Staying together for the kids…

 Boy meets girl and their supposed to live happily ever after, right. They don’t tell you about the hurt, challenges, compromise and family responsibilties that’s waiting for you in the future. Staying together for the kids is just one of the many stories some couples tell themselves to make them feel better about staying in a loveless marriage with no hope of getting out. Love, companionship and family can all be reasons to stay but is it reason enough?

I guess we can all agree that a marriage doesn’t start out loveless. There is always something that goes wrong and whether your relationship is strong to get through it, is a whole other story. Lets take a walk through the possibilities, shall we?

The cheating continues. Now, I have spoken about cheating in one of my previous blog entries and why that happens. So lets say it keeps happening, the cheating continues. At first you will try and work it out because maybe there’s something to save after all, but after a while you realise nothing changes and the bullshit keeps coming out of their mouth, no one is willing to break first and actually change for the marriage or partnership in the first place.

Then there is blackmail, where you know it’s happening but you use it as a sword to hurt your partner like they hurt you. In the end you resent eachother so much that you hate each other. The only thing you have that’s “keeping” you together are you’re children. So you use them as the pinnacle of keeping your marriage together.

Abuse is also another form of staying with someone. No, a person can’t just leave and yes, for some people it’s hard to grasp that. But imagine you are mentally and physically, so broken down that you can’t see the beautiful person you are anymore because your partner keeps telling you how lost you are without them and how you won’t make it one day without them. Wouldn’t you struggle to leave as well. Not even to mention when there is no money to leave because they mind fucked you so badly in the beginning that you gave up your job, your home, everything to be with them because you loved them.

That guilty feeling you get when you think of leaving the family because you just can’t stand the fighting anymore. All I can say is that, if you’ve tried working it out, your not fighting in front of the kids and the cheating doesn’t stop. You need to stop and think for a minute. Children aren’t stupid and if you want them to grow up feeling loved and respected you will do them the favour in showing them what love is. Love is not staying together for them. Love is not getting beat up every night because someone had a bad day or because you forgot to buy beer that afternoon. Love is not having mommy or daddy stay out late at night with aunt Karen or uncle John and sleeping in different rooms. Children see things that some adults don’t even realise and the sooner you see that, the sooner you can get out and start the life you want and be happy.

Life isn’t made so we can stay in shitty relationships using the dumbest excuses and be unhappy. Life is there to make the most of it, show you’re children what it’s like to live a full life and hope that they would one day live a fulfulling life knowing that if they followed in your footsteps, at least it had a happy ending.