Why It Falls Apart

Cases that involve divorcing couples in mediation are always wrought with emotion. The parties’ willingness to talk to each other is typically minimal. Sometimes they don’t even want to be in the same room even for a second. Yet they have children and require a plan to map out their soon to be divided families’ future. They need one another to figure this out; however, they don’t want any part of each other.

One day in the distant past you met your soon to be ex spouse and fell in love. You vowed to each other in front of friends, family and clergy that no matter what you would always be there for one another. You had a smile from ear to ear. But half of you ended up not being able to follow through. Think about it. HALF of the people that experience this wonderful institution we know as marriage ended up divorced. Why?

While there are many reasons as to why a marriage fails, the best explanation I can provide to anyone is that somewhere along the line the two of you just simply stopped communicating. When you met, had fun, enjoyed the moment, your needs and interests apparently matched well enough (or at least you “thought” they would) to make the decision to not only get married, but have children and start a family. As time marched on your needs and interests changed. If you had children you might have spent so much time focused on them that you forgot about each other. We start to make assumptions about how “good” our marriage is because we place it on auto pilot. While it may be good to one of you because your level of content is satisfactory, the other one of you is becoming bored, disinterested and slowly falling out of love. Obviously neither or one of you decided to no longer communicate your feelings. But that’s it. That’s why. Somewhere along the line you simply didn’t want to tell each other how you felt and why you felt that way. At some point you probably stopped trusting and respecting each other too.

During my first marriage I didn’t do a very good job of communicating. I “assumed” that everything was good and I never thought of myself as every becoming a statistic. I became one out of the two that divorce. I am remarried and my chances for this succeeding are apparently somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%! Yes, 80% of second marriages fail (you’d think most of us might have learned something by now). But my marriage works. My wife and I communicate and we work very hard at it. We stay tuned into each other and we make it a priority. We keep everything regarding us and our children as sacred and impenetrable to the outside world as we possibly can. We don’t let things that we know can be negative to our marriage get near our marriage. Day in and day out we keep our relationship a top priority.

I realize that in some cases people divorce for reasons ranging from domestic violence to lack of integrity to just being married to bad and wrong people. I guess you could have asked all the questions to get the answers you needed before you got married to get some future indications, but it doesn’t always work that way. When we meet someone and fall in love the fairy tale tells us there will be a happy ending because we’re happy. That’s something else that wasn’t communicated well – that the perfect storybook ending doesn’t just happen. That’s not the way it works in the real world. When people say that marriage “takes work” what they are really trying to say is that marriage takes a lot of talking and even more listening. About what we want. About why we want it. About why it is so important and what we can’t live without. And if you don’t know what the heck we want and why we want it then you weren’t listening in the first place and you did a lousy job of communicating. You’ll end up a statistic.

The couple in mediation won’t talk to one another. Why would I ever expect them to be able to if during the best times of their lives together they didn’t do a good job of it? That’s the last place they want to be, in a room with someone they don’t trust. But that is the first place they should be. This is about their lives, their family and their future. You didn’t get the marriage right but at the very least you should do what you can to get it as right as you can for your future.

Andy is a divorced (and now remarried) father of 3 boys (now 5 boys). He is a full time mediator and consultant for both business and domestic cases in Atlanta, GA. With his extensive 25+ year background in business Andy utilizes this expertise to mediate and consult on cases where in depth analysis of businesses is required to help couples move smoothly through the process of a mediated divorce. You can find Andy at www.andyflink.com, @AndyFlink or Facebook.