It can be hard to admit when you’re stuck in a bad marriage. But, it’s even harder to admit that and to recognize that you want to fix it. Marriage takes a lot of work.
When you’re wondering how to survive a bad marriage without divorce, you’re already showing how willing you are to do the work. So, check out these 16 pieces of advice we have for you when you want to improve your marriage and you’re looking for a few places to start.
Many of these tips address you as an individual because a lot of work has to be done on your end to understand yourself and your marriage better.
Having said that, the next step will always be to have an open, honest conversation with your partner after you’ve done a little soul-searching on your own.
This post is all about how to survive a bad marriage without divorce.
HOW TO SURVIVE A BAD
MARRIAGE WITHOUT DIVORCE:
1. Think about your approach to conflict resolution
Conflict resolution is the foundation of every relationship. It’s true that you need love, trust, and respect in a relationship for it to work. However, when you think of those three things in a relationship, conflict resolution is natural and peaceful.
That can look like initial yelling, anger, and rage. But, those feelings will eventually subside when the fundamental aspects of your marriage, love, trust, and respect, are there for you to fall back on. In an unhappy marriage, conflict is one more reason to end it.
Conflict becomes one more reason why you are ready to divorce or give up on your marriage. You stop looking for reasons to solve the conflict and put in the hard work of deciding to work toward a resolution. This comes back to love, trust, and respect.
Those three things will motivate you to resolve conflict in a way that reminds you your relationship is more important than just about any conflict.
And, if that conflict is truly challenging enough to surmount the love, trust, and respect you have for your partner, then it may be time to end the relationship anyway. In other words, find the will to put work into resolving conflict as it arises without locking yourself into an abusive relationship.
2. Identify any feelings of love you have for your partner
Everyone defines a “bad” marriage differently. For some people, a bad marriage is literal abuse, which, for others, can be defined as something far worse than a bad marriage. For others, a bad marriage is one that makes you bored and resentful.
After enough time passes, you start to find reasons to hate your partner simply because you don’t want to be the one to end the relationship you’re familiar with. As strange as it is to think about, people often feel very comfortable in a “bad” marriage (not the abusive kind).
They are comfortable with them because they are familiar with them and that familiarity is worth so much more than people realize. To break out of this cycle, you have to actively search for reasons you love your partner.
It’s possible that you feel like you don’t love your partner anymore. If that feels accurate to you, then that means you need to be honest with yourself. It’s noble to wonder how to survive a bad marriage without divorce.
But, to do that, you have to realize that a marriage is only worth saving if you love the person you’re married to.
Otherwise, you’re doing it for a reason that pleases somebody else and that goes against your goal in reading this post. When we say look for feelings of love, it’s because you deserve a loving marriage and that’s only possible if there’s still love present.
3. Ask yourself if there is a mutual respect in your marriage
It’s scary to ask yourself questions like “Does my partner respect me?” and “Do I respect them?” Those questions open you up to terrifying answers. You may realize there is no mutual respect in your marriage.
This is just as important as asking the questions to begin with because it brings you closer to understanding your marriage, and that’s where we’re starting when we think of how to survive a bad marriage without divorce.
Every action you take toward fixing the issues in your marriage brings you closer to creating a good marriage, even if that means that your marriage needs to end. It may sound strange, but the truth is that some relationships can’t be fixed and that’s okay.
When you ask yourself if your marriage has mutual respect, you get closer to understanding if your relationship is fixable and that’s closer to a good marriage than allowing yourself to be unhappy in a bad marriage.
So, get real and think about how much you respect your partner. Think of times when you’ve felt them respecting you through their actions or words.
You may surprised at just how much your partner, especially in a long-term relationship, respects you simply because they’ve made a habit of it.
4. Be honest about your own happiness in your marriage
Check in with your happiness. Get brutally honest about it because you are not doing yourself any favors by lying to yourself and others. The end of a marriage will happen one way or another and you’re here because you want to take action.
