3 Signs Your Marriage Will End in Divorce
The end might not be such a big surprise after all.
Nearly half of all marriages in the US end up in divorce or separation.
When I got divorced, I looked around my circle of married friends (some of whom were in their second marriages already) and thought to myself, “of course one of us had to go.”
It felt a lot like the universe was adjusting itself.
50% of all marriages ending up in divorce means you can look around at your circle of married friends and try to guess who’s next.
Here are a few signs to watch out for:
1. Overcompensating on social media:
One of my high school friends divorced her husband after only two years. She caught him cheating, which he had already done when they first started dating, a decade before the wedding.
She had already forgiven him countless times. She didn’t expect him to continue to cheat after the wedding, but he did. So she had enough.
On social media, however, they were the perfect couple. By looking at their Instagram feeds, no one would ever guess what went on behind the scenes: cheating, heartbreak, an offer of forgiveness met with more cheating.
They were constantly sharing beautiful pictures and sappy public declarations of undying love. How could anyone suspect something wasn’t right? I certainly didn’t, and It was quite a shocked when I found out the truth.
Another friend who broke up with his girlfriend of over five years confessed to me he only ever posted pictures of the two of them together when he was trying to make amends after a fight.
And I remember quite a few times when I posted pictures with my ex-husband on social media as an attempt to pretend things were good between us — they obviously weren’t.
While there’s nothing wrong with sharing happy snapshots of your married life on social media, using the internet to compensate for what’s lacking in your relationship is definitely a sign that things are going down the drain.
2. Selfishness and lack of empathy
Another friend is getting divorced after a little over a year of marriage. The wedding was beautiful, but the reception didn’t paint a pretty picture of future wedded bliss.
As his bride set out to have as much fun as she possibly could on the dance floor, my friend set out to get himself catastrophically drunk. While her new husband sat in a corner, barely coherent, the bride danced the night away as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
How’s selfishness and lack of empathy on your own wedding reception for a sign?
In my own marriage there were instances of selfishness and lack of empathy, on both sides. While my ex-husband gave everything he had to his career and barely paid any attention to our marriage, I gave him a hard time instead of offering a helping hand when he needed me the most.
People make mistakes, they falter. Sometimes, they’re unkind. But whenever selfishness and lack if empathy set the tone of a relationship, things are definitely not going well.
3. Feeling like you have to “defuse” tense situations involving your spouse
My ex-husband enjoyed getting into meaty topics with essentially everyone he came across. He would make these back and white statements and eventually find a way to fundamentally disagree with whomever he was talking to — and I placed myself in charge of the anti-bomb squad.
My role was to defuse the situation as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
That meant desperately trying to change the subject every time my ex-husband got into a political argument with a friend on a couples’ dinner. It meant I was a helicopter-wife, always hovering, paying attention and doing everything I could to prevent my ex from “offending” anyone, or losing someone’s respect.
Deep down, that meant I wasn’t comfortable just letting him be himself. I cared about what other people thought about us as a couple, so I wanted my ex to be more agreeable and not rub people the wrong way.
In the end, feeling like I couldn’t let him be himself was a sign of how mismatched we actually were as a couple.
If you feel like you always have to run interference for your partner, you’re not in the right relationship.
Sadly, these signs are easier to spot looking back
The tricky part with signs is to see them ahead of time, it’s a lot easier to spot them looking back and assessing what went wrong.
Based on statistics, we know there’s a chance we, or someone close to us, will eventually get divorced, but we push the very real possibility of it happening as far away from our minds as we possibly can. We’re never quite ready for it.
But that’s how divorce goes. We never seriously contemplate the possibility of a marriage eventually ending in divorce. “Not us,” we think. Divorce is what happens to other people, not to us.
Until it does.
Only you might be able to see the divorce coming if you pay attention. When you’re not stuck into the “not us” mode, and actually watch out for the signs.
It’s what happened to another friend of mine. He broke up an engagement months before the wedding once he noticed how eroded his relationship already was. The clarity that marriage wouldn’t fix any of his relationship’s problems helped him have the strength to call it quits. If only half of us were that wise.
Regardless of statistics, math or signs, we still stubbornly drive struggling relationships all the way to marriage and beyond. It’s no use, most of us will only see the cause of death of a relationships once the autopsy is performed.
If you watch out for the signs, however, you won’t be caught as off-guard — and you might be able to do something to fix it in time.
