Your Marriage May Have Failed but You Are Not a Failure

{3:30 minutes to read}

After hearing Katty Kay speak about the book written by her and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code, I immediately downloaded it and am very glad I did. They performed an exhaustive study on the highly sought after quality of confidence:

• Is it something that we are born with?

• Is it something that can be taught?

• Is it more important to be confident than competent?

Their hypothesis is that while there is some genetic component to confidence, it does not mean that if you were neither born with a strong sense of confidence nor nurtured to be confident, you will never be able to develop confidence.

To the contrary, it may be difficult and challenging, but a person can choose to care a little less about what people think, you can take more risk and most importantly, you can try to stop being perfect and please all people.

The concept of confidence came to my mind recently when I saw a client who clearly was taking on the demise of her marriage as some kind of personal failure and all her fault. I felt for her since it is hard enough to have to deal with the loss of a partner and face a new world that is unfamiliar and frightening. To do that while simultaneously blaming herself for everything that went wrong needlessly adds to the distress. One doesn’t need a career in family law to form the opinion that there is rarely one person who is solely to blame for a marriage being broken, short of a situation involving domestic violence or emotional abuse.

This theory is apparent to anyone who has ever been involved in a long term relationship. One person may have paid less attention than should have been paid to the other, but at the same time, the other person may have previously rebuked efforts at contact or developed interests that no longer involved the other. Neither is completely blameless, but also neither is completely at fault.

And no one is perfect.

It’s healthy to examine your behavior, recognize what role you played and learn from that introspection for your future relationships. It is equally healthy to examine the behavior of the other and recognize the role that the other played as well.

Imagine you are talking to a friend who is going through a divorce, could you conceive of yourself telling her it is all her fault? Of course not. You would be kind and supportive and likely tell her that she didn’t make all the mistakes in the marriage. So, try to be as supportive and kind to yourself as you would a friend.