SUBSCRIBEBreak Up and Divorce - Should You Condemn Yourself to a Bad Relationship for Life Because of Religion and Guilt?
If you’re in a bad marriage and are really unhappy, should you separate, get a divorce, or stay in the marriage?
For us, this is not a cut and dry decision as there are many factors to consider.
As you all know by now, we’re not afraid to approach what some would consider to be forbidden topics. We like to think outside of the box and question everything while staying true to ourselves.
Our goal with this post is to help Karen follow her heart and make decisions based on love rather that fear and guilt.
Hang on tight! This could get bumpy. We’re about to step outside the box and ask you to question beliefs that you may have never have thought to question before.
Don’t forget - take the poll at the end of this article to make your vote count on this incredibly controversial topic.
Background - Is this a bad relationship?
This question is a bit involved, so we’ll break it up into sections.
I was married for twelve years to a man (S) that deserted me twice. He also had numerous extra-marital infidelities. He took his stuff and left this last time about a year and a half ago. I tried and tried to talk to him but he refused to talk to me or answer my phone calls. I was just heartbroken. He was my second husband. My first husband wasn’t unfaithful, but he had an explosive temper and shouted and screamed at me. And even though he never actually hit me, I was afraid of him.
Anyway, seven months after my second husband left me I decided to try and move on with my life. I met a wonderful man (D). He was everything I had wanted - Caring, responsible, trustful and very loving. We started slowly, but after awhile I fell deeply in love with him. And he fell in love with me.
I hired an attorney. I filed for divorce. After I had been with D for around four months he proposed to me. I was very excited and accepted. I knew our relationship was perfect and we had a wonderful life ahead of us. We were doing everything together and I was so happy.
S somehow found out and started to phone me. He told me he wanted us to get back together. He told me he would never do any of the things he had done to me before. He said he had found God and was going to church now. He said that he was a changed man. He said I was still his wife and I owed him another chance to prove he had changed. He told me he was a broken man and was thinking about suicide. I finally allowed him to see me he cried and cried and pleaded with me telling me he had changed. I felt so guilty.
Love and Fear
Karen, while this is a very emotional situation, don’t allow yourself to feel guilty about anything another person does or experiences. They make their own choices in life and their experiences are their own. You can be understanding and empathize with the other person, but never, ever, make yourself responsible for what another person is experiencing.
You can control how you behave and respond to a situation, but that is where your control ends. Never let another person make you feel guilty. There is no right or wrong choice in life because we grow from each experience - some choices just work better for us than others. Even the ones that didn’t work out quite like you hoped provide the opportunity to grow.
Sometimes the best way to figure out what we want is to experience what we don’t want. Just try to learn from that experience so that you don’t keep repeating it. I’ve noticed that the Universe will keep sending you the same situation or experience over and over until you learn the lesson that you need to learn from that specific experience.
Our emotional scale has two extremes - love and fear.
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16 Responses to “Break Up and Divorce - Should You Condemn Yourself to a Bad Relationship for Life Because of Religion and Guilt?”
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This was really well written. I got a lot out of it. Good to see you tackling issues for people in marriages or other long-term relationships as well.
I think Karen needs to look within herself to find what would make her happy. Since D makes her happy, she should completely ditch S. Loose his phone number, block his number, and completely forget about him. However, 4 months with D is not enough foundation to base a marriage on and it never will be, even though she’s fallen madly in love with D. I’m 20 years old and have been going out with my girlfriend for the past year and a half and although i want to pop the question to her, i know that it’s still to early, even though I’m madly in love with her and she’s madly in love with me. If you’re like Karen or in a situation like hers, remember that happiness comes from within one’s self and that you, not other people or the situations that arise because of the stupidity of others. Only you can decide what will make you truly happy in life.
