For details about PACT — psychobiological approach to couples therapy — check out this page from the PACT Institute.
I’d love to hear from you if you give either …. or another … counseling method a try! Get in touch here.
Linda Hershman is a discernment counselor in Berwyn, Pa.
Chris tried counseling several times during his long marriage.
Transcript
Finding love takes time. So when we finally connect with someone, we may have the tendency to hold on tight. The longer we hang on, the more entrenched we become, and the harder it gets to change course. Even though numerous signs may be telling us, we’re going the wrong way. The Stay-or-Go Dilemma. That’s coming up on Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships. I’m Laura Stassi.
I recently received a voice mail reminding me that when it comes to love, it’s not necessarily find one … and then done.
LISTENER VOICE MAIL 1
Hi Laura. I became a widow at 61 in June of 2020, when my husband of 39 years passed away from COVID-19. I moved to a different city to be closer to my daughter and start a new life. I made new friends in the 55-plus community that I live in, but something was missing from my life, so I started online dating. I had a few dates and even one short-term relationship. It ended abruptly — no reason other than not compatible. Finally, I met someone special. Of course, there is a catch: He lives almost 300 miles away, plus he is 10 years older. Things didn’t work out, we ended our 10-month relationship two months ago. I’ve since moved on and found a new love interest closer to home, and we are the same age.
Thank you for all your research, interviews and enthusiasm for us gray daters. It is so nice to know I am not alone when it comes to believing passion is still there for those of us who are searching for it.
LAURA STASSI
Passion is still there for those searching for it. I love that line … though I confess. Sometimes, my faith has wavered. I also understand how difficult it can be to confidently go searching for it … when you’re in an unfulfilling long-term relationship. Like Mary, that’s not her real name. We chatted for an episode in early 2021 during the coronavirus lockdown. Mary was so concerned about anonymity that she spoke via Zoom from her car in a parking garage.
At the time, Mary and her husband had been together 25 years, had two kids. The romance had died. She couldn’t remember the last time they had any type of physical intimacy. She was unhappy in other ways as well, and she was struggling about whether to leave. Here’s a clip from that episode:
[CLIP FROM PREVIOUS EPISODE]
MARY
I go back and forth in my mind about what to do. Because there’s so many different thoughts in my mind, you know, am I expecting too much? And just the fear of what all this could do? You know, the upheaval? Is it worth all that if I make a change?
LAURA
So that’s the million-dollar question.
MARY
I mean, you just don’t know. Right? As I get older, I start to think, you know, is this really how, and especially now that it will be more and more just me and him at home? I start to think, is this really how I want to spend however many years I have left, if it’s, you know, if I’m fortunate to live another 20 30, 40 years?
[CLIP ENDS]
LAURA STASSI
Three years later, Mary is still in limbo. She tells me in an email that the biggest thing holding her back from ending her marriage … is their two grown kids. Mary says they still enjoy taking family vacations … and she doesn’t want to lose that. She’s also worried they’ll blame her for the marriage ending. I think what Mary is describing is a fear of being selfish.
LINDA HERSHMAN
It’s interesting you bring up that word selfish, because I look at that as two words. You’ve got selfish in the narcissistic, all-about-me sense. And I distinguish that from self-hyphen-ish, which I see as the willingness and ability to take care of oneself.
LAURA STASSI
That’s Linda Hershman. She’s a marriage and family therapist … and she wrote a book called “Gray Divorce: Everything You Need to Know About Later-Life Breakups.” We’re going to hear a lot more from Linda later in this episode. But first, meet Chris. He’s in his early 60 and lives in California. Like Mary, Chris has long struggled with a relationship decision.
CHRIS
So I was married for 25 years. We had some good times, but I think it was a mismatch from the beginning and there was tensions from the beginning that we tried to iron out over the years with some success.
LAURA STASSI
Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you two meet?
CHRIS
We met when a friend a friend of mine, who was a co-worker of hers, thought we might get along and introduced us. The three of us went out for lunch and we hit it off right away.
LAURA STASSI
How old were you?
