Tag Archives: divorce

The Mystery of Wanting Your Ex Back

One of the great mysteries is why two people end a relationship, go through the trauma of severing ties, dividing their assets, changing their bank accounts, their beneficiaries, and their insurance policies, and then look for ways to get back with their ex. With so much bitterness, anger, and hurt behind them, it seems somewhat masochistic to want to dive back into the relationship that they cited as the cause of their unhappiness. And yet, so many people want to …

Avoiding Marital Problems

There are so many issues that factor into why the divorce rate is so high and I can agree with most of them. We hear about people growing apart, different goals, different expectations, different communication styles, financial problems, changes in personality, and the list is endless. But the one thing I don’t see is something more basic as to be overlooked, and that is boredom. It takes me two years of seeing the best and the worst of a person’s …

Be Your Own Savior

After watching generations of women give up their dreams of a career and success in favor of marriage, and then watching them struggle for survival after a messy divorce, when I got into the counseling field, I decided to tell women to concentrate on their career before they looked for a life partner. I wanted to make sure they always had a way to earn a living no matter what curve balls were thrown at them. When you’re young, in …

The Male Mid-life Crisis

I read an article about men having a mid-life crisis at 40 because society has rendered them useless. They didn’t develop male friends or outside interests because everything centered on their wife. If they got a divorce, they lost everything, their house, their children, their wife, their friends, etc. Theoretically, it sounds possible. In actuality, it sounds like a lot of rubbish. There are couples who don’t socialize with anyone but each other and I keep telling my clients to …

Co-parenting – No Messy Love Involved

When I first heard the term, co-parenting, I immediately thought of couples who were divorced and were sharing custody of their children. I was wrong; that’s shared custody, not co-parenting. Then I thought of gay and lesbian couples who wanted children and that wasn’t right, either, because they were in a sexual relationship with each other so they didn’t qualify as co-parents. Then I thought of my client who wanted a child with her lover, but she didn’t want to …

Cinderella, the Ultimate Stepchild

Cinderella might have been our society’s earliest awareness of the hardships encountered in a blended family. But, whereas the prince rescues Cinderella and carries her off into the sunset for their happily-ever-after ending, most families don’t have that happy ending. When a divorced parent remarries, it can be hard enough on the children, especially when they keep hoping and praying that their parents will get back together. When there are children from that marriage, whether they are going to live …

Finding Yourself

When I first heard the term “find myself,” I was intrigued. How does one lose one’s “self?” But, here were grown men and women deserting their spouse and children, going off into the sunset, seeking a new life in order to find themselves and, suddenly, it didn’t seem so intriguing; it just seemed selfish and self-absorbed. It’s no surprise that we make different choices at different stages of our lives but, essentially, we’re still the same people. We may grow …

Letting Go and Moving On

It doesn’t seem to matter whether you are grieving the end of a person’s life or the end of a deep relationship, the grieving process can feel like the same. Many years ago, someone told me after the death of a very dear person, “The first week you cry for the person who died. The second week you cry for yourself. The third week you cry for everyone else.” At the time, I thought there might be a lot of …

Rebound Relationships

I used to tell clients not to rush into a new relationship immediately after ending an old relationship. My thoughts were that people need time to heal and to figure out what went wrong. I’ve always thought that it takes time to understand the dynamics of the one you’ve just left so that you don’t make the same mistakes the next time. Over the years, I have seen the positive and negative effects of rebound relationships and they are heavily …

Children of Divorce

A couple of years ago, I saw an interview with a single man and a single woman who had decided to have a child together but they didn’t want to enter into a conventional relationship. They weren’t attracted to each other, nor did they want to have sex with one another or marry each other. What they wanted was to have a child together by IVF, and be totally committed to the child rather than being committed to one another. …

Connie H. Deutsch