Instead of letting things happen as they will, you want to be an active participant in your marriage. That starts with taking inventory of what you have to work with and asking yourself if that’s enough. So, ask yourself if you are happy in your marriage.
If it’s hard to define “happiness,” since it can feel vague and amorphous, then think of instances lately when you felt good. If you struggle to think of instances lately, then ask yourself about the last time you felt happy or good in your marriage.
Since this process is all about building up from an unhappy marriage, be kind to yourself and recognize that you may not be happy. Even in that case, there’s still a reason you want to work through the issues in your marriage. So, get honest and accept the answer that you find.
5. Focus on gaining a better understanding of your partner
Nine times out of ten, we get angry with the people we love because we misunderstand them. We ascribe meaning to the actions of other people based on thoughts and feelings about every situation.
So, if your partner doesn’t unload the dishwasher, it’s because they don’t listen to you, don’t want to contribute to the relationship, and expect you to do everything for them. If you forget to unload the dishwasher, it’s because you were too busy to remember.
This is also referred to as Fundamental Attribution Error, in which we overestimate internal factors and underestimate external factors to explain why someone made a mistake. When we explain why we made a mistake, on the other hand, we do the exact opposite.
In other words, we tend to give ourselves a break and not afford that same break to others. That’s why you have to put effort into understanding your partner.
You have to re-learn how to explain their behavior in a way that gives them the benefit of the doubt, which, more often than not, is closer to the truth anyway.
Understanding your partner comes from a willingness to recover the emotional connection between you and your partner because you value your relationship.
6. Ask yourself about your emotional needs
Learn about yourself. Identify your emotional needs and think of yourself in new ways. Get to know yourself like you’re meeting a new person. Most of us didn’t grow up with questions like “What are your emotional needs?”
For many of us, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what that means, let alone how that applies to us. So, it’s okay to get real about the fact that you may have entered into your marriage without having ever discussed your emotional needs before.
At the start, you may have inadvertently learned about them through trial and error. Lots of us stumble onto our emotional needs by learning what feels good in a relationship and what doesn’t.
Now, let’s take that a step further and name our emotional needs using the term “emotional needs.”
7. Plan a date night for you and your partner to connect
Date nights provide the space for you to prioritize your relationship. By planning a date night, you are already making the decision that this relationship matters enough to spend time on it. This may sound like a low bar, but it matters.
When you’re working on transforming a bad relationship into one worth being in, you have to celebrate the small things. One of the most common reasons marriages end in divorce proceedings is the people in the relationship stopped putting effort in.
So, plan a date night in which you and your partner put aside all of your marital problems for the night and just talk. Throwback to when you were first dating and focus on the friendship as the basis of your relationship.
8. Think about how you prioritize your personal growth
When you’re in a loveless marriage, it’s easy to get stuck on the negative feelings. You have built up resentment for your partner and you feel trapped. But, if you notice, these feelings are all related to the way you relate to your partner and to your marriage.
So, to break out of this pattern, you may want to try focusing on your goals. Ask yourself what goals you have and what activities you enjoy doing on your own. We can think of this as both personal growth and self-care.
Funnily enough, when couples are struggling to connect, they are often more involved with each other than they realize.
Sometimes, the key to approaching your marriage from a different way is by checking in with yourself and how you’ve been paying attention to your needs as an individual outside of your marriage.
9. Ask yourself if social media plays a role in the way you think about marriage
It’s hard to do anything, nowadays, without having some preconceived notion of what it should look like. Whether it’s social media or a show or movie, we are bombarded with images of idealized and unrealistic images of life.
We see a couple having sex all the time on TV, so we think our marriage is messed up when it doesn’t look like that. Or we see a husband cheating on his wife and we connect that to our relationship. On the other hand, we see highlight reels all the time on social media.
So, naturally, we create all these impossible standards for our marriages to live up to without really checking in to see if those are the same standards we want for our marriage.
It can be difficult to differentiate between what social media and society tell us we should want with what we actually want. That’s why we have to distance ourselves from social media and recognize when it affects the way we see our marriage.
