How To Identify What The Question "Should I get a divorce?" Means To You.

 by: Karl Augustine

Deciding about whether you should get a divorce or not is an agonizing experience to go through. If you are asking yourself "should I get a divorce?", you've been thinking about your relationship's state for a while or an isolated incident that occurred was so terrible, that you want to just chuck it all and start over with a new life!

If you have been asking yourself "should I get a divorce?" for any length of time, you should figure out what is making you feel that way if you haven't already. Take the time to reflect back on why you're leaning towards divorce rather than working out your marriage. Once you identify the things that are making you feel like divorce is the right option, make a list of those things.

Once you make that list, go back through each item on the list that led you to asking yourself the question "should I get a divorce?". Look at each item on the list in depth and make certain you really deem those items as valid reasons for wanting a divorce, either in and of themselves or as a part of a common theme of reasons that make up a whole set.

Once you trim the list down to include only truly 'valid reasons', rank each reason in order of importance. Identify 2 reasons that hold the most weight to you and that contributed most to you asking yourself "should I get a divorce?". After you accomplish this, decide if these reasons seem like things that can be changed for the better or if they are just flat out unrecoverable. Soul search and decide whether or not you are willing to do what it takes to try and fix the problem that is associated with these reasons.

Example: If one of your reasons for thinking about divorce is because your spouse is insanely jealous of you having friendly and/or purely plutonic relationships with members of the opposite sex, decide whether or not you are willing to socialize less with members of the opposite sex (or in a different manner) or do what it takes to ensure that your spouse understands and believes that you truly love him/her. If you aren't willing to do either of those things (or anything else it may take to change the situation), you have some serious long-term thinking to do about whether you really want to stay married.

If you have been asking yourself "should I get a divorce" due to one isolated incident, you should re-live that isolated incident in your mind and identify why the isolated incident led you to the way that you feel now. List the top 5 reasons that this incident hurt you to the extent it did (thinking about divorce). Then, think about what you feel the top 5 reasons are that led to the actual incident itself. This is especially crucial because, even though it may be one isolated incident that caused you to think about divorce as an option, the reasons that led to that isolated incident may have been present for quite a while and need to be dealt with. The point is, just because one isolated incident 'happened', doesn't mean the execution of that incident is the true cause of the problem. Chances are there's much more to it, and finding out what those things are will help you identify the true story.

If you have been asking yourself "do I want a divorce?" and haven't prioritized why you feel that way, you aren't ready for divorce. What you are ready for however, is to go through soul searching to get to the root of the problem.