Mark: It seems like it’s nearly daily that we hear about another marriage breaking up. What’s so hard for me is knowing that a large percentage of those divorces don’t really need to happen.

Jill: Sometimes it’s folks we know and sometimes it’s folks we only know about. However, there’s often one common denominator that we’ve observed: they spend more energy on pursuing divorce than they spend on pursuing marriage.

Mark: I understand hopelessness. If you know any of my story, I also believed at one time that divorce was the answer. Looking back, however, I can now see that I spent way more time in my head focused on ending our relationship than I did on healing our relationship. I didn’t believe it could be healed so I quit trying. In doing so, I nearly destroyed us.

Jill: What goes on inside our head and our heart really makes a difference in what goes on inside our marriage relationship. Here are some questions you can ask yourself today:

Am I focusing more on what my spouse does wrong than what my spouse does right?
Am I spending a lot of energy trying to change him/her?
What if I took the amount of energy I’m spending on the wrong things and put it on the right things?
What if instead of securing the services of a lawyer, I secured the services of a marriage counselor?
What if I took the money it will cost to divorce and invested it into getting help for our marriage instead?
Have I spent the time needed to really figure out what’s going on inside of me that’s contributing to the dysfunction or frustrations in our marriage?
Have we read books, gone to marriage retreats, and sought out the help of someone who can help us hear each other better?
Am I being honest with my spouse about how I’m really feeling? (Stop that slow fade of minimizing today!)