Over the weekend, I received a reply from a wife who said that her husband had been living alone for the last few months. Neither of them had made any move to file for divorce. Basically, they were in a sort of “wait and see” holding pattern. But, the husband did not seem to be in a hurry to reconcile. The wife missed her husband and she saw no benefit in their living apart. She really wanted to start working to save her marriage, but every time she brought this up, the husband would stop her abruptly and tell her that he wasn’t ready to reconcile yet and that she had no idea if she would ever come back. I would be.
But, this is not what the wife wanted to hear. She told me, in part, “I really want to start over and try to make our marriage work again. Yes, we have some very real problems, but so do everyone else. Is this any reason to throw it all away and That we’re both miserable and alone? I don’t understand why we can’t just agree to start from scratch and work together to commit to this marriage and make it work.”
The points this wife was making are very common. Most couples I hear about are in a situation where one spouse is perfectly willing to give the marriage one more chance, while the other spouse is reluctant. Having each spouse on opposite sides makes coming to a resolution that everyone is excited to work on quite difficult and unlikely. So, in the next article, I’ll discuss some tactics you can try to convince her husband to work with you to start over and give the marriage one more chance.
Understand that you cannot “make” a reluctant husband reconcile with you, but you can gently encourage and entice him to work with you to make things better: Many wives want advice from me on how to “get” or “get” their husband to work with them to reconcile or save their marriage. Unfortunately, this is a tactic that rarely works. Every time you try to force someone to do something she doesn’t want to do, you are almost ensuring resentment and resistance. Usually, this just causes her target to move further and further away.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t encourage your husband to see things your way. It just means that he often gets much better results when he uses positive motivations instead of negative ones. Usually, if you are very resourceful and deliberate, you can begin to show your husband that he is in her best interest and that it would probably contribute to her happiness if he decided to reconcile with you.
To do this, you need to change their mindset a bit. Because, right now, he’s probably deliberating whether he’s better off with you and invested in the marriage or whether it’s in his best interest to end the marriage (or at least take a break). So, through your actions and his interactions with him, you want to gradually allow him to see and realize that it is ultimately better for him to remain married to you.
You’ll often get better results if you take reconciliation off the table for a while and instead focus on gradually improving your relationship with your husband: It’s often very tempting to focus solely on getting him to commit to making up with you. Many wives are willing to do almost whatever it takes to make this happen as soon as possible. But, this type of hyperfocus will usually drive the husband away or make him feel overwhelmed and pressured.
Usually, it’s best to divert attention from your immediate need for reconciliation. Whether you explain this to your husband is up to you. However, you might want to say something like, “I’ve been thinking a lot about where we are in our relationship. It seems like we’re both frustrated and kind of stuck. It doesn’t really seem to be working or doing any of that.” happy, so I want to take a few steps back and take some of the pressure off. Because, at the end of the day, none of us knows what the future holds. So what I’d like to do is just focus on making things better between us as individuals. No matter how this relationship ends, it’s too special to me to allow it to continue to deteriorate. So if going back a few steps helps me improve it, then that’s what I’d like to do. Let’s take the reconciliation conversation off the table for a while and see if we can improve our relationship and then go from there.”
This conversation will give you some advantages. First, she has taken a lot of pressure off her husband and her situation. Second, you’ve just made sure that he has no reason to avoid you, since you promised to make any interaction enjoyable without any pressure. Now, we both know that a reconciliation is still very important to you and it’s still what you want. But you do not need to constantly insist on this.
In fact, what you really want is for him to gradually become more receptive to redefining his relationship with you. As things gradually and genuinely start to improve, eventually a reconciliation becomes much more likely (and better yet, he’s willingly accepted this). own without being pressured. He wants him to be fully engaged and excited to try again.