When you were younger and pictured your life, you may have had a specific idea in your head of how you wanted it to look. You may have wanted to be working at a specific job, driving a specific car, or living in a specific city.

For others, your picture included the perfect relationship. You pictured the perfect marriage with the perfect children, and you lived happily ever after in your head.

Unfortunately, the perfect image of what you want your life to be is rarely what it ends up being. You have to make sacrifices, and plans change. The unpredictability of it all allows people to enter and leave as both parties see fit, and for those who are married, that may mean your spouse leaves.

Childhood idealism

As a child, no one sits in their room picturing their future and envisions a divorce. They just happen. Through events outside of the ideal design of the situation, the actions and interactions of others cause the formation of marriages, just as they cause the end of them.

As you get older and learn more about what it takes to make a relationship function, you begin to understand the warning signs of what to avoid. Even if you have gotten married or had children with someone, you still have the ability to notice things that may indicate that the relationship is not what it needs to be.

It may be something they do or say. It may be something they have done in the past. Either way, if it is bothering you to the point where you are worried about the viability of the union, then it is time to seek help.

Seeking help

While seeking help in your marriage through a licensed mental health professional may not be the ideal scenario you envisioned when you said “I do,” you may need to be sure that you did everything you could have possibly done, in order to save your marriage. Many people who are not sure about the viability of their relationship utilize relationship counseling as a way of putting the necessary work, and if that still does not make the marriage happy and functional, then they contact a family law attorney.

A family law attorney will be able to assess your unique situation and guide you through the divorce process. As difficult as it may, their job is to represent your best interests during a time when your sight of the situation may be clouded by emotions.

In order to choose the right family law attorney, it is essential to understand how the law firm can go about representing your interests. For men facing divorce, they can count on firms, like Cordell & Cordell, who focus on domestic litigation cases related to the rights of men and fathers and know how to represent their unique interests during divorce and child custody cases.

Focus and the future design

During the divorce experience, you may feel a sense of numbness creeping into your mind. You just want it all to be over, but it is vital to your future that you maintain your focus. As challenging as it may be, you may be starting your new life at a disadvantage if you fail to maintain your focus during the divorce process.

With the divorce settled, the design of your life is at a crossroads, and it is up to you to decide how it is handled. You may have to deal with aspects of your previous life, such as alimony, child support, or child custody issues, that can affect your financial future, but they do not control you or how the design of your life looks after the divorce experience. You get to decide that for yourself.

That decision should not be dictated by your childhood ideals of what your life should look like. One of the most important things to remember is that the ideal version of your life that you may have had as a child did not account for the personal growth and experiences that have formed you into the person you are today. The foresight necessary to factor those variables into the situation is not yet present in a child’s mind, making their ability to predict the lasting presence of a future marriage nonexistent.

Therefore, life events like marriage and divorce simply are parts of the larger journey of life, and as joyous or as difficult as they may be, they are never exactly the way you may have envisioned. All you can do is make the best of your situation moving forward, creating a new design for your new life.