sSara (00:05)

Empowered people make informed decisions that lead to living a life without regret. This is Sara Khaki and Shawna Woods from Atlanta Divorce Law Group. And this is the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. Welcome to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. I’m Sara Khaki with Atlanta Divorce Law Group and I’m joined by our very own managing partner, Shawna Woods. Shawna, today we’re going to talk about, you surrounding your relationship with a positive environment?

Let me kind of define what we mean by this. Environment meaning the people, the friends, the family, the time spent in your calendar, the way money spent in the marriage, the media that is consumed, the travel material that is read that brings a certain environment to the marriage. Is it creating a positive environment?

Or is it creating a negative environment? I think like anything else in our lives, when we want to make a change, not only is it important that we start making intentional changes within, like if I was to eat clean, if I wanted to be healthy and have a more healthy lifestyle, I wouldn’t just say, okay, first things I would do is I need to work out and I need to start watching what I eat. After that, I also need to watch what is…

The environment I’m putting myself in. If I’m constantly going to put in myself environments of fast food restaurants, constantly putting myself in an environment where alcohol is offered to me or putting myself in environment where I can’t be very active, it’s a very sedentary environment, am I going to succeed with my goal no matter how hard I make an intention to work out and eat healthy? Probably not, right? Same thing goes with success in…

Professional success or business success. If I decide that I want to reach certain professional status, am I going to get there if I spend a lot of time with people that do not have any jobs and have no ambition of getting a job? Probably not. So the concept of this is same thing goes for your marriage. If you can look at your marriage as an entity that requires certain things to be successful outside of just two

Good, wholehearted people who love each other and choose to be happy together. The environment you put that marriage in, the environment you put that partnership in will have an impact on the success of that partnership. I mean, I’m sure you have many examples of times we have talked to somebody who was, we asked them, why are you here? Why are you speaking to us? Why are we discussing divorce? And

How many times have you heard we wanted a stronger social life and we made some bad friends? I’ve heard that so many times.

sShawna (03:06)

So many times. There are a lot of times when people will come to me and say, I really wish we hadn’t started doing.

Whatever it was that led them down a different path. And to your point, we are what we consume. We are what we consume physically with our food. Because the first time, like you, the first time I want to start eating, correct? I go through and I clean out my house of anything that I don’t think is going to be healthy for me. Because I know myself. I know if it’s there, I’m probably going to consume it in a moment of weakness. We do the same things with, think about trash TV, right?

It doesn’t really give us anything. Doesn’t nourish our souls, but gosh, it’s sometimes fun to watch, right? If all we watch is trash TV, that doesn’t do anything for our growth mentally, physically, spiritually. Same thing with any kind of relationship. Are you letting riff-raff into your relationship? And is that riff-raff, you know,

Every Friday night to Sunday, we are out at so and so’s house drinking till one of us falls down. We come back, we have a fight because that’s what we were doing all weekend. Who are you surrounding yourselves with really does impact the person that you’re going to be. And to your point when there are a lot of examples that I get when people go down this road and it can be easy as, so this neighbor was going through a divorce.

sSara (04:38)

Right.

sShawna (04:40)

And

All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of divorced women who are hanging out at so and so’s house every Friday night. And what my wife is hearing is how cool it is to be divorced, how much fun they’re having, you know, instead of working on the relationship or spending time with other couples and having fun that way, they’re exposing themselves. And I’m not saying a group of divorced ladies is not fun, because quite frankly, they can be.

But is it healthy for an individual who wants to be in a happy marriage, who has a good marriage, to go and hang out in those environments when what they’re consuming mentally, what they’re hearing, is not congruent to what they’re saying they want?

sSara (05:27)

So you know that famous line, I don’t know exactly who said it or how it goes, but something to the effect of you are the sum of your five closest friends. Yes. I think it’s the same thing with marriage. You are basically the sum of the five closest married couples you have around you. And I think one of the biggest things you learn in partnership or in marriage is there’s a difference between having a really good friend for you.

Versus having a good friend up to the marriage. One of my criteria in life as getting older and try to stay married and have a healthy, happy marriage and continue to work on our marriage and on the goals that we wanna achieve together is it’s not just important that I have a friend that is good for me. The criteria actually goes, is this friend good for our marriage?

It is no longer just necessary that it’s not enough that they’re just a good friend for me. If they’re a good friend to me, but if I’m about to walk off the ledge on my marriage and they’re not the friend that would say, Hey, let’s take a pause. Let’s think about this. What’s going on? Are you sure is what you want to do? That’s not a good friend to the marriage for me. Of course, if you know, you’re in an abusive situation, you’re in a situation that you’re in danger.

Whole nother, that’s an outlier situation. I, yes, a good friend would help you get out of that. But I think in, we’re talking more averages where people are just going to their friend and complaining about their spouse. And instead of the spouse, the friend taking a moment and saying, hey, how are you showing up? What’s your part in this? Or let’s talk it through, or, you know, what if this, what if that? And just saying, you know what? He’s such a bastard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is not a friend to the marriage.

