3 Significant Reasons NOT to Get Divorced
**DISCLAIMER: The point of this post is not to try to get you to settle by staying in a terrible and miserable relationship. Some paths to divorce are very understandable. When there are long-term patterns of deceit, addiction, abuse, or infidelity, it’s easy to see why the marriage is ending. However, this post is for those whose spouse is sorry and wants to make the marriage work. This post is to try and help you decide whether focusing on the ways to work together as a couple to make the marriage all it could be is your best option or not.
Like a roller coaster, all marriages have their ups and downs. One minute you’re flying high with excitement, and the next minute you’re wishing you never got on the ride. So, when is it time to call it quits and file for divorce?
When you first got married, you likely never thought you would be contemplating all the reasons you should leave your spouse for good. It’s no secret that choosing to file for divorce isn’t something to be decided lightly. Divorce isn’t merely just two people cutting off ties with each other. There is a myriad of factors to consider, including your children, your finances, and, of course, your happiness. While divorce may seem like the best option for some couples, others may experience regret in the future.
So, should you stay in your troubled marriage, or should you choose to partake in the contentious courtroom battle that divorce often brings? Before you decide to choose divorce as a permanent “solution” to a temporary problem, let’s look at some of the financial and emotional costs of divorce.
1. The Emotional Toll of Divorce
Divorce is devastating in more ways than one. While reality TV and tabloids may give the impression that divorce is a time of high drama and intense emotions, divorce feels less like the latest twist in a soap opera and more like a death. With divorce comes grief of so many inherent losses. There is the grief of losing a loved one. Divorce separates us from the one person we believed would always be there. It’s the ultimate rejection, because one person is being rejected by the one person who knows them most in this world. There’s the grief of losing a sense of yourself. Divorce challenges the basic sense of who you are, who you’ve been, and who you will become. There is also the grief of losing all the hopes and dreams you counted on when you married.
2. Your Finances Change
As if the emotional toll isn’t rough enough, couples who split must then confront harsh financial realities. The financial impact of divorce can be crippling. There’s a myriad of costs associated with a divorce proceeding such as court fees, mediation costs, and attorney fees, to name a few. Thats just the one side of things. Then there’s dividing property, dividing debts, tax issues, retirement plan issues, insurance issues, child support, etc.
3. Your Children Are Affected
Divorce is the permanent breakup of a family. Divorce ends the fairytale of marriage, and makes children, if any, into victims. As resilient as children may be, regardless of their age, divorce can affect them in a variety of ways. Witnessing a loss of love between parents, having parents break their marriage commitment, adjusting to going back and forth between two different households, splitting their time between their parents, and the daily feeling of feeling torn between the two people they love most, all create a challenging new family circumstance in which to live. When divorce happens, a child’s world is never the same. They have to figure out how to navigate a newly fractured world. Children forced to constantly shift gears between two homes, two environments, two sets of rules, etc. is traumatizing.
If those three reasons aren’t bad enough, just think about the fact that you are going to have to date again. Dating again in your 40s and 50s…. seriously?! We didn’t even like it in our 20s!
Are You Better Off Married or Divorced?
Only you know the answer to the question of whether you’re better off staying married or getting a divorce. Perhaps problems in marriage should be considered a wake-up call to work on the marriage rather than take the road, more common than not, leading to divorce.
Ultimately, divorce can cause massive financial and emotional hardship in two people’s lives. Navigating through this post-divorce period is challenging. If you need advice or help, reach out to our top-rated divorce lawyers.