GOOD LORD!! Get away from S, DUH! He’s sucking the life out of you and using/manipulating you with guilt to keep you around and be his safety net. He left for whatever, it didn’t work out for him, he finds you your happy and he’s jealous! And stay away from the church “counselors”, this article really does a great job of describing what “religion” really is about.
PLEASE open your eyes to what S truely is. Get him out of your house, get a restraining order if need be. Sell your house so he can’t come back, get back with D and never look back.
Statically speaking there are a lot of people NOT getting married as they now see there is no reason to do so, and especially for men where there are no marital rights especially in the eyes of the law.
It appears that this awareness has been generated by non other than Tom Leykis.
Having experienced the courts myself, I will never get married again…it has no purpose.
This essay gives no real meaning to the term love! Love is a commitment, a chioce of will. Also, the interpretation of scriptures is entirely lawed and incomplete. If you don’t want to quote all of Jesus’ pronouncements on love, don’t quote Him at all. To advice someone on the basis of partial quotation is dissembling!
What do you do with Jesus saying “No greater love has a man but that he lay dosn his life for his friends.” That’s a love you never go near, nor from the viewpoint you eswpiuse, can you go near.
I am a man, who is a minister,and I believe God wants us to be happy. We assume that every marriage is put together by God, but he gives us free will and the choices we choose sometimes conflict with the things that he wants for us. He sends us warning signs that a mate is not right for us, but because we think we’re in "love" we ignore them and make our choice. So when we get divorced,after we’ve taken all the steps to stay together, we are not putting asunder what God has joined together because he didn’t join it together we chose to be together. They often say that people who cheat or have cheated, treat the other person as though they are the ones that are cheating. If he has found God then he will realize that his mistakes caused your marriage to fail and that you now belong to someone else. People also use God when they want to get something, so he may not even be the saint that he says he is. Does he go to chrurch regularly now that he back with you? You sound as though you’ve found true love and happiness in D. Why did S call you only after he found out you were moving on with your life, and not before then?
Karen sounds like a fool!!! There is no Counselor, Pastor,Judge or any other person that could ever make me want to go back to S ever again…. Should she be concerned that he has come back with 80K worth of DEBT… WHY did she think he came back?? Because he knew he HAS someone to bail his Sorry @$$ out!
Thank you for this wonderful article, which everybody should read. I had similar experiences and I think that any divorce is better than a bad marriage. I wasted many of my years with a man that cheated me all the time and did not deserve a bit of my love, and religious wrong beliefs prevented me for a long time from taking the only healthy decision: divorce. The so called spiritual counsellors I talked to didn’t help at all and only made me feel as I was the problem and I was the one to blame.
Our happiness as human beings is more important to God than any rule and religion in the world. The Bible has been and is still misused and abused to cover somebody’s agendas and ideologies, by people that only want to exert power and protect their own interests.
Tell S to GET OUT ! I stayed in a mentally abusive marriage for 20 years because I was afraid, had no money, six children and no place to go. But I finally walked out that door and never regreted it once (only that I waited sooo long) Life was very hard he would not let me have anything from the house not even for the kids. But I worked two jobs found chairs a TV etc. in good neighborhoods on trash night the kids and I made a game out of it. I drove an old Buick w/ 249,000 miles but I managed to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. After 5 years I met a wonderful man who has exceped the entire package and he treats me like a queen I am very happy and have finally let go of the pain and quilt. But the greatest thing of all I taught my girls not to let anyone to use them as door mats. Run to D you owe nothing to S. Trust me I know
I can agree with Giusi about misuse of the Bible. Misuse of it is almost as non-use. In my previous comment I pointed to how slective use of one facet of Jesus teaching was quite misleading, dishonest (from a merely scholarly viewpoint) and potentially could cause much more pain than a full reading might do. For example, the lady is deeply religious, obviously, yet the council given by basically a half-baked approach, detactches here from her deeply held beliefs, thus setting an already guilt plagued person up for even more guilt if she leaves what she has possibly been taught from early ages. Why not show her from within her own core beliefs that Jesus had a lot to say about love between a man and a wife–especially in the area of divorce– Matt.5 and Matt 19 are especially pertainent. Even a cursory reading would show that she has excellent BIBLICAL grounds for divorce AND remarraige. She could be counciled to look at Paul’s advice in Ephesians 5 about the proper relationship between a man and his wife, where the man is charged to love his wife as Christ loved the Church AND LAY DOWN HIS LIFE FOR HER!!!
