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When deciding on a divorce, we are sure that the relationship has broken up and we need to go different ways. But studies show that a third of divorced couples regret the decision to break up. Why do many of us later consider this act a mistake?
Surveys reveal three common reasons why people regret a broken family life.
1. Relationships with children. Over time, we realize that children did not survive divorce as easily as we hoped. Often circumstances force the former family to sell or exchange common housing, and the child loses not only the parent who leaves, but also the home. Children may not forgive someone who left the family. More often it is the father, and relations with him can be shaken. However, it may also be the mother who, as it seems to the child, forced the father to take this step.
2. Lack of intimacy with a new partner. On the scale of stress, divorce is considered the second most powerful shock (in the first place is the death of a spouse). On average, it takes about three years to heal wounds and take a step forward. However, practice shows that most are looking for a new partner and even get married two years after the breakup.
We are driven to this by a feeling of loneliness and emptiness, and sometimes by financial necessity. The old problems are exacerbated by the fact that we have not given ourselves time to realize them. They are transferred to other relationships for which we are psychologically unprepared. With a new partner, we suddenly find ourselves even more unhappy than before.
3. Nostalgia for the past. Time and distance allow us to look at the partner we have lost in a new light. We are starting to miss him. We meet other people and suddenly realize how many beautiful things we did not appreciate in our spouse, and we lament that we took all the good things for granted.
“Divorce regrets are part of the transition to a new stage in life”
Lev Khegai, Jungian analyst
The reason for divorce, as a rule, is an acute emotional conflict. But after a while, the strength of any affect dries up: a person tends to forget insults. Some of them he outgrows, there is a process of rethinking the past. Other grievances are forced out — mental defenses work. Still others are replaced by more recent problems, to which attention is switched.
People who are worried about divorce are faced with the fact that after making a radical decision, life does not become happier. The cause of suffering is often dissatisfaction with oneself, which is only projected onto dissatisfaction with a partner and marriage.
After parting, we try to find solace in memories, although our salvation is the readiness for deep personal changes. The first impulsive desire to erase a partner from the past entails the denial of that part of yourself that was associated with an unsuccessful relationship. We try to forget even painful, but important life experience.
The subsequent regret that we had to get a divorce becomes a signal: if we want to step forward, it is important to accept the part of our personality, our experience that was rejected along with our partner and marriage. This is the stage of parting with the past, necessary for understanding what happened. We can live it many years after parting.
Of course, it is better that this happens earlier, but each of us has our own inner rhythm of movement. It is important that in the end we come to this. If people do not admit that they are sorry, this can subconsciously spoil a new relationship or even turn into a hidden dissatisfaction with a partner. And this discontent at any moment runs the risk of developing into open forms of a new destructive conflict.