The holiday season is winding down for many in the Western world, signaling the beginning of a brand new year and the New Year’s resolutions that follow.
What about you? How are you getting your fresh start?
For many, a new beginning requires a reassessment of relationships. After the prolonged expectation to keep it all together during the holidays, it can be especially hard for some couples to continue with their marriages.
This new beginning may entail the removal of individuals from our lives who exert a negative influence over us or exhibit abusive behaviors. (Remember, abuse doesn’t just entail physical violence, it can be emotional or mental, too.) Or maybe it simply means rethinking our commitment to a person who refuses to change.
Broken Promises — and Their Effects on a Marriage
For some, years can pass as their spouse promises to deal with unresolved issues, but they never do. Maybe you’ve been pleading with your significant other to get help for an addiction, but it remains unaddressed. Or a mental illness has been left untreated, and they simply have no intention of seeking help. Perhaps your marriage has suffered from repeated sexual indiscretions and you’ve begged your spouse to join you for couples’ therapy but they refuse to go. Even financial infidelity can weigh a marriage down until it breaks.
As stated in this Atlantic article, even “bad holidays with a spouse can start to feel like a broken promise.” When a host of marital challenges — coupled with an unwillingness to change — begin to feel like broken promises they can easily erode the carefully laid foundation of a marriage. Is that true for you?
Have You Reached Your Basta Moment?
If any of this sounds familiar and you’ve been waiting for the situation to improve, you may find you’ve reached the point where you’ve finally had enough. At Wevorce, we refer to this as your “Basta moment*” — the moment it becomes clear it is time to stop waiting and start doing. For many this means divorce.
It is often at this moment we are able to help couples peacefully untangle their relationships and move forward as single adults and/or co-parents. Divorce isn’t something anyone should take lightly, and neither do we. But, if you’re like many who find themselves trapped in an unhappy marriage with no foreseeable way out, we are here to provide guidance and support. But the idea of starting over will be daunting, to say the least — even with help. It can take a major toll on one’s finances, one’s children, and one’s emotional well-being.
Forging a Path Forward
A person may feel sadness and guilt as they fear they are breaking a promise to love and cherish their spouse. However, when an initiator of divorce has been repeatedly crushed by their spouse’s broken promises, what then? In some cases, the feeling of betrayal associated with such disappointment takes a far greater emotional toll on a person than that of divorce itself. And, in many financial and legal contracts, one party’s refusal to honor the agreement is all that is required for such an agreement to become null and void. In a manner of speaking, isn’t that what happens when a marriage breaks? [WATCH here: Wevorce CEO Michelle Crosby discusses contractual partnerships.]
As Eckhart Tolle once said, “Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.” So if you’re on the cusp of change and growth — even if it’s painful — and your partner isn’t, it may very well be time to make some difficult decisions.
If you’ve been considering divorce and know the time has come to move forward, Wevorce can provide you with the tools and professional help you need to get started.
Your new beginning starts here.
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*Basta is an Italian word that literally means “enough.”
