“So, your wife wants a divorce and you don’t want one. How do you stop the divorce from happening? Hey, Cody Butler here, a marriage coach and founder of Better Marriage. Today, I want to talk to you about how to stop a divorce once filed if your wife presents the idea of divorce, and you want to stop it. Can you stop it? Can you turn it around? The answer is yes, but you’ll have to do some specific things. So, today, I want to talk to you about the first step, which is to put a tourniquet on the wound. You’re bleeding out right now if your wife is asking for a separation or divorce, and we need to stop that.”
How to Stop a Divorce Once Filed: Key Steps to Reignite Your Marriage
We need to understand that your wife leaves the relationship when hope leaves the relationship. At this point, she’s leaving because she’s lost all hope in your ability to change. She sees the current version of yourself and says, “I cannot live with this. This cannot be the rest of my life.” She’s tried everything she knows to get you to change, but you haven’t. She can’t live with that version of you, so she has no hope of you changing. She has two choices – live with you as you are, which is unacceptable, or make a clean break while she still can.
I can have some chance of happiness. This is what’s going on in your wife’s mind when she says, ‘It’s over. I want a divorce. I’m not changing my mind, so there’s no point trying.’ What she’s actually saying is, ‘I simply do not believe that you can change, and I cannot live with you as you are. There’s no hope of you changing, and I simply cannot live with you as you are right now.’ That is what she’s saying, and that is where we have to go to work.
Nine times out of ten, the reason she has no hope is that you, my friend, have not even understood or acknowledged the problem. This is very problematic for her because if she does not believe that you even understand the problem, there is absolutely no hope of a solution. I’ll say it again: if you have not demonstrated that you understand what the actual problem is, then there’s no hope in your wife’s mind of a solution to the problem.
A lot of times, we go to our wives and say, ‘I know what the problem is. It’s ABC and D,’ and she’s like, ‘No, that is not the problem. You don’t even understand what the problem is.’ This is where the frustration comes in, and this is where the hope leaves the relationship. This is why, in our ‘Win Your Wife Back’ program, one of the main rules we have is, ‘You don’t grade your own homework.’ If you get it wrong, the consequences are catastrophic.
If we go into a situation with erroneous certainty that our wife has a certain problem with us when actually that is not the problem at all, then it’s only going to make the situation worse. Nine times out of ten, even ten times out of ten, really, the man has no idea what the actual problems in the relationship are. He thinks he knows what the problems in the relationship are and he goes to work on them, but he’s graded his own homework, so he knows for sure that this is the problem. The reality is that this is not the problem at all, and all it does is positively reinforce that she’s made a good decision to leave.
This is why we see all the time and hear all the time, ‘The harder I try, the more I try to fix myself, the more she gets set on leaving.’ Of course, she does, because you are demonstrating that you have no understanding of what the problem is at all. She’s saying, ‘No, I can’t live with this. This guy is absolutely clueless. He just simply doesn’t know.’ I don’t say that to be mean. I’m saying it because this is what has to happen if you’re going to save your marriage. You have to recognize and understand what the problem genuinely is at a deep emotional level, then communicate it to her, so she can go, ‘Thank goodness he gets it! Finally, there is a glimmer of hope that he’s going to change, because up until now, he hasn’t even recognized and acknowledged what the problem is.’
Without that acknowledgment and recognition, there’s absolutely no hope. That’s why one of the first things we do in the ‘Win Your Wife Back’ program is to uncover the real problems within the relationship and put some principles in place. We navigate our own homework, become very wary of erroneous certainty, and communicate effectively. When we’re absolutely certain of something, we double-check and make sure it’s correct, because being incorrect causes massive problems.
Let me give you a quick example of how this might play out in your life. As a man, you might think, ‘Well, I do know what the problems are.
I actually know what’s going on, you’re grading your own homework, still brother. So, let me give you an example, and this is just a made-up one, but it’s kind of real as well. A woman will nag all the time for a man to take out the garbage, and she’ll nag and nag, and he won’t do it. Finally, he gets tired of nagging, and he takes the garbage out, but she still knocks. He goes, “I don’t get it. I’ve done exactly what she asked. She complained that I don’t take the garbage out; I’ve started taking the garbage out, and she still complains. What is the problem?”
The problem is that you are thinking that the garbage is the problem. You have a certainty, an erroneous certainty, that the problem is the garbage, and you think that you’ve solved the problem by taking the garbage out. But the reality of the situation is that you’re failing to recognize that she is a shared and equal partner in the home. You’re failing to recognize her need to have that garbage taken out. You’re failing to recognize her emotional condition, and you’re failing to recognize her desire not to have the garbage in the kitchen or wherever it is. The reality is, it’s not about the garbage at all. And the more you make it about the garbage and go, “I’ve taken the garbage out,” the more frustrated she’s going to get, and the more resolute she’s going to get that she wants to leave.
Because you’re just demonstrating that you have no concept whatsoever of what the real problem in the relationship is. The real problem in this instance, this demonstration purposes instance, is that you are not recognizing that this is a shared home, that she has equal partnership in it, and you are not treating her as an equal, as a partner. You’re not taking into account her emotional condition, her emotional state, her desires for a living environment, living conditions. You’re just simply invalidating her and not acknowledging her in any way, shape, or form. The more you make this about the garbage, the more she understands that you don’t understand her, and the more resolute she gets to leave.
So many men will say, “I’m certain I know what the problem is,” but the reality is, men and women are very different. We’re different species, we have different ways of processing information, we have different needs, and until we can actually understand the real genuine root cause of the problem, we cannot present to our wives a solution. Because she’s not going to believe that we have a solution until we can articulate that we understand the problem.
Once we can go to our wives and go, “Okay, sweetheart, I understand what the problem is. It’s got nothing to do with the trash, and it’s got everything to do with the fact that I was failing to acknowledge that we share a home together. I was failing to acknowledge you as an equal, which you are. I was failing to acknowledge your emotional condition. I was failing to even be aware of your needs, wants, and desires within the relationship, let alone meet them. I get that that was the problem, and the fact that I was just getting upset about the garbage, that’s just, you know, I’m just a buffy man. I’m sorry, I’m messed up. I get it now, though.”
She’s gonna go, “Okay, all right. I’ll give you another chance.” And then you get another chance, and that’s where we start working from.
Quite often, men come to us and say, “My wife has said it’s over. There’s no chance, and I’m not working on this anymore. It’s done.” However, that’s not what she means. You must understand that she means she doesn’t believe you can change, that there’s no hope for the relationship, and that’s why she’s not willing to work on it anymore. She’s already worked on it tirelessly, but she hasn’t seen any possibility of change from you. At this point, she doesn’t believe you’re capable of change. She believes that nothing is going to change, and she cannot continue to live with it. Therefore, she has no choice but to leave.
If we can bring new information into her decision-making process and show her that change is possible, and we understand the problem, we can make different decisions, and we can understand where she’s coming from. She’ll start to change her mind because she’s getting new information to make a better decision about the relationship. She’s not absolutely dead set on not working on it; she’s dead set on not working on it based on the current set of information and circumstances that you have presented.
If you’re interested in learning how to change that, how to present a new set of circumstances, and the changes that you actually need to make, and if you’re interested in winning your wife back, there’s a link in the description. Have a look at that and schedule a call with us. We can help you do that. We’ve helped hundreds of men literally now win their wives back.
If you want some more free advice, check out some videos around here. We’ve got literally over 100 videos on this YouTube channel now, giving free advice on how you can save your marriage and turn it around. Check some of those out. God bless you, and I’ll talk to you very soon.