Seven Questions

The decision to stay in a marriage or leave it feels overwhelming, especially if there are children. If you are struggling with this choice, I offer this brief set of seven questions to help you think through – with your heart and soul – the factors that may lead to an answer with which you can be at peace. I also offer a special session of mediation where you can sit as a couple to work through the issues and see if there is a meeting of the minds.

1.      Why did I marry this person? Was I “in love” or “in love with love?” What did that mean to me at the time? How did it manifest? What was the balance between physical attraction, affection, friendship, domestic harmony, intellectual rapport, spiritual compatibility?  What has been satisfied? What has proven to be unsatisfied?

2.      What did I expect to get out of the marriage? Looking back, was that a realistic expectation? Did I choose wisely given my hopes for married life? Is there potential for my spouse to meet me halfway on any of those expectations?

3.      Why did I want to get married in the first place? What, really, were my motivations? In what ways has this marriage served my own needs and desires?  Have those needs and desires changed? What do I want now? Could my spouse meet me halfway?

4.      What aspects or soul qualities of this other person did I value when I married him/her? Were they already actualized or only potentially there? How has the marriage provided space for those potential virtues and talents to manifest themselves? In what ways have our choices devalued or marginalized the potential that is there? Could these choices be made differently so as to provide support for more of those qualities in my spouse to manifest?

5.      What yearnings of my own soul did I expect this marriage to value and celebrate and bring out more strongly? In what ways has the marriage honored my soul? In what ways has the marriage devalued my soul? What choices did we make that allowed the soul to be devalued? Could we make different choices and change the outcome in the future?

6.      What were the spoken and the unspoken agreements that I made with this person when we married? i.e. I will protect you from worries about money; I will be your ally against a hostile world; I will always be there to play and travel with you; I won’t pry into your painful past; I will take business risks with you; I will give you positive emotional feedback during your depressions; I won’t make you give up your addictions if you won’t make me give up mine; I’ll raise the kids if you’ll pay the bills; I’ll protect you from loneliness, etc. How many of these agreements were fear-based and no longer serve the needs of my soul or my spouse’s soul? Can we make those agreements conscious and then change them to something more life-affirming?

7.      Am I following my bliss in this marriage? Are the deep hungers of my soul finding nourishment in the love and the challenges that being with this other person provides? What were the soul lessons that I wanted to learn with this person? Have I learned them? What soul challenges were present for my spouse in this marriage? Did I provide the support and the opportunity for those lessons to be learned? Are there more lessons or blessings that we could offer one another if we learned to be more conscious, more considerate, or more compassionate? Do I have the motivation to make that happen, or does it feel like a dead end? If I had only one more year to live, would it be with this person? 

Now sit quietly with these questions moving in your soul and accept the answer that comes from the deepest place of love and allegiance to your true self. You cannot fight against your deepest self for long, or it will deplete your energy and dim your light. Making the right choice for yourself will, in the long run, be the right choice for all concerned. To paraphrase the wise bard:

To thine own self be true,

and it must follow -- as does the night the day --

that thou cannot be false to anyone.

 Rev. Rebecca Armstrong