CHRIS
I was 43 years old, wait, wait, excuse me, 33 years old. She was five years younger.
LAURA STASSI
Okay, so you were still a little bit on the older side for getting married. And as we’ve talked about on the podcast, that’s supposed to be a protective factor against divorce. The older you are. Was this a first marriage for both of you?
CHRIS
It was, yeah.
LAURA STASSI
Okay, and so you also described I think you used not very happily married for 25 years. I don’t mean to giggle, I just like the way you describe things. It seemed like a mismatch, but yet you got married and had kids.
CHRIS
Well, I think we might have seen problems from the beginning. We dated for three years before we got married and she was kind of repeatedly uncomfortable with the relationship. I think some of it had to do with my being kind of ambivalent about making a commitment, which is a pattern of mine. She was interested in getting married so she would withdraw and then we’d get back together again and withdraw and get back together again. I think sexual differences made themselves apparent during the first three years where we weren’t really quite wanting the same kind of sexual relationship, and that caused tensions. I think all of this should have been big warning signs before we got married. But at some point, I mean, she felt like the biggest problem for her was my lack of commitment and so she thought well, if we’re married, that problem is going to be gone and everything will be fine, which of course, is a classic stupid mistake. But that’s what we did.
LAURA STASSI
Well, and I think sometimes we feel like, ok, we’ve been dating for a certain amount of time, why not get married? That’s what everybody else does. You know, we kind of fall into these traditional thoughts. So, and you had kids?
CHRIS
yes, yeah, it was a while. I think it was like seven years of marriage before we had kids, two of them.
LAURA STASSI
Tell me some good things. What drew you to her in the first place? Where did you really click?
CHRIS
It’s a good question. There was just some vibe between us that felt comfortable. I remember the meal the first meal that we had together with our friend, and I think we just liked looking at each other and we felt good talking to each other. It was a couple of weeks before we had our first date, but we are going to go out to a park and listen to some music. We ended up having a 16 hour first date. Oh, my Sat out on her porch until the wee hours of the morning talking and talking and talking about our lives. So there was definitely a connection there.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah, I mean that sounds lovely, it sounds like what we want. I mean because you know you said about sexual differences or sexual interest differences or I don’t know but it feels like that kind of connection where you’re able to talk to someone for 16 hours. That sounds like it would then naturally lead to you know more of a physical connection. No?
CHRIS
Well, we felt the physical connection that night and the second time we saw each other we consummated the physical connection. The feeling was definitely there, oh, um, but I think, um, there were I don’t know temperament differences that that made themselves known and I think, I think both of us had our own difficulties with emotional intimacy and our own kind of walls that we had around ourselves, and I think it prevented us from getting beyond a certain point in intimacy. I think neither of us could easily feel safe with the other.
We almost got divorced in 2015, and we had a pattern that happens a lot. My wife was the one that would withdraw from the relationship. I would be the pursuer to try to say let’s work this out, let’s talk to a therapist, et cetera. In 2015, she said she felt like she wanted to separate and end it, which was very traumatic for me. We came this close to doing it. We decided to talk to a therapist and work through some of the feelings around it, and in the course of the therapy we worked out some issues and we sort of accidentally reconciled.
LAURA STASSI
Up until that point, had you seen counseling? Or were you just thinking, okay, we’re married, we’re just going to soldier on?
CHRIS
No, we saw counselors I forget maybe three times. I think sometimes was more helpful, sometimes was less. We went to one, a counselor, a marriage therapist couple in Santa Fe, near where we lived, and I believe they were into Imago methods.
LAURA STASSI
Oh yeah.
CHRIS
And that particular workshop was fantastic and we were sort of believers afterward and felt fantastic afterward. But it was very hard to maintain the practices that we had learned in the workshop.
LAURA STASSI
Mmm.
CHRIS
And I think we had a good moment there but we sort of slid back into our patterns where it was just difficult to make a real open emotional connection with each other.
LAURA STASSI
So were you surprised when she said she wanted to split?