A brief visit to the crucificion scene points ti the fact that the consequences of the sin of the repentant theif was eath, but Jesus told him “This day yoy will be with me in paradise.” The consequences stood, the moral guilt was taken by Jesus. This might lead her to account forgiveness of C of the moral guilt of sin against her, but the consequences of his derelection should stand.
These are a few examples of the soundness of councelling within one’s system of belief that potentially could be worked through to resolve her situation ,allow marraige to her real ove, yet leave her attachment to her believe system, and whatever potential comfort it might give her intact.
What folly we commit when we don’t consider each heartache situation from a pop-culture position without treating the situation as or the person as a whole.
Of course you have to leave in you are unhappy in a relationship! Life is too short to waste it. Don’t you want to taste something better in it?
She needs to get out of her relationship with S as most people posting have advised. If not for her, then for any children that she might already have or could possibly have in the future. I just got done talking about this on another thread for Dan and Jennifer. Children growing up in a relationship where abuse, mental or physical, (and don’t pretend she’s not experiencing mental abuse) is prevalent are more likely to experience it in their own lives as adults. Girls are more likely to marry an abusive man and boys are more likely to become abusive as adults. So, if you can’t get out for yourself, get out for any children you might have, now or in the future.
Get out of the relationship. It doesnt get any better and no matter how much you try if the other person doesnt want to try or change then it wont. Once you loose trust that is is.
I agree with the gentleman who said basically, “it’s not God’s fault”. No, we chose the type of relationships that we learned we fit into. It’s called FREE WILL. Some experiences in childhood do lead us into tring to fix something that wasn’t there for us. A primary relationship was missing something. Then we continue to see the inner person we think we are and continue to make choices that are familiar, i.e. comfortable. The Bible says, “the heart is treacherous and who can know it..” So our “hearts” can see all the red flags and go head long into misery. Our hearts actually becomes our own enemy. The first marriage of Adam and Eve…was perfect…and they had free will also. OUTSIDE forces were allowed to ruin that marriage and they even blamed God too. “The woman..YOU gave me…”, Adam stated “caused me to eat of the tree.” Yet it stated, “the woman was totally deceived.” So therein lies the mystery. The diferences between what men want and what women want. The curse…? “You will CRAVE your husband and he will DOMINATE you.” So therein lays the problem. Inner weaknesses, that cause us to ruin marriages and chose the wrong person, man or woman. If the marriage is over, and Karen has tried everything possible, and counseling didn’t happen or work…I ask Karen…WHAT’S LEFT? Learn from your mistake…take more time to know who you are so you can ask yourself if you would be a good mate for the next person…if you don’t love yourself…how can you possibly know WHAT is best for you or WHO is best? If we continue making bad choices…don’t we have responsibilites in that. The old saying, “It takes two to tango.”, is right. Sure one can be the very worst one, the most abusive one…now that it’s revealed what that person REALLY is…what else does one need to know?
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I am man who cheated on his wife for a period of time. I spend everyday regretting my choice. My wife left me after I broke the wrong reationship off. I have been spending everyday trying to fix my marriage. She filed for divorce, and it kills me. I know it’s my fault. I am trying to repair it i just wish she would give it time. She found someone 2 weeks after she left and within a week or two of that she said she gave her heart to him. I’m broken and don’t know what to do. We have 2 little boys and I Love them too. I would do anything to fix my wrongs and have us back together again. Any suggestions.