Is Your Marriage without Hope?

    If you boil it all down, bad communication is at the heart of every divorce. So says Lauri Puhn, a family and divorce attorney-mediator in New York, N.Y., and author of “Instant Persuasion” (Penguin Books). While she agrees with what others in the field of matrimonial discord say about what signals a divorce, she has a different take on the causes and the solutions.    

“The problems arise when you feel hopeless about your marriage,” said the 30-year-old. “When you feel like your marriage has no hope, you think the traditional rules of marriage don’t apply to you. You say to yourself, ‘I am not in a traditional marriage anymore. We barely speak to each other. She gives me orders. This is not in a good marriage.’ You don’t plan to cheat, but this type of thinking gives you leeway to reach out to find someone else. The hole is so big that it is waiting to be filled.”   

According to Puhn, not letting yourself reach the point of hopelessness is the key to helping your marriage survive. In fact, her personal list of the five danger signs leading to divorce is centered around the concept of lost hope.            


1. Unresolved arguments are on the rise.
You address the same problem over and over again, more and more frequently and “you can’t hear each other anymore, since you already know every reason in the book for him saying what he is saying.” Knowing that the problem won’t change leads to hopelessness.    “When you get married, you are happy because of you hopes for the future,” she said. “When they start to run dry, you lose that hope. You become worse and worse at compromise. You just don’t care anymore. You throw up hands. You give up.”             

2. Criticism in public.
“When you reach a point where you are saying critical, disrespectful things about your spouse in front of other people, it’s a sign you are in for a real problem,” she said. “Humiliation is a destructive emotion.”  The reason someone would do this, according to Puhn, is that he or she has pent up anger. “It’s a release of anger, and you mean to humiliate your spouse. You want everyone to know how bad your spouse is.”