“What Do We Learn After a Marriage Failure?” Comments, Page 1

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6 Comments (2 Discussion Threads) on “What Do We Learn After a Marriage Failure?”

  1. Well said! I quoted you on my facebook page since I think character disturbance is never brought up in a marriage conference or books on how to make a marriage work. They all assume that fixes are 5 easy steps and both parties wish to change so just try harder.

  2. Do you see any hopeful signs that character disturbance will be more widely recognized and confronted in the near or not-too-distant future?

    1. Absolutely, I do. That said, there will always be those who push for points of view that either obscure or avoid the issue. Still, I think that more and more folks, lay and professional alike, are recognizing both the phenomenon and the need to understand and address it better than we have.

  3. “They’ll readily assert that the reason their marriage failed was because they didn’t pick the right partner. Believing that, they have the audacity to think they’re bound to do better the next time if only they’re a little more picky about who they hook up with.”

    How does this belief relate to the reality of a person who marries, then divorce, a character disturbed individual? I am now divorced from a highly character disturbed man. You name a manipulation tactic, he employed it on me, our therapists, our friends, and anyone else he could suck into his web. I do, in fact, have this thought and belief about my failed marriage. I started dating him as a teenager, then married, then stuck it out until he was so far off the deep-end, I knew there was no hope.

    I will not hesitate to admit I can be quite neurotic. In my tendency to analyze and self-reflect, I’ve been able to identify several things about myself which led me to stay with him and eventually marry him in the first place, despite some red flag behavior. I can also identify things I did in the marriage or aspects of my personality which surely weren’t helpful. However, his character was his character. It was already there, and it was there to stay. There is absolutely nothing I could have done to save my marriage from that destruction.

    So, yes, I feel like marrying the wrong person is exactly why I ended up in a failed marriage. I can’t speculate on whether or not a marriage to a different person would have been more successful, because that would have been a completely different relationship with completely different issues. And I do feel like I am now older, wiser, and more likely to choose a stable partner.

    Is it fair to say that all divorced people do a worse job picking partners the second time around? Isn’t it possible that one of the reasons subsequent divorces are more common is because the character disturbed individuals make up a higher percentage of that population?

    If you have 20 couples get married for the first time, then roughly 10 will divorce. Right? What if, of those ten, 2 couples consisted of stable-stable partners, 3 couples consisted of stable-disturbed partners, and 5 consisted of disturbed-disturbed partners? You’ve now got 7 stable divorcees and 13 disturbed ones. It seems reasonable to me that the second marriages involving 2 stable partners would likely make up most of the 1/3rd that stay together, leaving a population of 2-time divorcees filled predominantly with character disturbed individuals.

    What could the ex-spouse of a character disturbed individual say other than that they need to do a better job of choosing their next spouse?

  4. It sounds like you have more hope for remarriages among the neurotic and conscientious types. This resonated for me. At 66 years of age, I am now 20 years into a very successful remarriage. I was briefly married in my 20s and then single for many years. I had ample time to make more mistakes, reflect, and learn from all of it. I am actually my husband’s third wife (previous marriages lasted 1 year and 23 years). Even as I can see other conscientious types making better remarriage decisions, I have seen so many others with serious personality issues who go on to have ever more-distastrous marriages.

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