CHRIS
Well, the tensions had been obvious and we’d felt the tensions on and off for years and we’d had conflicts on and off over the years. So I was not completely surprised, but it was still traumatic to have it happen at the time. Yeah, I was terrified. We had two kids that were fairly young, I don’t know like 10 ish, something like that. I was very afraid of being an old person alone in the world where I’d never find anyone again. We had some financial challenges and I was very afraid of what would happen to us if we split. I was very afraid of disrupting the family. I didn’t want the family broken apart. Even though it was not a very well-functioning family, I wanted to try to keep it together, so it was very hard that time.
LAURA STASSI
I appreciate that I’m hearing this and that our listeners will be hearing this from a man, because typically the things you’ve expressed, other than the finances, have been what women feel they want to keep their families together, they’re terrified of being on their own. So I appreciate that those are universal feelings and not necessarily, you know, male feelings or female feelings, and of course the financial aspects are always kind of scary for everybody.
CHRIS
Yes.
LAURA STASSI
Sorry, that was my long little rant, so okay. So she said this you have all these emotions running around and then you saw a counselor and did you feel like then she was just kind of placating you by going to this counselor again?
CHRIS
No, I think we were both in favor of it at the time. In fact, historically, I had been the one that was more likely to suggest counseling, to say here we could do something to fix this, let’s work on this together. And I think I was the one that usually advocated that and I think I was the one that brought the idea up this time. And she agreed that it would be good to talk to someone to work through clearly the difficult emotions we were going to have. So we went into it, I think both of us pretty willingly.
LAURA STASSI
And thinking that you were going to be able to do a final fix on the marriage or figuring out…
CHRIS
No, no, no. We at that time we were planning to get divorced and the idea of talking to this therapist was just to help us, I think, deal with the emotions that we were having around the divorce and breaking up the family and so on. And it just, we ended up talking about a lot of the conflicts that we’d been through and during the process of that some things got better and we decided then to stay together.
LAURA STASSI
Oh, so you decided to stay. Okay, yeah, I know it’s hard and you know, when I laugh I’m laughing kind of out of nervousness and also out of recognition, because you know there’s a lot to be said about having a history with a person and having human beings with a person, and so sure.
CHRIS
Both of us had had some behaviors that contributed to our problems, and after that period of working with this counselor, she commented more than once how much I had worked to change some of the things that were problematic about me, which was a very sharp tongue, being very impatient, very critical, sometimes angry. She said over and over again that she was amazed at how much I had worked and how much I had changed.
LAURA STASSI
Hmm.
CHRIS
The thing is that I got the impression at the time that she viewed the situation as one where I was causing all the problems and now I had fixed my problems and we wouldn’t have any more problems, and I didn’t feel that she had taken responsibility for end of things, and I was actually kind of apprehensive as to how long the peace would last. I thought at the time that, well, maybe we’ll have four or five years till the kids are bigger before things unravel again, and in fact, that is exactly what happened.
LAURA STASSI
Kicking the can down the road, so to speak.
CHRIS
Yes. The final separation, came about… the background was some really serious mental health issues that she was suffering from. She’d had depression for many years that had been pretty well managed. She’d had some PTSD from childhood experiences that had been dealt with. But for some reason, in the summer of 2020, during the pandemic, something started to unravel with her and it manifested itself in some rages bringing up things that from the past 25 years things we’d long ago talked about, I thought, laid to rest. She got very severe anxiety and depression issues, so she had to go on disability for a little while.
Clearly, that those issues caused her to withdraw a lot from the relationship and I wanted to be supportive, but she really didn’t want me involved in any of it. So she didn’t want to discuss the problems, didn’t want to discuss the treatment, didn’t want to discuss whether we would remain as a couple or not or whether she was interested in that, and I kind of finally started to press on her do we want to preserve this marriage or not? And at some point she finally said no, let’s not. And at that point, I was completely ready. I said, okay, let’s just do this, because I knew that we’d had enough. I knew it was not going to get better.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah, you’d been through counseling more than once.
CHRIS
Yes.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah. Did you feel like there were some, now, health issues for her, some mental health issues? Did that make splitting up harder for you?
