Are you a couple with a young child or children? Are you completely overwhelmed by the physical and mental demands of a nuclear family without a “village” to raise the kids? Are you either managing two careers or one downsized career leaving holes in that person’s mental satisfaction? Are you suffering from lack of sleep and lack of adequate sexual intimacy? Are you caught between your own selfish needs for work-satisfaction-fostering-friendships, and being a good available parent? Are your frustrating disagreements from before the children have become ten times worse, and now there is no time to “work” on them the way you used to? Are you avoiding discussing and working on problems because nothing seems to come out of it any way, and there is the family to worry about? Are you feeling lonely, misunderstood, emotionally distant, unappreciated, and unable to reach your spouse? Are you, in addition to these problems, saddled with some other concrete issue such as financial irresponsibility, lack of interest in sex, extremely intense out-of-hand explosive arguments lasting over a few days, or signs of infidelity? All this, to a certain degree had existed before kids were born, but now the problems seem to be spilling over your mental and physical capability and you see so many good reasons for ending this turmoil by just quitting – although neither one of you really wants to do it?

Are you a married couple with children, often times considering divorce as a way towards freedom from all the scary compromises you have to make? Are you not yet doing it just because keeping a marriage is a value to you? Are you wondering if it is all worth it?

I have some “Grandmotherly old-fashioned” advice for you, with one difference; I am going to support it with “evidence”. The advice is: “stick it out” till the last drop of your blood! Dramatic? Yes, it is! However, it makes a point: wait it out for the longest time, even if it means going through years of overwhelming dissatisfaction.

First I want to present evidence that you are not alone in experiencing a post-children reduced sense of well-being. Your dissatisfaction with the post-children marital relationship is a growing trend in our modern and increasingly individualistic society, getting worse with each generation. This is a conclusion reached by a study conducted by the psychologists Campbell and Twenge, in 2003. This dip in the marital satisfaction and sense of well-being is well supported in academic research as reported by the 2008 NPR program “Kids may not be bundles of joy”, the 2010 popular New York Magazine article “All Joy and No Fun”, and 2011 report “The Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility” presenting a study conducted in 86 countries ranging from Tanzania and El Salvador to the US and France.

This evidence may make you realize that you are probably going through a perfectly normal phase in your marital life, so you can simply relax, take a breather, and think about the next two pieces of evidence that support my advise to stick it out for the longest period.

First, a major scholarly study released by University of Chicago sociologists challenges the assumption that staying in an unhappy marriage is asking for misery forever and getting out of this marriage will mean happiness in the long run. Not so simple! This study concludes that the people who divorce are not necessarily happier than the ones who choose to stay. More interestingly, two thirds of the ones who stay in the unhappy marriage reported being happy in their marriage five years later. The increase in marital satisfaction is especially true for couples who reported their marriages as “very unhappy” and still stayed together!

Second, along with the above result, consider that a decade old long-term study from UC Berkley shows that as a couple moves into older age, the marital satisfaction increases, possibly because children leave the nest to be independent.

Both these findings together suggest: it may be worth staying together, not just for kids, or for financial reasons, but for the increased sense of marital happiness awaiting you.

As a couple’s therapist I would like to suggest keeping a few key points in mind as you wait it out. This makes the current wait easier and the future increased marital satisfaction more meaningful.

1)     Make it into an “active” waiting it out, not simply numbing you down.

2)     Active wait would mean a few different things: sometimes letting go of your demand, sometimes looking for a different way to communicate your demand to your partner till you find the right way, and sometimes looking for other ways to satisfy your “personal” needs bucket.

3)     Active wait may include arguments, sometimes too intense, but that is better than numbing down everything. Just keep it away from children as a “must” rule.

4)     Look for ways to keep at least some sexual intimacy alive. Never give up on that completely.

5)     Reorient yourself to the “meaning” your kids bring to you! In spite of the literature pouring out of academic circles on the reduced sense of well being while raising young or adolescent children, most parents think of their children as the most meaningful thing that has happened to them. Whether raising kids takes a toll on the marriage or not, it creates a fiercely protective, all engaging, and “primal” joy, as chronicled in “Parenting and Happiness Pair Well Despite What You Read” published in Politics Daily. What this suggests is that your life has a source of meaning and joy, a potential antidote to allow you to go through the troubled marriage for some time.

Make the process All Joy and Some Fun!