So, your wife is asking for a divorce and you don’t want one. What do you do?
Hey, Cody Butler here, marriage coach, and founder of Better Marriage Today. I want to talk to you about what to do if your wife is asking for a divorce and you don’t want it. Can you turn this around? How do you turn this around? The answer to the question, ‘Can you turn this around?’ is absolutely, 100%, categorically, yes. And I speak from experience. I’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of times where the woman is actually saying there’s no hope, and then four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks later, the marriage is healed, and it’s on the path to reconciliation and restoration.
But you’ve got to understand, if you want to turn your marriage around and bring her back after she said that she wants out, you’ve got to take certain steps. Now, the first step you’ve got to take is to never give up hope that the marriage is reconcilable. When your attitude is right, the facts don’t matter. I speak to men all the time, and they come to me saying, ‘Well, the fact is this, and the fact is that, and the fact is she wants out, and the fact is she’s with another man.’ When your attitude is right, the facts don’t matter. And there are many aspects that go into your attitude, but the first one is always having hope that the relationship can be restored, reconciled, and brought back to a great place. Because how you see the relationship is going to determine how you feel about the relationship, and how you feel about it is going to determine your actions. And if you feel hopeless, you’re going to produce hopeless actions, which is going to produce a hopeless result. If you feel optimistic and hopeful, you are going to produce optimistic and hopeful actions, which is going to produce an optimistic and hopeful result.
So, it’s critically important that our mindset is one of reconciliation, restoration, and healing. We never lose sight of the fact that this marriage can and will be healed. Now, once we have the right mindset, we start to move into the tactics and the strategies. There are many things that we need to understand or do to really reconcile the relationship. But it really comes down to just a handful of things. Everything that’s going on in your relationship that you think is a problem right now really just comes down to one or two things. And if we can address the core issues and understand what those core issues are, then we can really go to start to work on what the problem really is.
To understand what the problem really is, to go to work in the right areas, we’ve got to go back to the very beginning of the relationship. When she said yes to marrying you, what did she say yes to? Why did she say yes? And what has changed? Well, the answer to that question is there were two things that she loved, and the reasons she said yes. The first is that she absolutely loved the way you made her feel. She loved the way that she felt around you. And the second thing was that she believed and saw that a future with you was considerably better than a future without you. She loved the way that she felt with you, and she saw that a future with you was better. When you put these two things together, who wouldn’t say yes to that?
So, fast forward down the road, if she’s saying, “No, I want a divorce, I want out,” then these two things fundamentally have changed. She no longer likes the way she feels about you around you, or she no longer likes the way you make her feel, and she no longer sees a future with you as better than a future without you. In fact, the opposite is true; she sees a future without you as better than a future with you. These are the two issues causing her to say she wants out of the relationship. If we can turn these around, if we understand that these are the only two problems in the relationship and work on them, then we stand a very, very, very good chance of saving this marriage and this relationship.
Everything you’re seeing in the marriage currently that you see as the problems of the marriage really relates back to these two things. The issues you’re seeing are not the issues at all, and as long as you’re seeing arguing, fighting, lack of trust, and whatever else, and just seeing these as the problems, you’re not working on the solution. The solution is how she feels about herself around you and what kind of future you are presenting.
There are a number of steps we need to take to reconcile this relationship, and I’ll give you a couple to get started. The first is that every communication you have with your wife, you really need to ask yourself how it’s making her feel, what impact it’s having on her self-esteem and emotional well-being, and what impact it’s having on how she feels about herself. This becomes very self-evident when we start to think about it in these terms. If we ask ourselves the question, “How is this making my wife feel?” then we can start to see that a conversation we had the other day made her feel really bad, that another conversation didn’t show her any future whatsoever, and the issue we had over here, the way we spoke and behaved, all led to her not feeling great about herself. So, the first thing is to become self-aware. Self-awareness is absolutely key and become aware of what impact your communication, whether verbal, physical, absent or present, is having on her. Is it making her feel good about herself or is it making her frustrated, angry, and feeling bad about herself? If it’s making her feel bad, don’t do it. This is going to be a great start to reconciling the relationship. Once she can start to feel good around you again, this will open up communication.
There are a lot of strategies that we have to use, and a lot of things we have to understand here, and we cover all of that in the “Win Your Wife Back” program. There are details in the description if you want to know how we’ve helped literally hundreds of men recover their situation from wherever they are and far beyond. We’ve seen everything. If you want more information on how you can turn this around in your marriage right now, there are also going to be some videos here, or here, or somewhere around here. Check out those videos as well, and there will be more information on what you need to do to save your marriage, even though your wife is telling you she wants out right now.
