Happy Monday, everyone!
One of the hardest emails I ever get goes something like this:
“My wife says she’s done. She’s talking separation. What do I do?”
If that’s your situation, how you respond matters more than you realize.
If your spouse says they want out, then yes, your job is ten times harder than if they came to you months ago and said where their head was at.
Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t.
None of that is important now because you have to focus on what you can do today.
What you have on your side is the fact that, in reality, very few people actually want to be single.
But many will trade the safety of a relationship for the freedom of getting away from pain.
Especially when they’ve reached the point of emotional exhaustion.
That’s the first hurdle you have to understand.
Their nervous system is fried.
Maybe it’s been your anger. Your defensiveness. Or your passivity… it doesn’t matter now what the source of their pain is.
Addressing that comes later.
The second hurdle you’re facing is just as important.
When someone has lived in pain long enough, they lose the ability to see the good that’s still there.
They can’t see that the person that they married still exists.
In fact, their pain makes it such that they don’t even want to look for that person.
That’s okay. It’s not their job to look for that right now.
It’s yours.
So what do you do?
You stop trying to convince them to stay.
Instead, your only goal is to make them feel safe enough to wait.
You might say something like:
“Sweetheart, I know I’ve hurt you. I’m not asking you to trust me today. I’m asking if you’d give me 24 hours at a time to show you I don’t have to keep being a source of your pain.”
Notice what you’re doing.
You’re not promising perfection.
You’re not asking for forever.
You’re simply asking for enough time to show them that you can be the person they needed all along.
If they agree to hit pause long enough to think, then you can ask a question that invites hope back into the room:
“If there was one thing I could do that would help you believe this marriage still has a chance… what would it be?”
(Side note: That question, I’d like to point out, isn’t something only people facing a crisis in their marriage need to ask. We can all rephrase it like this:“If there was one thing I could do that would make our marriage better… what would it be?”)
In closing, if your spouse can’t imagine a better future with you, there won’t be much to save.
But if you can help them imagine, even just a little, what different could look like, you may have something to build on.
Your goal right now isn’t to fix the marriage.
It’s to pause the pain long enough to give hope another chance.
