Do you feel as if your partner is pushing you away, and you are no longer close to them at all? How about you — are you truly committed to your relationship or perhaps eager to feel the taste of freedom once more? If any of this rings true, you may have stumbled upon a few signs your marriage is over. And unfortunately, those might not be the only ones!
Everyone thinks that marriage lasts forever; after all, two people have made vows to stay true to each other, for better or for worse. They go into it all, thinking that they’ve met their match and can now build a life together.
However, what many fail to realize is that people do change over time, which may or may not always be a good thing. In the case of marriage, it could lead to divorce simply because the spouses have nothing in common anymore.
Still, before jumping the gun, it is vital to recognize all (or at least most) of the signs your marriage is over. Without further ado, here are the most recurring ones and what they mean.
15 Signs Your Marriage Is Over, and You’re Headed for a Divorce
1. You Feel Alone
Although it may not be one of the earliest signs your marriage is over, feeling alone or isolated is definitely a huge red flag. Think about it — the whole point of marriage is to have someone to spend the rest of your life with. They ought to make you feel whole and contribute to your overall happiness.
As it stands, however, when a marriage is failing, one of the spouses, or sometimes even both of them, feel as if they’re all alone with their troubles. Usually, this may spark some motivation in them to do something about it.
Nevertheless, the more someone feels isolated, the greater the negativity around them. At some point, they may decide enough is enough — there’s no point in fixing anything — and call the marriage off.
2. There’s No Longer a Team — You’re Always Against Each Other
Before you and your spouse got married, you probably thought it was you two against the whole world. You were eager to support each other through everything, both good and bad experiences, and defend your little family from horrible outside influences.
And yet, here you find yourself thinking how you’re always at each other’s throat. Not only are you only able to fight, but you’re deliberately seeking out revenge against your partner in the hope of humiliating them or just winning a fight.
That in and of itself is a huge sign that your marriage is coming to an end. When you’re married, you are supposed to work together with your partner as a team.
There is no “I” in the word team, that much is true. And even though you may have occasional fights, they should never start out of sheer spite or revenge. After all, the point of matrimony isn’t to hate your partner and wish them ill!
3. Money Decisions Are Made Without Everyone Consenting to Them
One of the most significant signs your marriage is over is when you or your partner start spending money without even asking the other person what they think. Naturally, it is perfectly fine for couples to have separate joint accounts and to agree on allocating a portion of their earnings for rent, bills, food, etc. However, even if you don’t share an account, you do share a life — and your joint life entails that both streams of income are for both of you to use.
However, if you start making major money decisions alone, you’re basically telling them that their opinion and thoughts don’t matter. And the issue is even worse if you decide to use your earnings for it. You’re driving a wedge between you two and showing that you’re not interested in sharing your money or life with them anymore.
At some point, this sort of behavior may generate lots of resentment and even contribute to financial issues. As you may already know, that is a major reason couples argue and divorce in the end.
4. There’s Nothing Positive About Your Marriage (Or at Least You Don’t Remember It)
Everyone knows that it is rather difficult to stay in a marriage that doesn’t fulfill you completely. However, some people can hold onto some of the more positive memories and use them to rebuild their relationship.
Unfortunately, that’s not possible if you feel like there are no positive memories at all. If each fond moment you and your partner had has now been tainted by meaningless fights, jealousy, and the like, it will be very difficult to distract yourself from all that negativity.
It would be wonderful if each couple could stay in the honeymoon phase forever and always look at each other through pink sunglasses. However, if you’ve faced various challenges that have changed you both, it’s likely that not even the most positive memory is enough now to fix your relationship.
5. The Blame Game Is Your New Best Friend
Ah, the blame game — one of the most toxic signs your marriage is over. If you’ve been battling lost battles recently and always seem to come up with your partner’s previous shortcomings to win a fight, you’re definitely doing your best to alienate them even further.
It’s easy to see why someone would want to play the blame game. Nobody likes being told what they’ve done wrong, and it’s always easier to withstand some things when you know you haven’t done anything shady.
However, the point of marriage is to be together through both the bad and the good. And if you’ve already gone through the painful process of forgiveness, mentioning the same old shortcomings each time you get upset with your partner isn’t doing anything for your relationship. In fact, it’s just making it deteriorate, one fight at a time.
Besides, lack of responsibility is another reason people decide on a divorce. Whether you’ve done something wrong or your partner is to blame, both of you have to accept the responsibility in order to move on. If neither one of you does it, the blame game continues — until you eventually cannot go on anymore.
6. You Aren’t Living the Life of a Married Person
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going out with the girls or the boys or taking part in some single-people activities from time to time. However, if that becomes a weekly thing, and you find yourself mostly living like a single person, your marriage might be over.
When a couple is in love and has a good relationship, they naturally gravitate toward each other and want to spend time together. If you are mostly avoiding such situations and would rather go clubbing or book a vacation just for you, you may not be really committed to your partner. Something is making you isolate yourself from them and causing you to act like a singleton. It’s your job to figure out whether you want to do something about it or not.
7. There’s a Clear Lack of Intimacy
Naturally, one of the most uncomfortable signs your marriage is over is when there’s little to no intimacy at all anymore. Perhaps your partner has stopped kissing you goodbye before going off to work. Alternatively, you may have stopped having sex or have it when it’s a tradition — like on your anniversary.
