Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

Walking And Talking, But Not Understanding

Posted: May 19, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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My wife and I used to have a small organic farm where we raised livestock, herbs, and vegetables.  It was during that phase of our lives that I made a mess of our marriage and was too busy working the farm and my regular job to even take the time to notice what was happening.  I just plodded ahead like I was going somewhere when everything was falling apart around me.

We left the farm in the Fall of 2009 and it was an attempt, weak as it was, to save our marriage.  I didn’t know at the time that it needed saving, so I thought it was more preventative.  Things were going in the wrong direction, so I decided to let go of the thing that was taking so much of my time and energy and try to be there for my wife.

I thought we had patched everything up and moved on from my mistakes, so it was a complete shock to me when Spring of 2010 came and my wife began letting go emotionally.  We were no longer selling at the farmer’s markets, so we started walking to our local market and it was on these walks that we began having honest talks about what was going on with our marriage. 

It was on a walk to the farmer’s market that I asked my wife if she still loved me and she couldn’t tell me that she did.  It was on these walks that I realized the seriousness of what was going on inside her.  I kept thinking it was a phase that would pass, and that any day, she would say she was sorry and everything would go back to normal.  These Thursday evening conversations showed me that things were much worse than I wanted to imagine, and I began to face, for the first time, the idea that I really could lose her forever. 

During one of these talks, she told me that she hadn’t made any decisions yet, and that she was going to take it a month at a time.  She said that she had chosen me once and she might be able to choose me again, but she might need time apart to figure that out.  She said she had lost herself during our marriage (We had been pretty co-dependent at times, and there was a lot that was unhealthy in our relationship) and she didn’t really know who she was anymore.  She told me that if I could give her time to find out who she was and what she wanted, she might choose me again, not because she had to, but because she would want to.

Then she asked me the million dollar question, “Does that make sense?”  I told her with all honestly, “Not a bit, but I respect that you feel that way.” She reiterated this idea several times over several weeks, and every time I told her that I didn’t understand it even a little bit, but I didn’t judge her for it, or try to tell her she was wrong.  I just tried to listen to her heart and love her the best way I knew how.   

While everything inside me cried out to hold it together, the idea of possibly having to let her go began to lodge itself in my consciousness.  Things were already in motion that would have to run their course, and it really wasn’t up to me to figure it all out.  I was going to have to do a lot of work on making myself the person that she would want to choose when she was ready to make that decision.

I caused the Problem. I am to Blame.

Posted: May 18, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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They say that the first step in changing is admitting that there is a problem.  Sometimes there’s a disconnect between recognizing that there is a problem and recognizing what to do about it.  It’s easy to look at a run-down house and say, “There’s a problem here.”  Understanding how to restore that house can be considerably more difficult. 

Through the giving over of my heart and will to God, I had gained a lot of insight into what the problems were.  Fortunately, I wasn’t on my own in figuring out what needed to be done.  Between God showing me the places I had failed and needed to restore, and Mort Fertel’s emails giving me practical advice on things to say and do, I had a pretty good set of blueprints. 

I also had an impulsive desire to fix everything NOW!  Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but once confronted with the truth of it all, I just wanted to make it right.  I didn’t want it to take time.  I wanted it fixed this minute.  Because of that, I sometimes said and did things that were counter-productive and probably set us back instead of moving us forward. 

The most unique aspect of Mort Fertel’s Marriage Fitness idea is that you don’t focus on the problems.  You step away from the problems and begin using words and actions that will begin to rebuild love.  In terms of fitness, it is perfectly logical.

If you find yourself overweight and out of shape, it doesn’t help to talk about how you got that way.  You need to get to the gym and get to work.  You won’t lose weight, build muscle, or get fit by focusing on why you haven’t been exercising or how poorly you’ve been eating.  You’ve just got to do the work.  The result will be that you’ll get fit and it won’t really matter how you got off track in the past.

By trying to get my wife to see what I was seeing and get her to focus on the past, I was missing the mark.  I was unintentionally still making the situation in our marriage her fault.  Although I didn’t mean to be, what I was really saying was, “Why can’t you see it like I see it?  Why don’t you just get over everything and it will all be ok?”  She needed a whole lot more than that to learn to love me again. 

I quickly realized my mistake (a scenario that would, unfortunately, repeat itself many times over the next few months) and began to simply work on saying and doing as many loving things as I could to her and for her.  I didn’t try to get her to talk about what had happened and why she couldn’t forgive me or any of that.  I just started loving her, really loving her, on God’s terms and her terms, not mine.

