subject: My Husband Doesn't Want To Save The Marriage. How Can We Reconcile? [print this page] My Husband Doesn't Want To Save The MarriageMy Husband Doesn't Want To Save The Marriage. How Can We Reconcile?
Over the weekend, I hard from a wife who said that her husband had been living on his own for the last few months. Neither had made any move to file for divorce. Basically, they were in a sort of "wait and see" holding pattern. But, the husband didn't seem in any hurry to reconcile. The wife missed her husband and wasn't seeing any benefit whatsoever of them living apart. She very much wanted to begin working to save her marriage, but every time she brought this up, the husband abruptly stopped her and told her he wasn't yet ready to reconcile and had no idea if he would ever be ready.
But, this is not what the wife wanted to hear. She told me, in part: "I really want to just start over and try to make our marriage work again. Yes, we have some very real problems, but so does every one else. Is this any reason to just throw everything away and for both of us to be miserable and alone? I don't understand why we can't both just agree to start with a clean slate and work together to commit to this marriage and to making it work."
The points that this wife were making are very common. Most of the couples that I hear from 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 opposing sides makes coming up with a resolution that everyone is excited to work toward quite difficult and unlikely. So, in the following article, I'll discuss some tactics that you can try to convince your husband to work with you to start all over again and to give the marriage one more try.
Understanding That You Can't "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 for me to give them advice on how to "get" or "make" their husband work with them to reconcile or to save the marriage. Unfortunately, this is a tactic that rarely works. Anytime that you're trying to force someone to do something that they're reluctant to do, you're almost ensuring resentment and resistance. This usually only makes your goal further and further away.
But, this doesn't mean that you can't encourage your husband to see things your way. It just means that you often get much better results when you use positive motivations rather than negative ones. Usually, if you are very resourceful and deliberate, you can begin to show your husband that it is in his best interest and would likely contribute to his happiness if he were to decide to reconcile you.
In order to do this, you need to change his thinking a bit. Because, right now, he's probably deliberating as to whether he is better off with you and invested in the marriage or if it's in his best interest to end the marriage (or at least to take a break from it.) So, through your actions and your interactions with him, you want to gradually allow him to see and to realize that it's ultimately better for him to stay married to you.
You Will Often Get Better Results If You Take The Reconciliation Off The Table For A While And Instead Concentrate On Gradually Improving Your Relationship With Your Husband: Often, it's very tempting to place your sole focus on getting him to commit to reconciling with you. Many wives are willing to do nearly whatever it takes to get this to happen as soon as is possible. But, this sort of hyper focus will usually scare a husband away or make him feel overwhelmed and pressured.
You are usually better off taking the focus off of your immediate need for the reconciliation. Whether you spell this out for your husband is up to you. But, you might want to say something like "I have been thinking a great deal about where we are in our relationship. It seems that we are both frustrated and sort of stuck. It really doesn't seem to be working or making either of us happy, so I want to take a few steps back and take some of the pressure off. Because, at the end of the day, neither of us knows what the future is going to bring. So, what I'd like to do is to just focus on improving things between us as individuals. No matter how this relationship ends up, it's too special to me to allow for it to continue to deteriorate. So, if taking a few steps back helps me to improve it, then that's what I'd like to do. Let's just take the reconciliation talk off of the table for a while and see if we can just make our relationship better and then go from there."
This conversation is going to gain your a few advantages. First, you've taken a great deal of pressure off of your husband and the situation. Second, you've just ensured that he has no reason to avoid you, since you've promised to make any interactions pleasurable without any pressure. Now, we both know that a reconciliation is still very important to you and is still very much what you want. But, you don't need to constantly stress this to him.
In fact, what you really want is for him to gradually become more receptive to redefining his relationship with you. As things begin to gradually and genuinely improve, then eventually, a reconciliation becomes much more likely (and better yet, he's gone along with this quite willingly.) And ultimately, the best case scenario is that he totally commits to saving the marriage on his own without you pressuring him. You want for him to be fully committed and excited about trying again.
When I was trying to change my own husband's mind about reconciling with me, I made a lot of the same mistakes I discussed here. Thankfully, I realized my tactics were not working and changed course. Eventually, I was able to restore my husband's love and not only save the marriage, but make it stronger. You can reada very personal story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com/.
