SIGNS YOU SHOULD CONSULT A FAMILY LAW

ATTORNEY

Are you seeing signs you should consult a family law attorney? A few years back, you met the woman of your dreams! She was beautiful, intelligent, funny, interesting and she challenged you to be better but loved you for who you were. You wanted to spend every second of your time with her. You could easily envision building a family and a future with her. She was the first person you wanted to share everything good and exciting in your life with and the first person you turned to for comfort and guidance when times were hard. In short, she was the complete package.

Different types of people approach marriage in different ways. Some people spend a lot of time discussing all the different aspects of their coming marriage and getting inside each other’s heads to make certain that they are on the same page about the primary issues that might have the potential to impact their relationship after the initial euphoria ends and the honeymoon is over. It’s hard to pinpoint every issue that you might encounter as a couple but if you are of the mindset that you want to go into the marriage with your eyes open and have some sort of plan for dealing with problems as they arise, you will likely have a greater potential to succeed.

Having parents who have a successful marriage increases your odds of success in your own relationships significantly. They are your first and primary examples during your formative years. What you observe of their relationship interactions likely plays a significant role in shaping the way you approach your own marriage. Maybe you or your spouse approached the marriage with an overly romanticized view that love would conquer all. That’s what they tell you in the movies, isn’t it? That could definitely be considered a part of the legacy of John Hughes and many other filmmakers, right?

Realistically, there’s no sure fire formula for having a successful marriage, just best practices that will likely increase your odds. The odds against you are stacked pretty high as well. Even if you choose to employ all of the best practices, you can’t always get your spouse to join you in that endeavor. We can state emphatically after 20 years of practicing family law that love does not, in fact, conquer all.

It’s been said that “love makes a man do funny things”. It certainly seems to make them do irrational things. We could share countless examples of guys we’ve met who are extremely intelligent and successful in business but threw all sense out the window when it came to their relationships. Another couple of old sayings that come to mind are, “love is like a drug” and “blinded by love”. If you were thinking clearly, you probably would have been trying a lot harder to make certain that she loved you as much a you loved her.

Men are less demonstrative with their emotions and tend to internalize what they see as personal failures. We hope that realizing that you’re not alone will help you deal with that but we also want to give you a few tips on what to watch out for. Usually, if you’re encountering these sorts of things, the bloom has come off the rose and you’re in a spot where you’re able to view your relationship with a bit more objectivity. It’s important to watch for warning signs in a relationship. Recognizing them will help you protect yourself should your relationship truly be headed toward divorce and help you to protect yourself in matters of custody and asset division. If you’re from the “love conquers all” mindset, it may be time to take a break from those John Hughes movies and give Kramer vs. Kramer or The War of the Roses a spin.

A key sign that things are heading in a bad direction is loss of respect. If you realize that you have lost respect for your spouse, you really need to step back and look for evidence that they’ve lost respect for you also. It doesn’t matter who lost it first. Once it goes from one side, it will likely begin to erode from the other. When you don’t respect someone, it shows and you tend to treat them differently. If you notice that your spouse is treating you progressively more disrespectfully, as Bill Engvall would say, “there’s your sign”.

Here’s one that may be more obvious. Have you been attending marriage counseling? How’s that been going for you? Do you seem to be making progress? Are you remembering why you loved each other in the first place and fixing issues that begin to seem trivial as you rediscover your feelings for each other or is you counselor playing referee for your emotional smackdown? if one of you is requesting marriage counseling and the other is refusing, that’s a pretty solid harbinger of marital doom as well.

Did one of you want to have kids and the other not? How often does this come up? Have you passed the stage where you discuss it rationally and is primarily just used to snipe at each other now? That’s one of those things you really should have been crystal clear on before walking down the aisle. Maybe you had no problem having kids but can’t seem to agree on how to raise them. Are you fighting about that a lot? That is actually pretty common. If the kids are witnessing that then you’re likely to undo a lot of positive teachings you are trying to impart to them concerning relationships and human interaction. Do you dismiss each other? Ignore expressed concerns? Become overly defensive to even minor criticism?

How well are you communicating? If you shared everything in the beginning and now you barely talk at all that’s not good. Do you find yourself being rebuked or criticized when you share your thoughts or feelings? That might be attributable to that loss of respect thing we mentioned above. We’re guessing that it makes you not want to talk much. It also contributes to lack of partnership mentality. If you find yourself contemplating what life might be like without your spouse, chances are they’re doing the same. It begins with wanting to spend time apart and no longer wanting to share activities together. Why would you if you just get criticized every time you open your mouth? The simple fact of the matter is that if you don’t want to do things together, soon you won’t want to be together at all. Gwyneth Paltrow famously referred to this as becoming “consciously uncoupled”.

We alluded to this earlier in the post but it bears repeating. If one of you is working to make the relationship work and the other is not, you will reach a point where you just need to call it what it is. You will notice that we didn’t delve into signs that many people would consider obvious such as infidelity or abuse. Those are even larger issues and have significant psychological repercussions. In this post we are aiming to alert you to a few early warnings that there are bad things on the horizon for your union. Maybe you’re just exhausted and don’t have it in you to keep pushing forward due to a mix of the things mentioned above. The point we want to make is that if you see warning signs, consulting an attorney is in the best interest of your future. Family lawyers have seen a lot and many people actually benefit from the wisdom of an attorney and are able to go back and repair their failing relationship. Either way, it’s important to be vigilant in your relationship and take the necessary steps to ensure a happy future.

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