A married man losing sleep over divorce needs to stop trying to fix his wife and start fixing himself. Internal work—managing emotions, confronting past issues, reducing defensiveness—creates the closure he's looking for. Change yourself first, and the marriage either improves or you're ready for what comes next.
What keeps married men who are on the brink of divorce up at night? What keeps them up at night and what keeps them mentally tortured is that they don't have closure. They know that there's things that operate in their shadow and that they're unintentionally affecting the people around them, that the family and their wife is the collateral damage to the work they haven't done on themselves. And what keeps them up at night is they're constantly trying to figure out, how do I placate my wife? How do I just make my wife happy? You know, how do I fix this externally? But your lack of closure, brother, is caused by the fact that you haven't become aware of the fact that all of the greatest changes happen internally first. Because you don't change the marriage, you change the man that shows up to the marriage. You change how that man deals with his emotions. You change how that man relates to his past. You change how that man manages his own thoughts. You change how that man interacts with others. You change how that man— you stop that man from getting defensive, getting reactive, projecting. You teach that man how to stand in his truth, in the confidence of who he is. The lack of closure is caused by the fact that you know that you have work to do, but you're more committed to seeing your wife react positively to what you do externally than you are in the faith of knowing that if you build yourself up internally and work through these issues internally, that it's automatically going to affect the external. Because your whole life you've tried to fix the inside from the outside. So you're more committed to seeing your wife react to what you do than you are committed to the process of what's going to give you a better marriage. Here's the thing. You win regardless, because either A, you end up being with your wife and you're a better man, or B, it doesn't work out and you're still a better man, which prepares you for the next relationship in your life if you're going to have one. All the greatest changes happen within. Start to look inside yourself. The closure that you're seeking, brother, is found when you understand what you were missing in here.
