advanced cancer; survival is possible, but it will require drastic actions and setting pretty much everything else aside to focus on the situation.
Of course, it’s better to deal with this before it becomes critical. Your marriage is a living thing and failing to care for it has dire and long-term consequences. If your marriage hasn’t grown or improved in the last month, you have a problem. If it’s been three months, you have a disaster.
A post worth reading:
The Vine Community Chruch | Marriage & Singleness◄ Our pastor taught on 1 Cor 7 this week. Excellent sermon and a good resource for this post. (The sermon starts 51 minutes in.)
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This is exactly where I’m at but the roles are reversed. I struggled alone for over a decade to make our marriage work but my wife fought any change. I’m done fighting. Our marriage is already dead but she doesn’t recognize it yet. I’m just waiting for the right conditions to exit. I told her for years that I was unhappy with the way things were. She blamed me and gave me a list of things that I needed to change. I did them and still she refused to change, instead giving me more things to add to the list but refusing to acknowledge my original complaint.
Eventually I realized that nothing I could do would ever make her change and I gave up on expecting her to. When I quit bothering her, she quit giving me things to change also, so I know it was just a diversion to ensure I would never accomplish enough for her. She probably thinks that my lack of pressure means I have accepted the marriage as she wants it to be. Far from it. I have accepted that we will never be on the same page and I’ve given up all hope for a future together. Divorce won’t be killing the marriage, it will be pulling the plug on a marriage that died many years ago.
I suspect that a lot of despair comes from the ‘good is the enemy of great’ shibboleth. It’s true enough in some things, but it leads many to discard an OK marriage in the hope that a great relationship may be achievable elsewhere; I’ll bet that not a lot of people will leave a marriage to enter a life of monasticism.