Which ultimately is probably not a friend to you.

sShawna (07:24)

A great point and one of the ones that I was thinking of as well is if you have a friend that does not like your spouse. And again, we’re not talking about abusive situations. We’re talking about personality, whatever it is. They don’t like your spouse. How is that going to affect you and your feelings toward your spouse? I was thinking in particular, there’s this video clip of Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez. Yeah. Back when Ms. Gomez was dating a very famous singer herself. And

There’s a picture, it focuses in on Taylor’s face as she watches her friend walk over to this partner that she has. And you can just see this total, ugh, disdain and rolling of the eyes at the very thought of him. And that’s what kind of made me laugh. Like if you have that friend, now obviously that relationship was not made to last and that friendship was, but if you have a friend, let’s just take that.

Who that’s the way they react to your partner. They react in such a negative way they don’t like them. That is going, their feelings are gonna rub off on you. Things are going to influence you and you may even be like, I want this friend to like me. Want them to see my value. So I’m gonna downplay my spouse to them because they are already downplaying. It’s a very slippery slip that you can go on. And so you do have to be careful about not only your friends, but who you hang out with at

sSara (08:32)

Absolutely.

sShawna (08:52)

The summer parties, the barbecues, the football get togethers that we all have. Because someone else may not be happy in their relationship and their marriage. Misery not only loves company, but misery may love trying to influence how you have intimate relationships with your spouse because they want to be either take your place or be involved.

sSara (09:03)

And misery loves company.

So to take this further outside of just friends, think it even matters with the media you consume, what you read, how you spend your time together. At the end of the day, all these things are being consumed and they do create an environment. And what are they normalizing? What are you watching on the news about all the celebrity divorces, whether you’re or you’re reading material that perhaps is completely off value system.

Of your marriage or you’re spending your quality time together like you said, in just heavy drinking, anything but other than just to reconnect with your spouse or reconnect with yourself and who you are, who you want to be. At the end of the day, I think it really comes back to what are the values of the marriage? And again, if we look at this marriage as an entity, what are its values? What’s the mission of this marriage? Like what’s

What’s the purpose of these two people coming together? What do they want to achieve together in this life and this marriage or in this partnership together? And by what values do they want to get there? So if we have that benchmark, then anything that comes up against it, is that really something I should be spending my time on? Would it take me further away from the goals of this entity, of this partnership, or bring me closer to it? Will this…

Normalize some sort of behavior for me that will keep me further away from the goals of this marriage or will it take me further from it? One of my favorite quotes that I’ve heard from my coach David Nagel, he says, what you don’t consciously reject, you subconsciously accept. So you may say, yeah, we have these friends.

And they come over and they do this and that and we don’t agree with a lot of things they do but you know it’s, we just have a nice casual time with them. They are involved in something or some kind of thinking or some kind of way of being that is out of alignment with what you want your marriage to look like and who the two of you want to be. Just you not consciously rejecting that means you’ve subconsciously brought that into your marriage and into your life.

Same thing goes with what we watch on the news, what we watch on the media, how we spend our time, and how we spend our money.

sShawna (11:47)

Absolutely. And just to be clear, this conversation is not about people who are in abusive relationships. I want to be very clear because people who need a checkpoint of if my relationship is healthy or not and stepping away from an abusive relationship is an important thing to do. What we’re talking about though is allowing negative influences into a happy marriage that can destroy a happy marriage that really can be the catalyst

To having to come see us.

And I think it’s really hard to do that with family members in particular. Because I will tell you from my experience, and my dad actually said this to me one time, this has been many, many years ago, and I was complaining about a relationship to him. And he said, Shawna, if you are intending to be in this relationship, I need you not to share these things with me because I cannot stop disliking this person.

And support this relationship when you’re coming to me and telling me these things. Well, that was not a good relationship and my dad was appropriate in telling me that. It was an amazing gift that he actually gave to me because what he did was I’m gonna support you in your relationship but I have to draw this boundary of where you’re allowed to tell me. And it’s hard for parents. Having a daughter who is grown and has had a couple of different relationships, it is so hard sometimes to support a relationship

When you know certain things are going on that you feel are hurtful or harmful to the person you love. And being in the contrast, if you’re telling your parents, your sister, your grown children, whoever it is about the relationship that you’re in, you need to check yourself. Are you only ever sharing the negative or do you call them up and share the positive too? Because that can influence

Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I have a

Probably a different definition of family than you do because we have different backgrounds But I think that you have to be very circumspect before you simply say I’m gonna cut off a family member Because I think it’s negatively affecting a relationship I don’t think that’s always the appropriate thing to do in fact most the times it’s not appropriate thing to do especially if it is you know a a child or a parent or a sister, know somebody who is in your nuclear family and you have very close ties to

That being said, it’s your priorities, right, that you need to set. I’ve always been of the mind that each individual, if a family member needs to be spoken to about something, it is that person’s family, right? For you, you would speak to your family. Your husband would speak to his family so that we we lessen the conflict. That’s word I’m looking

Or the conflict that could potentially be between your spouse and a family member, because we all have these. Gosh, know, families are all up in our business and we’re all up in their business so much. And when you have strong-minded, strong-opinion people, sometimes there’s gonna be conflict and how to manage that among family members. Think what you guys are doing is incredibly important. Let’s talk how we’re gonna manage this conflict that they may be causing in our relationship and how we’re gonna minimize that.