During this time, I began writing all these thoughts and realizations down so I wouldn’t forget and lose them.  I kept papers that had scripture verses, memories, and things I needed to go back and restore like the wedding ring.  I also wrote on one paper this statement:  “I am to blame.  I caused the failure of our marriage.”  That admission allowed the shift to occur from, “Why doesn’t my wife respond in the way I want her to,” to “I caused this, it’s my responsibility to fix it.”

Seeing Her in Everything

Posted: May 17, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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You will never finish any project that you never start.  No matter how simple you think it’s going to be, nor how daunting the task.  You have to get it started if you’re going to get it done.

I’m not really sure why I was such a procrastinator for much of my life or why I would fail to take care of things that needed my attention.  With a big project, it can be so overwhelming that you simply don’t know where to start.  You look at it and it all just seems like too much.  Sometimes that was the case for me.  That was where Mort Fertel’s emails were such a godsend.  I didn’t have to figure out what to do.  I could just follow the instructions.

In the routine maintenance, however, I had no such excuse.   I just didn’t do what needed done.  I didn’t pay attention.  I neglected to maintain the romance and the special things that keep love fresh and new.  I still wanted our love to be like that, but I hadn’t done my part for years and I finally more or less gave up. 

Seemingly out of nowhere, as I would walk through the apartment, I began to see my wife and our history all around me.  Things I hadn’t thought about in years, and things that I had forgotten altogether were suddenly returning to me with great force.  As I passed by a shelf or opened a drawer or cupboard, I would see things that had always been there, but now they reminded me that they had been gifts we had given each other, or were keepsakes from special times and places in our lives. 

Where I had forgotten all of the good things that we had shared for more than a decade and allowed myself to focus on the disappointments, I was seeing anew how special and wonderful our marriage had always been.  Where I had allowed myself to blame my loving partner for the marriage going downhill, I could now see how she had always tried to make me happy and had only wanted my love in return.  I was living in the same place, surrounded by the same things, but seeing it all so differently.  I saw her in everything and knew that I had blown it.

That evening, I tried to talk to her.  “This is us, remember?”  I tried to get her to see what I had seen and feel what I felt, but her eyes hadn’t been opened.  Her heart was still hard.  And I was taking the wrong approach.  I would learn that in the days to come.

Mort Fertel: Unexpected Help

Posted: May 16, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Shortly after the restoration vision, while I was trying to process my recent change of heart and mind, I received an email late one evening.  I found it curious that it said something about help for your marriage in the subject line, but I assumed that it was spam and ignored it.

By morning, my curiosity got the best of me and I opened and read it.  It addressed me by name and said that I had visited the web site and requested information.  It was from someone named Mort Fertel, whom I had never heard of, and whose website I had definitely never visited.

Nevertheless, it said I had signed up for the free help and that I would begin receiving a series of emails called, “7 secrets to fixing your marriage.”  Even though I couldn’t imagine how it was that this had come to me, I was all for any help I could get, so I read the information.

He has a program called “Marriage fitness” where he uses principles of physical fitness and training to help people whose marriages are in trouble.  It’s a completely different approach from traditional marriage counseling and it really caught my attention. 

Over the next few days and weeks, it was absolutely uncanny how much the emails spoke directly to our situation.  I began to conclude that they must really be coming from God, because this guy couldn’t possibly be that much in tune with exactly what we were going through.  (Much later, I would find out that our oldest daughter had gone through Mort Fertel’s pre-marital counseling and she had visited the website and signed me up without telling me.  As they say, God works in mysterious ways)

Mort Fertel’s approach works because it is practical and doable.  Much like Dave Ramsey helps people with their finances by walking them step-by-step through exactly what to DO, so Mort Fertel’s message is not a bunch of theoretical what-if’s, but rather very specific things to begin doing immediately.  He even tells you that when you first begin doing these things, your spouse probably won’t respond, but do them anyway because they need to be done.  They will take effect over time, but they need to be started if things are going to change. 

In a restoration project, a great deal of work goes on before it really looks like anything good is happening.  There’s a lot of tearing out and removing of damaged, worn out, and useless material.  Then there’s all the work on the infrastructure: putting in wires, pipes, replacement beams, insulation, etc.  None of that is seen from the outside, and none is attractive to the eye while it’s taking place.  In reality, the house is going to have to look a lot worse before it starts looking better.

So it can be with a marriage that is severely neglected and damaged.  There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, starting right now, but it may very well not seem like it’s getting any better for quite some time.  More likely, exposing all that damage will exacerbate the pain in the beginning.

There comes a point, though, with a house, where it seems like all of a sudden, it all comes together.  It’s almost like you drive by one day and it looks like a shambles, and you drive by the next day and you can see a beautiful house appearing right before your eyes.  The work you do at the end is the part everybody sees.  The painting, landscaping, and putting on the finishing touches is where the oohs and ahs come in, but the dirty work that went on without any recognition is what made the transformation possible.

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