CHRIS
Um …She was clearly suffering from some serious problems. At the point that we finally separated, I was feeling a desire for self-preservation. I just felt like I had been through so much and in hindsight, I think that I should have taken the responsibility, maybe, for stepping out of the marriage earlier than I had, because I was not happy and I think I was very passive in saying, well, maybe things will get better eventually. Things will get better, maybe I’m being too negative. I think the right thing to have done would have been for us to separate earlier than we did, and so I think our marriage was not strong enough to survive this kind of crisis, and once this crisis hit, I didn’t have any qualms about just each of us doing what we needed to do for ourselves.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah.
CHRIS: My wife and I agreed to stay in our house. We have a rented house and we agreed to stay in it for five months until the end of the school year, both for financial and for the kids to not have such a disruption. We almost made it. She ended up moving out a little early because she just felt like the tension was too much between us. and I got to say that the first night that we were not sleeping under the same roof, I felt such a relief that I cannot describe to you. I just felt this feels so much better and I’ve never stopped feeling relief that we’re not doing that anymore.
LAURA STASSI
Oh, that makes me sad. I mean, I totally understand and at the same time it’s so sad. You know, I’ve heard of many couples, I’ve done it, where you’re trying to maintain some sort of harmony in the house while it’s all falling apart. And that’s really hard, it’s really hard to live with. I think that’s really hard. It’s really hard to live with. I think that’s harder than splitting up, actually. So you stayed in the house with the kids and then she moved to a different place.
CHRIS
Right, she got an apartment. My daughter left for college soon after, and then my son did a half a week with each of us between our two homes.
LAURA STASSI You said you felt relief at that point. Did you think about dating? Or did you decide to go ahead and get all the you know paperwork and the technicalities of the divorce final before you wanted to date again?
CHRIS
I waited a while. I started dating I think about nine months after we separated, because I felt rightly or wrongly. I felt like, well, I think I’m ready to be talking to some other people in my life and have something else going on, and I also thought that our divorce was almost over. I thought, well, there’s really nothing to argue about, we’ll be done in two or three months. As it turned out, it became much more adversarial than I expected and it dragged on for two years beyond that, so it wasn’t what I expected.
I met someone at three months of dating who I actually on my 60th birthday, was our first date and we immediately clicked and formed a relationship that went almost for a year. But unfortunately, that ended up being to the backdrop of this contentious divorce going on, which was unfortunate. It was not what she signed on for. She was not expecting that and I was not expecting. It was not what she signed on for. She was not expecting that and I was not expecting that. So it was a difficult time, but it was a wonderful time too. I mean to form a new relationship with somebody and find out oh yes, I can be happy with another person, another person could be happy with me. It was a really big deal.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah, I mean you probably know your wife better than anybody else. Do you think that this contentiousness, do you think she really didn’t want the split, or do you think you know it was starting to scare her about the finances? Or what do you think was behind the sort of dragging it out?
CHRIS
It’s difficult for me to say. I’ve thought about this a lot. The mental health issues definitely contributed. She clearly was not in her right mind. I think she would agree that she was getting some very intensive treatments for depression ketamine injections, and which she said helped a lot.
But she I extended myself quite a bit during the divorce, although I had some qualms about it. I extended myself financially in a way that people usually would not, because my credit was better than hers and I thought, well, she needs credit so she can get her own credit. I’m going to take a chance. And you know, let her keep using my credit cards for a while. That turned out to be a mistake. There were. Let her keep using my credit cards for a while. That turned out to be a mistake. There were bad things done with the credit cards and I’ve never been able to discern what her thinking was. Talked to her about resolving these things and why is this happening there? She just went to a very dark place. She went to a very dark place and there was no way we could talk to each other. She only wished to communicate through our attorneys. So, um, it was a difficult time.
LAURA STASSI
I’m sorry, that sounds awful and at the same time you’re ready to get on with your life emotionally. But you know, I’m just. I’m just thinking, if I’m on a website and I come across you and you look like a very nice man, but then you’re like, okay, I’m not actually divorced and as a matter of fact it’d be like whoa buddy. So you know, kudos to you for trying and kudos to the woman. I mean, I totally get it.
