For many people, divorce isn’t a quick or easy decision even when they know the marriage isn’t working:
Even though I wanted the marriage to end, I was not prepared for what I was about to experience going through divorce. Wanting your marriage to end and wanting to go through a divorce are two incredibly different things. You might want your marriage to be over but nobody wants to go through the divorce part. ~ Heather-Marie
Heather-Marie got married soon after her 18th birthday and was married for seven years. She saw herself as the bad guy for wanting divorce and she didn’t want to be that person. In the end her husband had an affair and that triggered the divorce.
Understanding that deciding that your marriage needs to end and beginning the process of divorce are two completely separate steps is enormously helpful. Agonizing over how you’re going to tell spouse often masks the other fears you may have and that will cloud your thinking. There’s also a tendency to see some reasons for divorce as having more legitimacy than others and the key to breaking that thinking is understanding where your views about divorce came from.
If you could avoid the ugliness of divorce would you end your marriage?