Some food for thought

If you’re considering divorce and want to know the cons of divorce, here’s a list that might be helpful for you in your decision-making process.

This list has been collected from divorced individuals who thought these cons wouldn’t happen to them if they divorced.

• Your friends will start to avoid you because all you talk about is your divorce.

• You have to worry about who is with your children: Has your spouse chosen a good person to bring into your children’s lives? Or is the person dangerous, cruel, irresponsible or a bad example?

• It is obvious to everyone that you are divorced and wounded because you are alone at church, restaurants, the cinema, coffee shops, supermarkets (you end up buying frozen dinners and pizza).

• You date a person and still have to put up with their ex and yours. So you’re fighting other people’s battles or getting them involved in yours even if you don’t intend to.

• Your heart will be torn each time you have to watch your child cry as they are going back to the other parent’s house.

• You will not be able to console your child as s/he cries for the spouse that is not there and wants their family together.

• Christmas Eves alone or Christmas Days when your children can’t play with the toys you got them as they leave to go to the other parent’s house at 1 p.m.

• No dates for important events in your life; everyone is busy or dating someone else.

• New Year’s Eve with a different date every year or no date at all because it is your night to have the kids.

• No one to share ups and downs of life, joys, successes and losses.

• Heartbreak, weekly, monthly, yearly... Ms (or Mr) Right is rarely the first one to show up.

• Your friends think you are single and your single friends think you are married.

• You never have enough money for children and dating.

• You have to find a good person that is worthy of being in your children’s lives... What if you are wrong?

• The shame of being divorced. (Even in this day and age, there’s a “shame” associated with divorce.)

• The feelings that you are a failure as a spouse and lover.

• Loss of extended family... you are not welcome at family reunions for the other side.

• Loss of mutual friends; they usually pick sides or get divided like other marital property.

• Feelings of helplessness, like being in quicksand and overwhelmed with life.

• Loneliness, loneliness, loneliness: Everyone has a life and you don’t anymore (you thought divorce meant freedom).

• Divorce can affect children for many years, well into adulthood.

• Divorce causes children pain, stress and confusion.

Those are just some cons of a divorce.

If parents care enough, they will figure out how to solve their problems and save their marriage. Not just save it; make it good.

Impossible? Absolutely not.

The only problems that are not solvable are those that involve continuing violence or abuse. No one should stay in those. Children in that environment actually feel relief when divorce comes.

Nearly everything else is fixable. It takes two things. Each spouse has to stop doing the things destroying the marriage. Each spouse has to start doing the things to make love grow.

It is definitely worth saving a marriage for the children.