CHRIS: I got to a place for the last part of it where, when I would get a phone call about something that was going to happen that was upsetting, I would feel a flash of anger, but I could let go of it very fast. So I was not fighting anymore, and at some point I just decided I didn’t care about the money that I was trying to get back, I just didn’t want to think about this topic anymore, and I said just keep it, let’s just sign the papers, and we came to a resolution that way.
LAURA STASSI
Thanks, Chris, and whoa. Sounds like so much time wasted, right? Though I know from painful experience that when you’re in the thick of it like that, it is really difficult to clearly evaluate what to do. Even when, like Chris, you get professional help.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a lovingly efficient way to make the stay-or-go decision? I think there actually may be one out there. It’s called discernment counseling. Therapist Linda Hershman explains it. Plus, more listeners talk about their stay-or-go dilemmas. That’s all after the break.
BREAK
LAURA STASSI
We’re back with Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships. I’m Laura Stassi. Before the break, you heard Chris describe a kind of torturous cycle of marriage therapy. But there’s something relatively new in relationship toolkits. It’s called discernment counseling. I asked Linda Hershman all about it. Linda’s a marriage and family therapist, and author of “Gray Divorce: Everything You Need to Know About Later-Life Breakups.”
LINDA HERSHMAN
Discernment counseling is a brief protocol, typically one to five sessions, that is designed specifically for couples, when one is leaning out and moving toward divorce and the other wants to preserve the marriage, and discernment counseling is strictly focused on making a decision. There are three paths on making a decision. There are three paths. Path one is to stay the course and not make a decision. Right now. And I will tell you, Laura, everybody who has ever called me for discernment counseling says, oh no, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m not doing that. We’ve been doing nothing for a year or 10 years or 20 years. I’m not doing that anymore. And in discernment counseling, staying the course tends to be a more active path, not a passive path. So, for example, I have couples who come in for discernment counseling and stay the course might look like until you get individual counseling to deal with your drinking, or until I go and work on my depression, or until something is resolved. I don’t feel prepared to make a decision on what to do about the marriage.
LAURA STASSI
Okay, but do they leave with a sort of a deadline kind of a situation?
LINDA HERSHMAN
Well, sometimes they may leave with a deadline. I have people who will choose to stay the course path and they will say I’m willing to give this three months or six months. But oftentimes putting the boundary out there sort of becomes the deadline, because the expectation is if, for example, the other person doesn’t do their work, then how much longer are you? You’ve already been to discernment counseling. You’ve said this is what I need, and so the onus is up to you to then say we’ve reached our deadline here.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah, okay, so staying the course. In fact, of staying the course, what’s the second path?
LINDA HERSHMAN
The second path is to move towards separation and divorce, and that is Bill Doherty who developed the model for discernment counseling. I believe his statistics are that something like 41% of their couples who come in for discernment counseling choose that path. Mine tend to be a little bit lower than that, but not so much lower that we’re doing very, very different things and we, as discernment counselors, when couples choose that path, I personally like to provide forward with divorce were referred to me by family law attorneys and mediators to begin with. If they come in, if the couple comes in and there’s some hesitation, if they are a caring, ethical lawyer, they are going to want to have that person explore that before they just rush in and say, great, I can drop these papers for you.
And then the third path is to commit to intensive marriage counseling to see if the marriage can potentially be saved.
LAURA STASSI
Wow, and so did you say that there are three to five sessions before they have to choose one of these three paths. Is that how it typically works?
LINDA HERSHMAN
No, no no, the sessions are done one at a time and I have a lot of clients who make a decision after one session. 22:20 I just had a couple earlier today that, after one session, both agreed this is the path we want to take, okay, and we just we say one to five sessions because we don’t like to go beyond five. When you do, you’re not discerning anymore, you’re just continuing, avoiding making a decision. And when we’re doing discernment counseling, we want to keep our focus on the decision-making process, and when we stay too long, it risks becoming more about marriage counseling.
