Questions to Ask Yourself After Your Marriage Ends: Who am I Sharing My Bed With?
In his beautiful ballad, Percy Sledge sang to us, “Take time to know her, it’s not an overnight thing.”
Getting to know someone takes a long time. For many divorced people, there is a strong pull to find a new life partner, a new forever relationship, a new soul mate. Initial excitement during the honeymoon phase of a new relationship can mask problematic aspects of someone’s individual character. We may fall in love with the feeling of being in love or fall in love with our fantasy of who the other person is.
The only way to truly know if it’s a good fit is to wait and take your time to get to know someone with all his or her ‘warts and bunions’. And then the next question is, “How well do the rocks in your head fit the holes in your partner’s head?”
Time also allows the divorced person to truly sort out what their own role was in the demise of their marital relationship and understand it so that history does not repeat itself. In the book Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix Ph.D points out that that we come into new relationships with childhood wounds and believe, especially at the beginning of a relationship, that the partner is equipped to heal those wounds. What we often fail to recognize is that we are drawn to people who are wounded in the same way as ourselves, but just don’t see it. For many divorced individuals who have children, the choice of a new mate will significantly affect the children as well.
A solid foundation develops over time. Get to know each other and find out:
- Who are you together?
- How do you resolve conflict as it arises?
- How do you repair ruptures in your relationship?
- What triggers you? What do you trigger in your partner?
- Are you able to talk things through and resolve problems together?
- Are you able to recover when things go awry?
These questions cannot be answered in the small, honeymoon window of time. Find out who each of you is in the relationship and how the two of you can grow together.
Take the time to prepare yourself for a conscious, authentic relationship for life. My Divorce Recovery can give you tools. Contact us today.