I recently heard from a wife who felt like she was the only one interested in saving her marriage. She and her husband had been having problems for over a year and the husband had apparently become very tired of it because he had recently told the wife that he was seriously considering filing for a divorce in the near future.

The wife couldn't bear the thought of ending her marriage and uprooting her family. She said, in part: "He no longer listens to anything that I say. Every time I try to convince him to work with me to save our marriage, he changes the subject. The thing is, I strongly believe that we could turn our marriage around with just a little effort, but he won't budge. It's heartbreaking for me to sit and watch helplessly as I see everything I worked for walking out the door. What can I do?"

Boy, do I know how this feels. I was in the same situation. And what I learned was that the more "convincing" you try to do, the more resistant they become. This is especially true when the process goes on for a while. Here's the thing. If you've already tried everything in your power to convince your husband to save the marriage and to not walk away, sometimes you have to wait to approach this until after you've carried out another strategy. Sometimes, you need to delay having this conversation until you can adjust his attitude and resistance a little bit. I will discuss this more in the following article.

Sometimes, The Harder You Try To Talk Your Husband Into Saving Your Marriage, The More He Wants To End It: And, this is why you have to be slick about your strategy. Because I can't tell you how many husbands tell me that their wife literally will not take no for an answer and then proceeds to bombard him with all types of pleas and promises (which usually fall on deaf ears.)

And, once you've reached this point, you'll often make your situation even worse when you continue pushing. It's almost as if a switch turns and he's now absolutely determined that he wants precisely the opposite of what you want and he's going to make sure that he gets his way. So, don't allow yourself to be on opposing sides. You must find a way to be his ally rather than his adversary. This makes the process go a lot more smoothly and increases your chance for success.

It's Sometimes Best To Put Off The "Convincing" Until You've Already Gained Some Ground: Sometimes, it's all about how you package it. Sometimes, when you ask a husband to "work" with you on the marriage, the mental picture that he gets is not an attractive one, at least to him. He's already resistant, so he's likely going to envision him having to reluctantly talk about his feelings while you continue to ask him more questions and debate with him. Very few men are going to embrace this.

But here's the good news. You can absolutely start this process on your own, without needing his cooperation, at least at first. You can begin to make small changes and improvements on your own. Once he sees that you've backed off and begins to see some improvements, the chances of him jumping on board become much greater. You don't even have to tell him or explain about what you are doing. You simply begin to control what you can (yourself and your own actions) and as the improvements come, you take baby steps toward making a few more. As he begins to get positive feedback, he'll likely begin to participate without your even having to ask or having to spell it out for him.

Much Of The Time, Talking Him Into Saving The Marriage Is All In How You Package And Present It: As I said, most husbands are not going to jump at the change to discuss their feelings and slog through all of your problems. But if you don't necessarily want to go it alone and want to elicit at least some of his cooperation, you are so much better off not focusing on the negative.

You don't want to say anything like "our marriage is awful and if we don't work very hard right now, we're going to be very sorry." Instead, you want to shift the focus on the positive things that are easily attainable. The alternative would be something like: "do you remember when you couldn't keep our hands off each other? Remember when we took that trip to (fill in the blank) and never left our room? I miss that. I want that back. I want to return some of that excitement to our marriage and I don't think it would be all that difficult. Let's see what happens."

Do you see the difference? In the second scenario, you're giving him something to look forward to so that he will actually want to participate. And instead of asking "will you work with me to make that happen," you turned down the pressure and said "let's see what happens." In short, you haven't really asked him to do anything that he doesn't want to do. So, he has no reason to resist you and he just might want to stick around to see what's in store.

Sometimes, when you're trying to convince your husband to help you save the marriage, you should never focus on the convincing (or the work that it's actually going to take.) Instead, you'll often be better off if you take matters into you own hands and package the whole thing in a positive way so that you're husband is going to be the beneficiary of the plan rather than the reluctant partner in it. Yes, this requires more work on your part. But won't it be worth it in the end?

How do I know all this? Because I have lived it. I had to use the same methods to save my own marriage. And I eventually had to just do most of this myself. I made a lot of mistakes at first that almost cost me dearly, but I was able to change course. Luckily, over time (and by taking slow, calculated baby steps), I was able to reestablish intimacy and prevent the divorce, even though I was the only one who wanted to at the time. You can read a very personal story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com/.

Leslie Cane's blog is at http://isavedmymarriage.com.  She enjoys sharing the story of how she saved her own marriage to help others.