Three things can be done when negotiating separation and divorce to make your relationship experience healthy and successful. Realities in a relationship need to be identified unemotionally, good communication should take place, wider reading on relationships to learn from other experiences is valuable, and joining a support group can enrich your understanding.
Identify Relationship Realities
Relationship failures often mask as other things and self-delusion is common. To navigate a successful break-up the journey begins with identifying what is really going on in your relationship. Once you have a relatively "objective" assessment of what is reality in your situation (beyond how you feel, your reactions, the other person's true perspective) mature that assessment against the wisdom, experience and the journey of others.
Talking and Reading about Relationships
Pursue intentional reading and talking, trawling local libraries for books on male and female relationships. Talk to your spouse specifically, and in detail, about what is happening to you, how you feel, and ask how s/he feels. Look behind feelings to what is actually real between you.
Emotions, even at the best of times, are terrible guides. While talking, read. Two books may be of particular assistance: Thomas Moore's Soul Mates and Judith Levine's My Enemy My Love. Reading will add to your pool of understanding, about yourself and your partner. Levine's case studies, such as Dottie Bernstein's story (Levine, 344--), can add context and resonance to your situation. Moore will add a deep layer of understanding about endings and the spiritual foundation of relationships.
Join a Divorce Support Group
A number of community churches run the internationally acclaimed "Divorce Care" program. Meeting others wrestling with varying severities of divorce and separation can be liberating, enlightening and practical. It will help with the pain. Consider it a form of training -- preparation for what might occur ahead. Many things will be learned and there will be emotional support hearing the stories of others and socializing with fellow "broken people." It may also diminish any sense of condemnation and judgment.
Gathering all the resources, insights, experiences and stories of the books read, the conversations had, and any courses attended, will empower you to face a marriage or relationship ending. It will assist with the resolution of emotional impasses, deal with pain, acknowledge the realities of what is actually going on between two human beings, and plot a practical course of action that can be taken.
The process will not make for an easy journey or resolve all issues. It will help you to respond well to realities as they arise, understand your partner from their perspective, understand yourself in a realistic way, and respond accordingly when confronted with decisions that have to be made.
As you engage with the process of separation or divorce, a one-line maxim may be worth contemplating: "a bend in the road is only the end if we choose not to turn the corner."
Levine, Judith. My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women's' Lives. Doubleday, New York, 1992.
Moore, Thomas. Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship. Harper Perennial, New York, 1994.
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