Divorced Men Reveal Shocking Red Flags They Ignored Before Their Marriages Crumbled

That should have been enough to wake me up, but I continued to downplay it, think of our issues as normal marital bumps along the road. I wish she had just slapped me honestly. I wish I had heard the words “I can’t keep going on like this!” or “We seriously need marriage counseling/therapy”, but it never got brought up. And from what I’m seeing on here, apparently direct confrontation from women appears to be pretty rare, so I guess it shouldn’t have come as a shock to me like it did.

BUT the main reason she feels like she has to seek divorce isn’t even the issues themselves, but what her brain and body have been doing to her through the years of neglect. Aside from the anxiety, feelings of abandonment, fight or flight responses, she has also been experiencing a slew of physical responses such as random bruising over her body, weight gain, and nearly an auto immune disease. Hence the reason why she feels she has to escape the marriage as fast as possible and why our perspectives on our situation are so different. She is seeing her therapist, but rarely in person, so I’ve been trying to encourage her to do that, but mainly, I am trying to work on myself and discover why I acted the way I did and how I can change my life going forward.

So now to finally answer the question, I am doing weekly counseling, lots of videos and books on becoming a better communicator and getting more natural at connecting with people, journaling, weekly walks and talks with friends, etc. I never really worked on myself at all during our marriage and didn’t have any relationship goals in mind. I was just “doing life” aimlessly. That was a big problem as well as putting way too much weight on my wife (she did this to me too) where she was more or less responsible for my self worth. It makes hard conversations almost impossible to have because emotions just fly in them.

Anyway, the strangest thing is happening and I don’t know where we will wind up, but we are sort of “resetting” our relationship. She made the comment to me months ago that she desired to “remain friends” after the divorce. I’ve never witnessed that before and was emotionally all over the place at the time, so I laughed it off and thought “how naive of her”, but since her anger against me has lessened and some empathy has returned, there has been actual effort put forth in getting together to go for ice cream or out to lunch as a family where we can just talk and share our hearts again. So, inspired by her efforts, I suggested that we work together and discuss what being friends would actually look like. So just today, we got together and went over things like how often we desire to get together, how we can support one another, what boundaries need to be in place, etc. My hope obviously is that we will be able to get back together, but I know she needs time and healing. I want to show her that real change in me is possible, so I will continue to work on myself and grow in ways I should have been doing during our marriage.

If I could have, I would have told my younger self that you can’t stop pursuing your wife. Just because you are married, you can’t naively assume that she’s going to be with you ‘til d***h do you part’ without putting in the work to maintain or grow the marriage. Also, the stupid 23 year old me thought that after my wife went to therapy for her childhood trauma, it was “taken care of”. I’d love to have gotten myself educated on how those childhood issues can resurface in marriage and also learn how to support her and what pitfalls to avoid as well.

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading my story! I hope it can help someone!

JodoKast87 , DC Studio Report