Episode 10: You are allowed to leave

This episode is all about permission. It’s about how women seem to evolve in middle-age and how we seem to be outgrowing our marriages at alarming rates, and how to know if that’s ok or not.

In the last few weeks as I’ve been speaking with clients there’s a recurring theme that keeps coming up. I keep hearing women say that their husband is a really nice guy, he’s a great dad, a great provider, they list their husband’s great qualities and then berate themselves for their own misery and usually end up in a wail of “why can’t i just be happy?”

And often it's because they've changed over the course of time.

You are allowed to change. You are allowed to grow. And you are allowed to choose to leave your marriage.

If you’ve done all the work you can, if you’ve been to therapy, if you’ve asked your husband to go to therapy with you, if you’ve been bending yourself into a pretzel for the last ten years trying to take all the responsibility for all the things because you’ve been taught in 12-step rooms, in personal development programs, in therapy that you are responsible for your happiness, and you can create any relationship you want, but it’s still not fucking working, your marriage, at this point in time, may be unworkable. And that’s ok.

And the thing that can be hard for us to wrap our minds around is that no one has to be at fault. No one has to be wrong. When something isn’t workable, it’s often no one’s fault.