My divorced male client underestimated his wife until it was too late

every marriage The therapist has asked me about the next few dozen times. After listing her complaints, the wife shed tears, she said:

“I don’t even know if he loves me anymore.”

And to her bewildered partner drops her chin to her surprise.

“What does it mean that I don’t love you? I go to work every day!”

“If I leave you’ll do that anyway,” she says lightly.

He sighs in frustration and is ready to throw the towel. She appears to hold her trump card. Here’s what he can’t say:

“You’re right. I’ll go to work every day if you leave me. But that doesn’t mean the same thing.”

The chance is to be that if she leaves him, he is a shadow of himself and simply experience the movement of living. All therapists have seen it too.

Men struggle to give them a reason to cherish their wife, as it is the reason why they value everything else. In my long clinical experience, men tend to live in Their work and routine, but they live for Their family. In general, wives provide the husband with meaning in life, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The victim of divorce to a man

physical and mental health, and work performance; concentrationDivorce is more emotionally difficult for men than women. (Think about the emotional happiness of a male friend whose wife has left.) divorce My man practicing:

Undoubtedly, women will also suffer from the struggles of being single, especially financially and single after divorce. Parent-child relationship. However, in general, the psychological benefits of marriage and the harm of divorce are distorted to men. This is because women maintain and nurture the social support structure of their families. They remember people’s birthdays and anniversaries. My friends remember that they like movies and like to host dinners. When a woman leaves the marriage, they take that support network with them, and their men sit by the phone and wonder why no one is calling.

Divorced women rarely face the same kind of emotional isolation as divorced men. (The saying “no woman is not an island” is not necessary.) They are less likely to develop alcoholism or suicidal tendencies, and are very unlikely to engage in high-risk behaviors such as speeding or playing with a gun. On almost every measure, marriage is more psychologically essential for men than for women.

Invisibility of meaning and purpose

We are not used to thinking about meaning and purpose. They rarely form every day the goal And a desire. Rather, they are more prominent in their absence than in their presence. My divorced male clients underestimated their wife until it was too late, after getting exhausted from dealing with the perceived isolation of marriage. The men who divorced at my practice fell in love with their wife as they were out the door.

Leave your comfort zone

To thrive, a dedicated relationship requires both parties to break out of their comfort zone. In the realm of meaning and purpose, a man must understand the importance of a wife before losing her. I doubt she regretted on his deathbed that she said too often how important she was to him.

Women need to understand the difficulty (much clearer) of meaning and purpose, in fact, unnaturalness. Your husband won’t do it as easily or often as you wish, but he must put in more effort than he wishes, and more.

Put another way, to make a successful marriage, both partners need to leave their comfort zone and grow from the deepest value to rising love.

Visit to find a therapist near you Psychology Today’s Therapy Directory.