10. Consider whether you think you have financial security
As much as we hate to admit it, financial security has a lot to do with a marriage. Both from the perspective of financial problems and financial abuse, we have to consider finances whenever we talk about marital issues.
If we’re being honest, it’s almost impossible to leave a marriage if you don’t have financial security as an individual. So, we can’t fairly talk about saving your marriage without getting really honest about finances.
You want to save your marriage and that’s beautiful. However, if you’re only doing that because you can’t afford to leave, there are other options for you (including referring to the National Domestic Violence Hotline for information and help).
If that’s not the case, then it’s worth asking yourself how many of the issues in your relationship only exist because of financial issues.
Finances are a huge stressor, no matter who makes money and who pays the bills. Think about this and what role money has in the state of your marriage.
11. Remind yourself how much the little things matter
Your relationship is made in the small moments when you think of your partner. It takes time and “training” to re-think the way that you see your partner.
It’s difficult to reframe the way that you think about your partner from negative to positive. It takes consistent, long-term effort.
The good news is that one of the easiest ways to change your mindset from searching for flaws in your partner to searching for more reasons to love your partner is by looking for small ways of showing them love. This also translates to them doing the same for you and noticing it.
Instead of noticing them not taking out the trash, you noticed that they cleaned the sink and did the dishes last night. The little things matter the most on multiple levels.
The little things help you fall in love all over again, change your mindset from pessimist to optimist, and help you transform your marriage.
12. Define quality time for yourself
Quality time is different for everyone. If you feel unseen by your partner, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt and have a conversation about it. They may have no clue how you define quality time because they define it differently.
So, not only does this mean that you may not be getting your needs met because your partner is not aware of how they differ from their own needs, but your partner may not be getting their needs met either.
Before you approach your partner about not meeting your needs, you have to make sure you know how to talk about your needs. So, define them for yourself and understand what feels good.
13. Join a support group of people going through the same thing
You’re not alone. Other people have gone through the same marital struggles as you have. People are going through it right now. The only difference between you and those people is they are actively getting help by attending a support group.
Support groups are beneficial for specific issues and experiences that are generalized enough that the people who have experienced them understand the collective trauma of it.
So, if your marriage is struggling and you want to work on it, then there are lots of other people out there who can relate. Support groups will give you the community you need.
This community will help you realize how normal your struggles are and that you have people to back you up as you process your feelings and work on your marriage.
14. Ask yourself about physical intimacy in your relationship
Physical intimacy is important. It looks different for everyone, so you don’t automatically have to think of sex when it comes to intimacy. It can be hugging, cuddling, kissing, and more.
Communicate with your partner about what it looks like to them and figure out what it looks like to you. Consider what you feel comfortable with in the moment. Depending on the emotional level of your marriage, you may not want to engage in certain types of physical intimacy.
That’s okay as long as you understand where you are and communicate that to your partner. There’s definitely a stereotype that men are hyper-sexual and women are hypo-sexual. It’s hard for this to not affect your marriage, but, with real communication, you can figure this out.
Figuring it out may look like ending your relationship if your partner can’t accept where you are and what you’re comfortable with.
15. Remember that positive change is the key
Small positive change is all you need. You do not have to make major steps overnight for your marriage to change. The changes that last longer are typically the ones that happen incrementally over time.
These changes often happen because you change the way that you think, which takes time. It’s easy to fall back into old patterns.
This is why the slow movements, that slowly change the way you think or reinforce new, positive patterns of behavior, are the ones that will improve your marriage.
16. Consider seeing a marriage and family therapist
Never underestimate the power of professional help. There are people trained in marriage counseling who are ready to help you. Couples therapy is the best option for anyone in a relationship because it shows their dedication to making their marriage work.
It’s a lot of work to change the patterns that are you actively a part of, and it’s even harder when you’re not a trained couples therapist. So, give yourself a break and get the help you need for the marriage you want.
