Divorce May Be Your Wake-Up Call


  • At times, many can view the act of getting a divorce as a wake-up call in their own lives.
  • These wake-up calls can inspire evaluating one's life, choices, and priorities.
  • Marriages can have their own forms of wake-up calls, that can spark an evaluation on the relationship as a whole.

When people stay at a hotel, they sometimes find themselves calling the front desk out of habit and setting up a wake-up call, in order to start their day at the time they need to. They do not necessarily trust their internal clock to wake themselves up, because so many times, your internal clock may want more rest than you may intend. That might cause you to miss out on what you were there for, leaving you to pick up the pieces and try and make sense of what happened.

Similarly, many view the act of a divorce as a wake-up call in life. Individuals experiencing a lack of excitement in their daily life sometimes compare it to being asleep. The act of being with the same person day in and day out coupled with the unexciting routine of getting up every morning next to the same person, eating the same breakfast, going to the same job, driving the same car, coming home to the same place, having the same dinner, and going to bed at the same time every night, can make a dissatisfied individual take stock of their own life.

Evaluating life

Similar to divorce, life evaluation is not necessarily a bad thing. In taking stock of one’s life, one is able to reassess their goals and navigate their way through their own history of decision-making. Evaluating how these decisions were made and what motivated you to make them helps you gain perspective.

According to Elite Daily, evaluating aspects of one’s life gives one a shot at personal growth and evolution. Given the changes that divorce can entail and how it can leave one’s life at a crossroads, it is understandable wanting to take some time to figure out what went into your decision to pursue a relationship with this person, why you chose to marry this person, and what aspects of the relationship caused it to combust.

Evaluating marriage

Many couples facing marital problems and divorce find themselves asking these questions, wondering how they got to this point. Many times, they have lost the ability to have fun together, according to Psychology Today. They have lost the ability to laugh and joke with one another, causing them to evaluate every thought before it is spoken between them.

When you get to the point where you, as an individual, are walking on egg shells, trying to be as careful as possible with every word that you say, hoping not to offend your spouse, you could be sleeping through your metaphorical wake-up call and failing to notice the deterioration of your relationship and how it has affected you as a person.

Many times, couples enter a relationship and later on, a marriage wanting similar things in the marriage. Hopes, dreams, and accomplishments are common points of interest that people share, as they head into new stages of their lives and of their relationships. Sometimes, those things change, and it is okay that those things change. However, conflict can arise when people no longer want the same things in their relationship.

Slippery slope

When those divisions begin, it can breed a lack of trust. When one spouse begins displaying signs that they may have different interests than you, it can spark an increase in communication, as you may try to understand the perspective of your spouse. The increase in communication also could be a result of sudden conflict arising from the changing perspectives.

Without the trust necessary to sustain a relationship in changing times, assumptions can surface and cloud communication. What one spouse may say may be clouded by how the other spouse interprets it. This can continue to escalate, until it reaches a breaking point where one wishes to end the frustration altogether.

For some, this moment can be seen as a wake-up call. For some, one can only take the growing differences between the respective spouses so many times before the differences become too much, and it becomes apparent to them that they need to move on from this union.

Because of the miscommunication and mistrust, the marriage becomes a two-sided occurrence and the two spouses fail to work as a team. They no longer rely on one another to solve problems that may arise in their daily lives, and their roles in each other’s lives no longer feel like that of a spouse. Those roles become more comparable to that of a disgruntled roommate, and they become set in their perspective, eliminating any hope of them working out their differences through communication.

Actions and reactions

The stage where working things out is viable is beyond that of considering the end of the relationship to be a wake-up call. Those looking at the relationship as something that needs to end are not interested in fixing something that they see as broken.

They see it as something they need to move on from, in order to improve themselves and their overall wellness and happiness. They see themselves asleep, needing a double espresso shot in their vanilla latte that divorce may provide, in order to restore their awareness to what has been going on in their lives.

That is okay. You, as a human being, should not want a spouse who does not want to be with you. In them experiencing their wake-up call and wishing to end the marriage, you may experience your own and pursue interests that you may not have been able to, had you stayed married.

End of Content Icon

Leave a Reply