LAURA STASSI
Gotcha. This is so interesting to me and I really wish this had been a place when I was going through my issues. I mean, we saw a lot of counselors, but it’s just your typical, he said. She said blah, blah, blah. In your experience the couples who choose the intensive therapy, do you know what the likelihood of having a happily ever after is for those couples?
LINDA HERSHMAN
I don’t know because I don’t follow up with them. I it’s very possible that Bill Doherty and his group in Minnesota, which does all the research, maybe I think he is probably doing more follow-up. But once I finish discernment counseling, I’m handing them off and I’m done, except to offer that if they need to come back for another discernment at some point, the door is open for that.
LAURA STASSI
Have you found that couples actually can come up with the path they want to take, or is that just another point of contention?
LINDA HERSHMAN
Well, again, keep in mind one person is typically leaning out and the other is typically leaning in, and that can flip-flop during the discernment process too. That’s not fixed. But the leaning in partner tends to be more open to the leaning out partner saying here’s my stay the course path and here’s what I’d like to see. Or let’s go to marriage counseling because the leaning in partner wants to preserve the marriage.
LAURA STASSI
Right. Interesting.
LINDA HERSHMAN
And they are motivated for change generally.
LAURA STASSI
Are there certain, I guess, topics I know every couple is different but are there certain, I guess, sticking points that you see repeatedly with longtime married couples who come in?
LINDA HERSHMAN
I’m laughing in my head when you ask that question because
LAURA STASSI Laugh out loud.
LINDA HERSHMAN
Every couples counselor will tell you that probably 90% of the people who seek marriage counseling say we don’t communicate, which means nothing to a marriage counselor, and when I have them in the room and they say our goal is to communicate or we’re here because we don’t communicate, what I tell them is oh, you absolutely communicate. You’re never not communicating. It is how and what you’re communicating that is creating a problem. So let’s drill down on this. And if I wave a magic wand and I sprinkle fairy dust and your communication is what you’d like it to be, or it’s better, tell me concretely and specifically what will change about your communication.
LAURA STASSI
Yeah.
LINDA HERSHMAN
And so, yeah, that’s more often than not the entry into it, more often than not the entry into it. And then, of course, you’ve got infidelity. That’s a big one. That’s what brings couples in, but again, that’s not usually where the focus is once a couple begins the repair process on that. But again, it tends to be different with older couples, because oftentimes it’s somebody waking up and saying you know, I just don’t want to do this anymore. This is not the life I want to be living.
LAURA STASSI So is discernment counseling sort of a new, I hate to say, buzzword, but is it a new buzzword in counseling?
LINDA HERSHMAN
Well, no, unfortunately, because it’s like this fantastic widget that people still don’t know has been invented. Discernment counseling was developed I want to say about nine or probably 20 years and I considered myself, based on the feedback and the referrals and everything else and how many couples successfully terminated treatment, meeting their treatment goals, I considered myself a good marriage counselor.
LAURA STASSI
Mm-hmm.
LINDA HERSHMAN
Where I always got stuck, though, was with those couples who came in and either I knew or I sensed that one person had no motivation, that they were just there to tick off a box or to create a soft landing, or they just didn’t even know if they wanted to save the marriage, and those were the couples I really struggled with. I read an article that Bill Doherty had written about discernment counseling, which he was in process of developing that was specifically designed for couples who couldn’t decide whether to stay or to go, and a light bulb went off, and I thought this is the missing piece.
LAURA STASSI
Yes, yes.
LINDA HERSHMAN
This is what I need. I need this protocol for these kinds of couples who really are not appropriate for marriage counseling at this point.
LAURA STASSI
I wonder if you can offer some general advice If someone says they’re unhappy, or if someone says my partner says he’s unhappy.
LINDA HERSHMAN
Yes, Okay, I’m going to lean on the men a little bit here Because, as my husband says to me, he’s always the last one to know, know what happens so much of the time is, the wife experiences dissatisfaction in the relationship before the husband does, and we try and communicate it. We tell our spouses, try and communicate it. We tell our spouses I’m not happy here, and too often the response is well, I’m happy. If you’re not happy, go see a therapist. Or I don’t understand why you’re not happy. Everything’s great.