In either case, a lack of intimacy is never a good sign, especially if you feel as if there’s no more sexual attraction anymore. Of course, nobody expects couples to have sex multiple times a day (like when they were dating!).
However, letting a few months pass in between such displays of intimacy shows that you don’t feel close to your partner anymore. More importantly, it may be a sign that you don’t mind them being just a friend.
8. You’re Never on the Same Page and Don’t Understand Each Other
Couples will fight from time to time — that’s perfectly normal and something you should definitely expect. Nevertheless, the way they fight also plays a role in how long their marriage will last.
Most of the time, fights occur because one person doesn’t understand their partner’s perspective. However, at that moment, it’s essential for them to try to understand it by asking for some explanations. They should want to dig deeper into their partner’s thoughts if they want to reach a resolution.
If the marriage is almost over, though, they will not be very understanding. That, in turn, will make the other person feel as if their opinion doesn’t matter. The lack of understanding obviously discredits them.
In the end, the couple grows even more distant. Neither of the two wants to know why the other person thinks or feels something. And eventually, the lack of trying to understand each other kills the marriage.
9. You Don’t See Your Spouse in Your Future
One of the clearest signs your marriage is over is something you may occasionally catch yourself doing — imagining the future without your spouse. Of course, you may act the part of a devoted partner in real life by including them in your plans. However, if you find yourself imagining what the next 10 to 15 years will bring and don’t see yourself next to your partner, it’s likely because you don’t want them there!
Does that make you a bad person? Of course not! But if you have stopped loving your partner and want a divorce, it’s always better to go before it’s too late.
The problem is when you ignore the fact you don’t see a future or want to build a life with them. In that case, it’s best to come out clean straight away before both of you get hurt.
10. You Don’t Care About Fixing Anything — and Compromise Is Not an Option
The harder you fight, the more challenging the making-up is, especially if a compromise is not an option. As mentioned, a married couple ought to work as a team, not as opponents. That entails making a few compromises here and there in order to fix a certain issue and move on.
If you don’t want to do that, though, or feel as if you have to yield to your partner’s perspective each time, your marriage definitely doesn’t live up to expectations. There has to be a clear balance of compromises, and you both need to want to actually fix your relationship. Otherwise, there’s really no point in staying.
11. Contempt Is the New Normal for You
As you can imagine, displaying contempt is one of the most negative signs your marriage is over. Per definition, someone who looks at others with total contempt believes they are beneath them or simply worthless. If you or your partner feel like that about each other, there’s no happiness in your marriage — just pure negativity.
Fortunately, contempt is at least easy to recognize, as it’s downright annoying and alienating. If you or your partner often scoff at each other, fail to validate your feelings, or keep rolling your eyes at each remark, there’s a lot of contempt between you. Since this is destructive behavior, other signs of a failed marriage are soon to follow.
12. You Either Fight All the Time or You Don’t Argue at All
If it’s not obvious by now, you ought to remember that a marriage is a balancing act. Both parties shouldn’t give more than they receive, and each one has to contribute to the relationship.
In line with that, it’s absurd to expect that you won’t ever fight. As bad as it might seem, fighting means that you’re (at least) showing interest in talking about something that has upset you. However, it shouldn’t happen too often or not at all — it’s all in the balance.
Unfortunately, a lack of arguing could be a sign of emotional neglect. It shows that you or your partner don’t even care about your relationship (or each other, for that matter). As such, you don’t deem fights worthy of your time and instead ignore each bad situation to avoid them.
13. You’re Having an Emotional or a Physical Affair
Naturally, one of the major signs your marriage is over is when you’ve done potentially the worst thing possible to your partner — you’ve cheated. But the problem isn’t necessarily in the fact you found someone else attractive or that you’re in love with someone else. It is the break in the trust that will eventually destroy your marriage.
Trust is one of the pillars of each relationship that, once broken, is extremely difficult to mend. If you have cheated, you have already shown that you can hurt your partner that way. Who’s to say that you won’t do it again, no matter how hard you try to restore the lost trust?
14. Divorce Is Always on Your Mind
As mentioned, one of the signs your marriage is over is when you are acting single and ready to mingle. That sort of behavior is often followed by always thinking about separation and divorce.
Various things can trigger separation thoughts, like movies, for instance. If you recognize some of your life in the plotlines, you may start wondering if you should get up and leave.
Of course, a single thing may not have triggered these feelings; you may have been fighting them for a while now. In either case, though, if you catch yourself thinking of going your own way often, you are already nurturing that singleton mindset. You do not include your partner in your future, and you want to run away.
15. You Don’t Feel Like Yourself Anymore
Finally, feeling like you cannot even recognize yourself anymore is one of the most devastating signs your marriage is over. Not only does it show that your marriage hasn’t been good for you, but it also makes you wonder how your life would have turned out if you had never married at all.
In essence, if you don’t recognize yourself anymore and keep asking how you became who you are now, you’re second-guessing it all. It’s not just about your marriage anymore, but your whole life too.
Somewhere along the way, you lost yourself and became a shell of a person. To find yourself again, you have to eliminate the thing that made you so. Unfortunately, that may very well be your partner.
Final Thoughts
Though some of these signs your marriage is over seem rather obvious, you’d be surprised by how much people can ignore problems before they find themselves headed for a divorce. Hopefully, you now know what to pay attention to and which problems may be possible to fix. In the end, remember that there’s no shame in divorce.
Still, if you feel like you need to, there’s always something you can do to mend your marriage.
