Groups » Making Your Marriage Last: Top 6 Tips to Prevent Divorce
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What does it take for a marriage to succeed?
How can I keep my marriage from deteriorating?
Can the passion in the marriage be reignited?
These are few of the difficult questions that a lot of couples face at some point in their married lives.
Sustaining love in a marriage requires a lot of effort. In fact, it can be daunting. Moreover, you don’t want to reach that stage where your relationship with your partner is on a shaky ground. Instead, you want to restore the love that was once there and achieve greater depth. You want to keep that flame that connects you together burning in your heart and soul.
Here are a few tips to avoid a divorce – the final nail in the marital coffin.
1. Keep the Lines of Communication Open
Irrespective of how much care is taken, sometimes, you will run into some trouble or the other with your spouse because situations tend to get out of hand. What works best during times like these is how courageously you face these problems.
It’s all about weathering the storm with a brave heart. For this, you need to ensure effective communication between you and your partner.
Effective communication is crucial to strengthen any marriage. Only by openly sharing about your life, interests, passions, expectations, difficulties, financial matters, and adjustment issues, can a greater level of intimacy be achieved. You need to absolutely honest with each other.
In fact, according to communication researcher Jonathan Pettigrew, couples who sent each other text messages experienced increased feeling of connectedness.
A successful marriage thrives on the open exchange of emotions, beliefs and desires.
2. Make the Relationship Your Priority, Spend More Time
There is absolutely no substitute to quality time spent together as a couple.
Owing to various distractions such as work, household chores, and kids, amongst others, spending time together can be more like a rare luxury. In such a scenario, most couples often take their personal relationships for granted and put them on the back burner.
The relationship starts getting weaker due to negligence. Eventually, you end up feeling disconnected with your partner.
Spending time together will help you shore up in difficult situations. Research proves that a couple can significantly improve their chances of marital success by devoting as little as 15 minutes a day exclusively to each other.
For instance, you could spend a few minutes together before leaving for work or before bedtime, take out time for meaningful conversations, and go for date nights frequently. All of this will help you rebuild a strong foundation for your marriage.
3. Allow Him/Her Freedom to Pursue His/Her Interests
As already stated, spending time together as a couple is essential for a marriage to be successful. But the question that is often perplexing is: How much time should one spend with their partner?
If you don’t spend sufficient time with your partner, he/she may form the opinion that you do not care enough to sustain the relationship. On the other hand, spending too much time can be smothering.
It is crucial to understand the importance of pursuing certain interests and activities by yourself. This way you can spend some time with yourself and come back to the relationship refreshed and ready to share your experiences.
According to an unpublished study by Terri Orbuch, a psychologist and research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, giving each other enough space or privacy in a relationship is more important than a good sex life for a couple's happiness. Being in your own personal space for some time might help the relationship grow stronger and your heart fonder.
4. Be Loyal
In 1998, Dr. Finnegan Alford-Cooper released her findings in the book For Keeps: Marriages that Last a Lifetime. It was based on her studies related to 576 couples who had been married for 50 years or more. In her study, she found that 95 percent of the spouses agreed that fidelity was essential to the success of a marriage, and 94 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that marriage is a long-term commitment to one person.
Loyalty is not just about physical fidelity but also involves emotional devotion. This can be extremely difficult. But, nothing works the way this factor can for sustaining a marriage.
5. Value Money
More often than not, a couple brings different expectations about money to a relationship. Moreover, coming to an agreement on how to handle money together is a critical component of marital success.
It’s important that you and your partner agree on a budget and an approach to debt, if any, and live within your limits. This way you will be able to avoid conflicts related to finances. You need to make all your decisions wisely by understanding the difference between needs and wants. What you consider a need might be perceived as a want by your partner. It is, therefore, important that you find a common ground to distinguish between two in a mutually agreeable manner.
6. Handle Conflicts Constructively
In a healthy marriage, the way you handle differences matters more than the differences themselves. The ever-increasing conflicts can put the brakes on your love for one another. But then again, it comes back to how effectively you handle these fights, irrespective of how minor they are.
You don’t want your relationship to fail because when that happens, it can be emotionally and mentally devastating, and you may regret losing something that once meant a lot to you. Consulting a family lawyer before applying for a divorce can be a good idea. The lawyer can explain the consequences of a divorce and also let you know whether or not you are prepared to deal with it during the initial consultation.
Finding an experienced and trustworthy divorce attorney is quite a simple task. You can ask for recommendations from friends, colleagues or relatives. Searching on the Internet can also help you to a great extent. For instance, if you are looking for the top-rated family law attorneys in Chicago, you could simply search online for family law attorney Chicago. This will provide you with several relevant results. Once you have the list of lawyers ready, you can meet them individually and choose the one you think is most suitable for your case.
Conclusion
All relationships require a strong foundation to stay tough during hard times. Without that, they crumble into pieces. Let there be no wall between you and your partner. Let the situation not make you lose hope for your marriage. The process of divorce is more like navigating through the troubled sea of arguments and bitter feelings. You can, however, work on your marriage by bearing the above tips in mind. These will help you deal with the situation, win your partner back and reinstate the love in your relationship.