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Was this just a holiday romance... or should I fix my marriage?

Question:

I am going though a bad marriage and it has been for a couple of years now. I am 31 and have been unhappy recently because of my marriage.

My employer sent me to work in Europe for a month. I was to work with a person in Europe who turned out to be a beautiful single woman 26 years old and with a great outlook in life and fun person to be with. We hit it off right away and by day 5 we had both fallen in love. I am now back in Houston and my heart is in Europe, the lady and I are exchanging emails and both miss each other very much.

I have only felt like this a few times in my life, and it has been a long time since I felt this happy. So I have a couple of questions and hopefully you can help me understand.

Was this just a holiday romance, and I should forget about it and try my best to fix my marriage?

I think this was a big flashing sign telling me to get out of my marriage and start living a happy life again, but so many things are going though my head right now to see clearly.

Thanks, hope you can make sense of this.

Answer:

This will be easier for you to deal with if you look at it as two separate issues: Your bad marriage and the woman in Europe.

Let’s talk about your marriage first, then we’ll deal with the new woman.

What puzzles me is: If your marriage is that bad, why do you stick around? What makes you keep going home every night for more abuse and misery? Where does commitment end and stupidity begin? I’m not trying to be unkind. I’m trying to save your sanity and, ultimately, help you from throwing your life away.

You say, "I am going though a bad marriage and it has been for a couple of years now. I am 31 and have been unhappy recently because of my marriage."

I think you made a mistake in saying, "...(I’ve) been unhappy recently because of my marriage." How can anyone be "unhappy recently" in a bad marriage that’s been going on for several years? What I think you mean is, "I’ve been miserable in my marriage for the last couple of years. I was hoping it would solve itself. It hasn’t. So I’ve had to bury the pain and ignore it because I saw no way out and I didn’t know what to do. But with this new woman I now see I have other options I didn’t realize were available to me before. As a result, it’s caused my feelings of unhappiness, frustration and pain to surface, making it close to impossible for me to bury my unhappiness with my marriage."

I believe this is a more accurate evaluation of what’s going on. You’re realizing you can be happy and fulfilled somewhere else with a different woman with very little effort. This woman walked into your life and now you have to do something about your marriage you’ve been avoiding: You have to deal with it. One way or the other. Something you should have done a couple of years ago.

Should you try to fix your marriage? That depends. Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself first: Can your marriage be fixed? Do you want to fix it? Why or why not? Does your wife want it fixed? Why or why not?

Next, and most importantly, is: What do you want? What do you want from a marriage? What do you want from your wife? What do you want from the woman in Europe? And what do you want out of life? Until you can answer these questions to your satisfaction you will be unable to make an intelligent decision as to what to do in your current situation because the answers to those questions give you the answers to what to do with your wife, with your marriage and with the woman in Europe.

Something to think about in terms of your marriage: If you’re going to do all the work, all the giving, all the changing and your wife is going to do all the taking and stay the way she is, why waste your time? Why fight an uphill battle with your wife while she throws in varying degrees of guilt, abuse, insults and pity? Why let her beat you up mentally, emotionally and on every other level if she doesn’t want the marriage to work? If, on the other hand, she says, "I want to save our marriage. We were happy once. Let’s try to make it work," that’s a different story.

Next, are there children involved? If not, your split (if that’s what you decide to do) will be a lot easier. But let’s say you have children. Whether you stay together or divorce, your children will adjust. If you divorce, no matter how your wife brings them up, to love you or hate you, sooner or later your children will pass their own judgement on you, their mother and the situation in their own way and in their own time. They will make up their own minds independent of what you and their mother say and do. Then they will decide what kind of a relationship, if any, they want to have with you.

To stay together solely for the sake of your children only teaches them how to have a dysfunctional relationship with a member of the opposite sex. When they don’t see two loving, caring parents interact, they never learn how to establish a loving, caring relationship with a member of the opposite sex (or anyone else, for that matter). Is this really the role model you want to be for your children? Or, when your children finally reach the age of passing judgement on you, would you rather they said, "Mom and Dad made a mistake getting married. They were smart enough and mature enough not to waste their lives in an unworkable situation. They loved us enough to give us what they had while they were able. I have to love and respect them for that."

Choose your answer carefully. Your children will watch how you handle your problems and copy you because, for better or worse, you and your wife are their best role models. What kind of a legacy you want to pass on to your heirs?

If you decide to end your marriage (for whatever reason) you need to give yourself permission to admit you made a mistake marrying the woman you married. You don’t need to get this permission from me, a marriage counselor, a psychologist, a lawyer, a minister, a rabbi, or the Pope. You need to get it from yourself because you’re the one who has to live with the decision. Yes, seek all the advice you can to make the best decision you can. But you’re the one who ultimately has to make the decision. You need to accept responsibility that you made a mistake and move on.

Notice I said, "accept responsibility," not "beat yourself up for making a mistake." Unless you allow yourself to make mistakes in life you can not grow and move forward because failure teaches success. If you knew then what you know now you wouldn’t have made the mistake. If you view your marriage as a classroom you can see what lessons you did well in and what lessons need improvement.

What have you learned from your marriage and what would you do differently now that you know what you know? If you end your marriage and fail to incorporate this hard earned information you will be doomed to repeat it with the next woman.

Now lets talk about the woman in Europe.

There are several challenges connected to your woman friend in Europe. First and foremost is the distance problem. Second is the fact that you live in different countries. If the relationship works out, what country will the two of you live in? Who is going to change their citizenship? How serious do you both want to get in this relationship? If she loves her country and wants to live there and you love America and want to live here, what will happen? If you get married and she moves to America and then it doesn’t work out, what will she do in a foreign country while all her friends are in Europe?

It’s time for you to be realistic and look at the situation logically rather than emotionally. Where can this relationship go and where do you both want it to go? Does she know you’re involved in a bad marriage? How does she feel about it? Love each other and be in love with each other all you want but go into the relationship like mature adults whose future is dependent on the outcome. Because it is.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying you should walk away from the woman in Europe. The relationship can work out. True love really can conquer all. But, because of your bad marriage and the baggage you’ll inevitably carry with you from it, as well as the problems of your new woman living in Europe rather than close to home, this is not going to be an easy road. As long as you understand that, it will give you some sense of direction and a realistic approach on how to resolve your marriage and move forward with the woman in Europe, if that’s what you decide to do.

Whatever you do, please don’t repeat the mistake you’ve made in your marriage believing, hoping, things will "just work themselves out" because they rarely do.

You ask of the woman in Europe, "Was this just a holiday romance?" I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Time, and what you both need, want and desire from each other will answer that question.

...it’s unwise to go from a bad marriage to another relationship without having time to heal emotionally...

A final piece of advice: Should you chose to end your marriage, it’s unwise to go from a bad marriage to another relationship without having time to heal emotionally, without taking the time to evaluate what exactly went wrong in your marriage. Unless you do your homework in these crucial areas you’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes at some point down the road.

God acts in strange ways sometimes. Regardless of what we want, or believe is right, God knows what He’s doing. In deciding what to do about your marriage and the woman in Europe, I would like to share a quote I give my students to help them gain direction in how to handle things. It is, "Don’t let the good things in life rob you of the best things in life."

Unless you deal with the situation with your wife and bad marriage, it will only get worse. Unless you deal with your feelings toward the woman in Europe, she will pop up again in the form of another woman in another time, in another place.

Please chose your course of action wisely.

Good luck and God Bless.