When you are both standing at the altar with stars in your eyes and love in your hearts, it is difficult to think how differently things can be in a short time in the future. For some, that short time is measured in months or even weeks, and for others that time frame is measured in years. It is amazing to note the number of divorces that occur after a couple has been married for 25, 30, or even more years in today’s society.

But in truth, except in extreme cases, chances are high that at least one of you, if not both of you, really do not want a divorce. A divorce has a permanence about it that neither one of you want to face. There will be ramifications from family members, friends, your church or synagogue, at your place of employment, and you just really do not want all those hassles. You need to be asking yourself if a divorce is really what you want, or if there are some things that you could and should be doing differently, looking at from a different perspective, and taking a more subjective viewpoint with. After all, you realized a long time ago that marriage is a set of compromises, and more often than not, a simple conversation about those compromises will clearly show that one or the other of you, and mostly likely both of you, are not living up to those compromises.

Divorce usually becomes a situation when two people who were once very close, perhaps even soul mates, have become separated. Perhaps not separated physically, but separated in terms of being mentally on the same page with the same goals and the same objectives. So digging a little deeper, the root cause is almost always communications, or rather, a LACK of communication between the two of you. So would increased communication get you back on the same page again? A surprisingly high number of cases, after counseling, report that the answer to that question is yes.

Like anything else, communication is a two way street. One person cannot do all the talking and the other one do all the listening. Talking is a skill that most of us are born with, but very few of us have really mastered, or even tried to master the fine art of listening. You need to listen to what your partner is saying, and value that input since that is what they are thinking, that is what they are at right now. They are probably giving you clues, like a road map, in terms of how to get back on the same page as you are on.

First, determine what has caused you to stop communicating effectively. In today’s world, the answer to that is frequently the fact that both of you are working full time, and at the end of the day, since you both put so much of yourself into your job, you have very little energy left over to devote to your relationship. It goes without saying that such a situation is not good and will inevitably without fail be detrimental to your relationship. Make an effort to save some of your energy to communicate with your spouse after a long hard day at work. It may actually help you to unwind, instead of rerunning the day’s hassles in your mind, to put those things out of your mind and concentrate on something else, like your spouse, what they did today, and what was important in their day. Showing interest in the other is always a step closer towards effective communication.

For some couples, however, this is not enough. They have drifted too far apart for too long of a time to be able to effectively reestablish communication between them. There are more considerations you should be thinking about before the answer of divorce should be considered, however, all of which should be very seriously considered prior to deciding that divorce is the only viable answer, because in a surprising number of cases, divorce was only one of many viable options.