What is Trial Separation and How to make it Work for Both of You?

If a married couple feels that they don’t get along well with each other anymore, and if they think that they will be better off as not husband and wife anymore, first is that they result to trial separation. Now, you will be asking what a trial separation is, right?

Trial separation is actually an informal way of ending the marriage. It gives liberty to the spouse who wanted the divorce to experience how is it to be single again, without worrying about the responsibilities of being married. And if things got actually easy and they the spouse likes to be single again, then they will go through the process of divorce but then, if the spouse misses the company and the benefits of being married, well then they may stay married and start a new life and plan their future again.

For a trial separation to be effective, you may try consider these options:

·         Have a time frame. The ideal time for a trial separation is actually 3-6 months. In this way you will have the enough time to decide whether you want to continue the marriage of proceed to the divorce process. If this may take longer then, it will be more difficult for you to get back into the relationship because of the temptations that you will be getting along the way.

·         Before you decide on the trial separation, make sure that you have discussed what will be your arrangements with your spouse so that no one will be going out of the line. It is better that you have a pen and paper ready while discussing these so that it will be all clear to the both you that you have limits and it should be strictly followed.

·         Always be present in your therapy sessions. Make sure that you will not be skipping any of those whether or not your counselor is available or unavailable. Couples therapy is one way of giving you the time to meet with your spouse with the schedule that is both agreeable to both sides so that this set-up will be a successful one. If one party does not cooperate well, then this may not be successful at all and you are just wasting both your time and effort.

·         Don’t forget to include the financial obligations. Being in this kind of set-up doesn’t give you the liberty to not continue with your responsibilities as husband and wife. This will actually be expensive because you will be planning a budget for two households, so you really do need to sacrifice a bit for this financially.

·         Settle your intimacy issues. This is also an important part of planning your trial separation because this will either make or break the result of the set-up. It is well recommended that you won’t engaged in grave sexual interaction because it may interfere with the result of the whole set-up and you won’t be able to get accurate results about it in the end. So it is better that you decide on how intimate will you get when you are in this kind of situation after all, you can have more of that when all of your issues have been settled.

Trial separation will actually work out very fine if couples are only following strict rules of what they have decided on the kind of set-up that they will be doing and if they have full cooperation regarding this matter. But then couples are different, this process may work to some and to others it really won’t.