Almost 40% of marriages end in divorce. While divorce may be a common occurrence, breaking up your marriage is never easy. Often, it’s hard to tell whether you should keep fighting for your relationship, or throw in the towel and end your relationship.
To help you make your decision, we’ve put together this list of common signs you need a divorce. If these red flags sound familiar, your marriage may have run its course.
1. Counseling Didn’t Help
It’s certainly worthwhile to attend couples counseling before deciding to get divorced. Couples counseling provides a controlled environment where each partner can safely express themselves. This gives your partner a window into how you feel and provides you with tools to improve your communication.
If couples counseling doesn’t work, or your partner doesn’t care enough to attend the sessions, it’s a clear sign that your marriage is over.
2. Avoiding Your Spouse
Being married doesn’t mean you have to be together 24/7. Even in the strongest of marriages, spouses become annoyed with each other and sometimes avoid spending time together. This is normal. In fact, some alone time is healthy.
That said, you need to ensure you aren’t filling your diary with activities in an effort to avoid your spouse. Are you actually interested in pottery lessons or are you just delaying going home?
Your spouse is the one person you vowed to spend the rest of your life with. If you spend most of your time avoiding them, there is an obvious rift in your relationship.
3. No Physical Intimacy
As your marriage progresses, it’s normal for the passion between you and your partner to decrease. Starting a family, advancing your career, and navigating life’s hurdles often take priority over intimacy.
While you may not share as many steamy moments as you used to, you should still hold hands, cuddle on the couch or achieve physical intimacy in other ways. If your mutual attraction has completely fizzled out, odds are your relationship will too.
4. Lack of Trust
A strong marriage is built on a foundation of trust. Your spouse should be your partner in crime. While you may not get along 100% of the time, you need to know that they will always have your back.
Mutual trust means you can share your insecurities, secrets, and goals without the fear of judgment or rejection. If you find yourself confiding in family and friends before your partner, a lack of trust is evident.
Trust is a fragile thing, and once it’s broken, it’s difficult to repair. For this reason, trust issues are one of the most obvious divorce warning signs.
5. You’re Parents, Not Partners
Having children demands a lot of your time and attention. When all your focus is on providing the best life for your kids, it’s easy to let your relationship fall by the wayside.
In a marriage, you need to play the dual role of both parent and partner. Failure to achieve this balance results in feelings of neglect or inadequacy that quickly cause your relationship to crumble.
If you’ve forgotten how to be partners, divorce may be the best option for your family. To ease the blow, check out this guide on how to make divorce less hard on the kids.
6. Everything Is Hard
As a marriage starts to crumble, every interaction becomes strained. Most conversations end in a fight and the mere presence of your partner makes you anxious and on edge. You are always on the offense, and it’s exhausting.
Interactions like these are full of pain, anger, and often, abuse. Marriage is hard, but it shouldn’t be this hard. If you and your partner are always at war with each other, divorce may be the white flag you’ve been searching for.
7. Your Priorities Have Changed
As you progress through married life, you and your spouse will naturally change and adapt your goals and opinions. While it’s fine for you to disagree on your favorite snacks or holiday destinations, you need to agree on the “big” things.
Major life events like adopting a new religion, wanting to start a family, or the desire to move across the country need to be agreed on by both partners. If both spouses don’t adapt to these changes, it can lead to resentment and feelings of helplessness.
As you embrace your own identity and grow into yourself, you may grow apart from your spouse. Instead of holding each other back, divorce allows you the freedom to embrace the lives you both want to live.
8. You’re Stonewalling
When every conversation ends in a fight, or your feelings are undermined or ignored, it’s easy to stonewall your partner. Withdrawing from the relationship and becoming emotionally unavailable may help to avoid arguments but it won’t help to save your marriage.
Stonewalling stifles honest communication, leaving you and your partner unable to solve your problems. Left unaddressed, these problems will likely lead to a greater distance between you and your spouse, pushing you towards getting a divorce.
9. You Fantasize About Leaving
Do you daydream about falling in love again? Do you find yourself thinking thoughts like, “If I were to break up with my partner, how would that discussion go?” Often, we run through these scenarios to prepare ourselves for a future conversation.
If thoughts like these are flooding your brain, you need to ask yourself whether you’re simply daydreaming, or actually mapping out an exit strategy.
10. You Feel Indifferent
Indifference is one of the top warning signs you are headed for a divorce. Indifference can sneak up on married couples as it’s hard to identify. You don’t hate your spouse, but you don’t love them either, you just feel numb.
If you’ve stopped caring about each other’s feelings, needs, or desires, it’s a clear sign that you’ve subconsciously checked out of the relationship. Your emotions have left the building, and so should you.
11. More Negative Than Positive Interactions
Every married couple will experience one or two of the red flags on this list during the course of their relationship. Even the healthiest of marriages isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
At the end of the day, for your relationship to survive, you and your spouse need to have more positive than negative interactions. If you struggle to remember the last time your spouse made you feel important, happy, or loved, then divorce may be the answer you’ve been looking for.
Don’t Ignore These Signs You Need a Divorce
Ending a marriage is heartbreaking, but if the thought of spending another 50 years with your spouse sounds like torture, divorce may be the best option. If these 11 signs you need a divorce hit close to home, it may be the end of the road for your marriage.
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