And when women are not heard at a certain point, they will create a crisis, which could be. That’s it. I want a divorce that gets the men’s attention and suddenly they’re saying wait a minute, I had no idea it got this bad and let’s do something. And so I’m looking at you men. If your wife is saying I’m not happy with the way the marriage is going, I would like us to work on this together. If you want to be in that marriage, pay attention and do not wait until she creates a crisis, Because once we get to that point, it can be really hard to get us back.
LAURA STASSI
That’s Linda Hershman. By the way, Linda calls out men because as she says, fun fact: women initiate 66 percent of all divorces. Not that husbands are happier but that wives, when they reach a certain level of unhappiness, tend to take the initiative.
So wrapping it up, In discernment counseling, Linda works with couples to make a decision to stay the course, move toward separation and divorce, or commit to marriage counseling to see if they can save the union. For couples choosing this third path, Linda usually refers them to a different therapist. Also, Linda recommends counseling for any committed couple who wants to strengthen their ties, whether married or not.
OK, who doesn’t know at least one couple who tried to save their marriage through counseling – and split up anyway. So I’m always gratified to hear the opposite. I got an email from a listener who told me after 27 years of marriage, she and her husband had a crisis that quote, “exploded our otherwise seemingly good marriage. This listener and her husband went to a type of counseling called PACT – P-A-C-T. It’s a lot to get into … we’ll have information about it on the Bonus Content page of the Dating While Gray website.
This listener says, quote “It’s hard to express how much insight I got, my husband too, from learning about PACT. It was like a veil lifted. The full recovery of trust and shift to a secure relationship took about two to three years. We’re 7 years out now. The PACT system gave us a new way to look at marriage, and new tools. Several friends have told me they can see a difference in how we are together, and in particular how he treats me.” End quote.
We wish you all the best, listener. And this next voice mail reminds me that sometimes, we’re able to figure it all out for ourselves.
LISTENER VOICE MAIL 2
Hi, Laura, my husband and I have been married for 27 years. We were that couple that everybody thought, oh, they have nothing in common. it’s been an interesting 27 years, and we had our ups and downs. The biggest thing about traveling when you’re married and you’re not traveling together, is that it’s a big trust issue. You have to trust your partner, and it was kind of tough in the beginning. Not so much the trust, but just, you know, he would go and I would be at home, and I would do, do some work or and I’d come back, and he’d sort of had this attitude of, well, what have you been doing? Well, I’ve been gone, and I’d already gone out, worked, came back, deposited the money, paid the bills. So it was that kind of thing where we had to get used to that and stop rearranging the house every time one of us left. That happened a lot.
I think it was probably 14 years ago, things just didn’t things just weren’t clicking and actually it, it felt really dire. I mean, one of those crying in the shower saying, I hate you. I hate you, um, but not really knowing how to do it. I talked to my sister about it, she just kept saying, you have to tell him. You have to talk to him. You have to do whatever.
I think what eventually led us to our discussion, I always say, we, you know, when we brought the D word up, the divorce word was just that one day, we both sort of came to the conclusion that we weren’t we were no longer married, you know, partners, lovers, whatever. We were roommates. We tried to have a kid, and that didn’t happen for us. And that was actually another low point in our marriage. But this particular conversation happened one time we’re having our coffee out on our porch in the morning, and I don’t know, I can’t even now remember who started it, but it basically was, we can’t keep doing this.
And I think I might have said that, and he immediately agreed and said, Yeah, it’s we’re not, it’s not, it’s like we’re not married. So we talked, you know, this is what you do, this is what I do, that sort of thing. I thought it would sort of be very emotional, but it was all very sort of, yeah, I do that. Yeah, you’re right. And so I asked, Do you Do you want to should we get divorced? And it really sort of dropped a bomb into the conversation, and everything got really quiet. And of course, he said, Well, I don’t know, do you, but I looked at him and I thought, I don’t want to say goodbye to you, because I love you. I still love you, but I don’t like how we’re living. So if we can’t change this and be better partners to each other and lovers and husband and wife, then yeah, then we should probably get divorced. So he sort of looked at me with this really intense look, and he. Said, I love you too. And I said, Okay, well, can we agree to now talk about the things that are going on that we need to change? And so we did, and that changed everything for us.
