Rule 1: Own Your Decision
Having “personal agency” is about realizing you have the power to make changes and take control of what happens next.
After two decades of trying to save my marriage, I finally made the decision to give up on the dream but stay for the kids. Exercising my personal agency helped me see myself as a woman capable of making well thought out decisions for herself instead of being a victim.
Rule 2: Manage Your Expectations.
When I got married, I expected to be with a partner who was equally yoked to success of our relationship, and it took many years to realize I was not.
In her book Expectation Hangover, Christine Hassler writes “we suffer when our reality does not match the expectations we are so attached to”. Instead of focusing on the unattainable, you should shift your mindset: Forget the goal line and focus on your soul line.
Releasing the picture-perfect image of your marriage allows space for something more genuine. It’s not about chasing perfection—it’s about giving your kids a stable, loving environment and showing up for yourself, even when life feels shitty.
Rule 3: Make Peace with Your Regrets
You can never go back and rewrite the past. Never.
Author Cheryl Strayed knows this better than anyone. In her book Tiny Beautiful Things, she offers the most gut-wrenching advice about what to do with the life we didn’t choose:
I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
So salute. Bless and release. Carry on.
Rule 4: Strengthen Your Walls.
Walls in a good marriage are bad. Walls in a bad marriage are good.
When I decided to stay married for the kids, I had to protect my heart to preserve it. If you can’t afford therapy, read a book, listen to a podcast, or create a kickass playlist You need to figure out a way to become slightly more bulletproof.
Realize the rules of engagement have changed and building walls of protection is required.
Rule 5: Shorten Your Horizon
Waking up every morning to the idea that this is all there is will not serve you.
Instead of obsessing over the untrue (and unhelpful) thought that “this is all my life will ever be”, I constantly reminded myself, “this is just my now.” Author George MacDonald had the same idea when he wrote:
“No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.”
I stopped handing the microphone to my anxieties about all of tomorrow’s burdens. You should too. Today’s burdens are enough for now.
Rule 6: Reignite Your Passion
Trying to save a lifeless marriage was all consuming for a while, but once I declared it DOA, I needed to find a way to come back to life.
I’ve always been passionate about words and self-expression, so I started to stoke those fires. (Shameless self-promotion here: My first passion project was designing this deck of Moving On Encouragement Cards. It’s for women whose relationship has ended. Breathing life into this project breathed life back into me. To rephrase Howard Thurman’s great quote:
Rule 7: Be a Chooser, Not a Beggar
I spent years begging my spouse for a better marriage (and feeling pathetic most of the time.) Until I became a chooser.
Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl wrote about the profound power of being a chooser in his bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning:
The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.
I had no control over whether my spouse would give or withhold affection. Be faithful or on the prowl. Be supportive of my needs or dismissive. This was NOT the future I would have chosen for myself, but I had to make a choice every morning.
Staying in a bad marriage for the kids is hard. Leaving a bad marriage when there are kids is hard.
Every day I woke up and chose my hard.
Rule 8: Know When to Leave
For as many times as I thought about not staying in the marriage for the kids, the benefits had outweighed the costs for 30+ years.
Even though my kids were witnessing an unhealthy version of marriage, but they weren’t being harmed or abused so I couldn’t justify leaving my marriage because I was (rightfully) unhappy.
But that all changed one night in February when I woke up to find my spouse sitting on my bed and I felt the hair raise up on my neck and I knew my soul was in the kind of danger I couldn’t repair.
I filed for divorce the next day.
Thanks for reading Gentle Nudges by Renee Wood! Know someone who might be encouraged by this article? This post is public so feel free to share it.