In my last post, on June 10, The Good News About Being Part of the Problem, I wrote about the power of seeing your own contribution to what’s going wrong in your marriage. That’s the first move. But it stays abstract until you know what you’re actually looking for. In years of sitting with couples,…
I hear some version of this almost every week: “I’ve tried everything. Nothing works. I don’t think it even matters.” The person sitting across from me is genuinely exhausted. Not “we had a rough month” exhausted. I mean battle-worn, hope-thinning, seriously-wondering-why-they-bother exhausted. They’ve read the books. They’ve had the hard conversations — or tried to….
By the time many couples reach my office, they are exhausted. Not “we’re struggling to communicate” exhausted. I mean sleeping-on-the-couch, avoiding real conversation, reading lawyer reviews, terrified for the kids, Googling-apartments-at-1:00-AM exhausted. Often one person, for the first time, is thinking seriously about divorce, while the other is desperately trying to save the marriage. They…