When you get married, there are many expectations you have from your spouse. You rightly consider the relationship as the beginning of a new chapter in life with endless possibilities. Life can take a turn for the better with the intimacy as well as emotional and financial support you expect to receive from your partner. Marriage is actually a contract which imposes rights and obligations on both the partners.

There are many marriages where things do not work out as hoped and one partner betrays the other’s trust or does not measure up to the responsibility. This is when the dreaded word “divorce” enters the vocabulary of the couple and the marriage goes rapidly downhill.

The following are five situations which are unacceptable to most partners and lead to their marital separation.

Infidelity

When one gets married, one of the biggest obligations one has is not to have physical relations or another romantic relationship outside marriage. This is a condition that must be met at all costs if the marriage has to continue further. However, infidelity among married partners is not that uncommon. Some people get into extra-marital affairs due to plain boredom after some years of living with the same individual. This is the proverbial “seven-year itch.” Then there are people who have a roving eye and are habitual offenders. They do not let go of any chance of having a intimate relationship with anyone, including neighbours, office colleagues and even their partner’s friends or relatives!

An extra-marital affair is something quite serious and few marriages are able to survive intact after it. The partners find it difficult to forgive their spouse as the entire foundation of the relationship gets compromised.

Emotional Abuse

In an ideal marriage, both the partners provide psychological support and emotional nourishment to each other. This, over the years, results in their mutual spiritual growth and they become a better human being who is more self-assured and self-confident. However, some partners are suffering from a variety of mental illnesses or complexes and begin to emotionally abuse their spouse.

Emotional abuse can take many forms such as non-stop criticism, picking up quarrels for no reason, monopolising financial income of the family and leaving nothing for others, tight control over movements of the partner, not allowing the other to do a job or anything else to one’s liking, and so on. Emotional abuse makes the relationship very claustrophobic and suffocating for the victim and divorce begins to seem as an attractive option.

Physical Abuse

There are many partners whose sole purpose in marriage is to dominate everybody and rule the entire home unchallenged. One of the ways by which they accomplish this is by inflicting physical abuse on the members. This abuse is usually inflicted by the husband and involves such behaviour as beating (with hands or feet as well as any object), pushing the person around and other terrorising behaviour.

Physical abuse over a long time destroys the personality of the victim and often leads to bodily scars, broken bones, black eyes and worse. Some people have even died due to being physically assaulted by their spouses. Such abuse indirectly creates emotional turmoil in the victim by giving the unspoken message that he or she is a contemptible person who is not liked by their partner.

Mistreatment of Children

One of the most despicable things a partner can do in a family is to physically or emotionally abuse the children or mistreat them in other ways. Children are vulnerable by nature because their personalities have not yet fully developed. They are easily left bruised. Their mistreatment at the hands of a parent haunts them throughout their lives. Sometimes, the emotional scars of childhood never heal. Both mother and father are perfectly capable of mistreating and physically or emotionally abusing their children. A partner often takes a firm stance against this and files for divorce to protect the well-being of his or her children.

Unreliability

Trust is the foundation of a successful marital relationship. The partners have to rely on each other completely for the marriage to remain strong. For emotional security, they have to take comfort in the fact that no matter what happens, their partner would be there to help them out of the situation. The more is the trust and confidence between spouses, the happier the family is and the better is the atmosphere available for children to grow up into healthy adults.

However, there are many spouses who hide things from their partners and keep secrets. They live double lives and do not allow their husband or wife to know where they go, whom they meet or even how much they actually earn. These kinds of marriages are prime candidates for failures as the ties that bind the partners together are quite weak.