She Dropped The Divorce Bomb (WTF?)
“BOOM! One day she asked me for a divorce,” John says to me.
He’s absolutely blindsided, as if it came out of nowhere.
But yet it didn’t. He and his wife rarely had sex. They were more like roommates than a married couple.
And to deal or not deal, he worked a lot.
Are you asleep at the steering wheel of your marriage?
With 66% of divorces being initiated by women (and 90% among college educated women), so many men are blindsided when their wife asks for a divorce.
And in the aftermath, they are devastated, in shock. Beat up with grief, loss, fear, anger, sadness. A shit storm of emotions.
A man gets fearful of where he’s going to live, swirling in questions. What’s going to happen to my kids? How am I going to afford two homes? Will I be alone forever?
Are you asleep at the steering wheel of your marriage?
With 66% of divorces being initiated by women (and 90% among college educated women), so many men are blindsided when their wife asks for a divorce.
And in the aftermath, they are devastated, in shock. Beat up with grief, loss, fear, anger, sadness. A shit storm of emotions.
A man gets fearful of where he’s going to live, swirling in questions. What’s going to happen to my kids? How am I going to afford two homes? Will I be alone forever?
What can you do in this moment?
What not to do is what I see most men do. And that’s going through a list of “I should have’s.” Literally beating themselves up with what they didn’t do and how they didn’t show up.
While it’s natural to want to know what happened in your marriage, how you got to a place where your wife wants a divorce, it’s another thing to knock yourself down further when you’re already down.
And being in the dump, a lot of men run back to their wife, begging and pleading for a second chance.
“Oh, baby, please take me back. I’m aware of what I wasn’t doing. I promise I’ll do better.”
It makes sense — the desire to want to make things better — but often the pleading just makes things worse, and she’s further disinterested and often even repulsed.
“Yeah, now you show up.”
Instead, I want to suggest you do something else. Something that will help you get your feet back on the ground, get a sense of what you really want, and how best to pursue it.
Are you open to showing up in another way?
The other way is this. Push pause. I speak to this further in the video below.
The desire is to panic and try to magically plug up the holes in the sinking ship.
Pressing pause allows you to poke your head out of the wreckage. And from there, you can make a much better decision about what you want moving ahead.
The truth is, neither you nor your wife want the same version of your prior marriage.
What if instead you went after what you really want?
For most guys, that’s not even a thought. Emotions are overwhelming all his systems. He has no sense that he even has any choice in this moment.
From experience, I know that when a woman asks for a divorce, often she’s dropping the bomb to wake a man’s ass up. Sure, sometimes she’s done for good. And yet either way, you have a choice on how you respond.
The men who come to me for help feel lost. But they’re open to another way. And yes, it’s a battle in the trenches with a lot of tough emotions.
But we work hard to sort things out to get them back on their feet quickly.
Are you ignoring the warning signs in your marriage?
If so, consider a course correction. Join a supportive group of men, tackling their relationship challenges, and get personal feedback on your unique situation on our weekly “Men’s Relationship Tools” calls at 9am mtn time.
Escaping a bad marriage through your job or other means is a set up for the divorce bomb. With a little help, you can do better.