LAURA STASSI
Finally, I want to end this episode with a brief return to Chris. There’s a surreal plot twist to his story, and it continues to reverberate in his life. But Chris is resilient, and he has some hard-learned advice to share.
CHRIS
Our divorce was finally finalized on March 13th of 2023. The next morning, I got a call from my son, who was with my ex, who said that the ambulance had just taken her away. She was having really serious health problems. She had gained a tremendous amount of weight. She was not taking care of herself at all. She barely could walk. She’d been to the emergency room a couple of times with breathing problems and a blood pressure spike and I felt like she was self-destructing. And that morning, March 14th, he called and we followed the ambulance to the hospital and she was dead from cardiac arrest when we arrived.
LAURA STASSI
Oh! I can’t even imagine the emotions, the conflicting emotions, that you’re feeling.
CHRIS It’s been a lot to deal with. There was still a lot of financial damage being done to me that was going to be continuing into the future, which I was terrified of, and her passing actually caused a bunch of that to stop. So, in honesty, there was some relief at being out from under the gun. I stopped being afraid. I’d been so afraid up until that point and I wasn’t afraid.
I’d been so afraid up until that point and I wasn’t afraid anymore. But it’s been kind of an incomprehensible thing to go through and I can’t even understand all of what’s happening inside. I’m pretty happy. Nowadays I often think that my biggest challenge is to realize how free I am right now, and that’s a good thing. But I can tell that there’s something sitting inside there that’s just taking a really long time to get processed. I mean, there was a conflict between us and we are not ever going to have a time where we can sit down and come to any agreement or come to any terms about what happened. I mean, it’s just stopped there. So I sort of have to work it out on my own and it’s a challenge, but it’s happening over time.
CHRIS: When I first got out there in the dating world, I was so vulnerable and so needy and wanting a relationship so bad and was so hurt when they didn’t work out. It’s changed a lot since then. A relationship so bad and was so hurt when they didn’t work out. It’s changed a lot since then.
I am no longer nearly as eager to get into a long-term relationship as I was, and I don’t quite know what to make of that. I think part of it is because I’ve come to a place where I’m kind of content with my life and I’m thinking about what do I want to do with myself? I think some of it also is that I’m probably a little bit afraid of looking back at my 25-year marriage and what do I know? What I know, what the experience I have is being in a house for 25 years with someone that I don’t get along with and do I know how to do something better than that? Do I know how to be with someone who really wants to be with me and to be a partnership? And in some ways, I don’t know that and I think I can learn that, but I feel, I think I feel very frightened of it sometimes too.
LAURA STASSI
So based on your own experiences, can you offer any words of encouragement, tips or advice?
CHRIS
The thing that comes to mind is something that I’ve been working on right now to not be afraid of saying what it is that I need, and this is manifesting itself like in my current relationships. I feel afraid to say out loud what I need, and I think to take responsibility for what I need, and during my marriage, I think sometimes I would say, well, I want this, I want it to be more like this, but I didn’t take responsibility for saying, well, I need this to be happy. And if I don’t have this, then I think maybe we should reconsider whether this is working well, and I think it would have been better for both of us if I’d been able to do that.
CHRIS
I have a friend at work who I have lunch with every so often. He’s been married for as long as I was married and is very unhappy. His wife and him have not had sex for 12 years or so and he’s wanting and wanting and wanting to get out of it. And I listen to him and all I can say to other people is what I can say to him, which is I tell him it’s better on the other side, if you need to move on, don’t be afraid to move on. There is a great life and a lot of wonderful, wonderful people to meet out there.
END CREDITS
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I’m Laura Stassi. Thanks so much for listening.
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