The question underneath the question

Most people asking “should I get a divorce” are actually asking something different: do I want a divorce, or do I just not want another 20 years of this?

Is the marriage really over, or is it the version of the marriage you’ve been living that no longer works? Do you want a whole new partner, or a different experience with the partner you have?

These are very different questions, and once you separate them, clarity starts to show up. It’s not that you’ve stopped loving your partner. In most cases, you’ve just stopped practicing love.

To be clear, this isn’t about violent, abusive, or coercive marriages. We’re talking about the long marriages, often 10 to 30 years in, where the relationship isn’t bad, it’s just gone quiet. The spark is gone. It feels monotonous. Women tend to describe it as emotional disconnection, men as physical disconnection, but underneath both is the same thing: disconnection.

Hard times don’t break marriages, they reveal them

Recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the divorce rate ticked up slightly this year, reversing a long term downward trend. What the data doesn’t capture is the number of couples who have separated but still live together because they can’t afford to divorce and live apart. If that were counted, the real number would likely be higher.

But here’s the thing worth sitting with: hard times don’t create the cracks in a relationship, they reveal them. When life is easy, it’s possible to avoid, distract, or coast. When life gets hard, the connection you never built, the communication that never happened, and the safety that was never established all surface at once. It can feel like your partner isn’t showing up for you, but the truth is usually that the relationship hasn’t been built for years, sometimes decades.

For most couples, there wasn’t one big betrayal or one defining event. It was thousands of small things over time: conversations that didn’t happen, affection that wasn’t expressed, criticism that crept in, and connection that slowly eroded.

Five questions to ask before you decide anything

1. Are you done, or are you just hurt? If your partner changed, would you want to stay? Notice the energy behind your answer. “I’m done” often comes from ego, fear, and self protection. A grounded answer sounds more like “I no longer want to experience this version of our marriage” without blame attached to it.

2. Have you outgrown each other, or just stopped growing together? Values shift across seasons of life. That’s normal. The problem isn’t growth, it’s growing in different directions without checking in. Getting curious about who your partner is now, not who they were ten years ago, changes everything.

3. What is your part in the marriage you say you hate? Not about fault or blame, but about pattern. Are you the one who withdraws, or the one who chases? Are you passive, or over functioning while your partner does nothing? These patterns are always co-created, and they reinforce each other.

4. What if your partner won’t change? This is the wrong question to fixate on, because you can’t control anyone but yourself. The better question is what you can do differently today. Changing your part in the pattern is often what interrupts it entirely.

5. Have you actually tried to change the marriage, or just talked about the problems in it? A lot of counselling and therapy ends up being a space to argue for validation about what already happened, rather than a space to build something new. Talking about the marriage you had isn’t the same as creating the one you want.

The real work isn’t trying harder

Trying harder usually means trying to control your partner, and it creates resistance rather than connection. What actually works is turning inward: getting honest about your own part, taking responsibility for it, and showing up differently without waiting for your partner to go first.

Love isn’t a feeling you have once and keep forever. It’s a practice. Most marriages that end don’t end because love disappeared, they end because the practice of it stopped.

If this is where you’re at, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Listen to the full episode, Should I Get a Divorce?, on the Save My Marriage Podcast.