Five signs you shouldn’t wed – those little moans could mean you’re heading for divorce, by a family lawyer
A TOP divorce lawyer in the UK has revealed the signs to look out for which means you shouldn’t marry your partner.
Ayesha Vardag, 55, is known as ‘the Diva of Divorce’ and has spent the last two decades ensuring she’s at the top of her field.
Having dealt with everything from celebrity cases to high net worth divorce settlements, Ayesha has seen it all.
Coupled with her personal experience of divorce, Ayesha has a professional and empathetic approach to the subject.
This makes the lawyer, who owns her own firm Vardags, uniquely positioned to share the top signs you shouldn’t marry the partner you’re with in a bid to avoid a divorce.
Personality Compatibility
After the initial attraction to someone, the very first question people tend to try to figure out is: ‘Are we compatible?’ – and for good reason.
If you do end up planning to propose or get married to one another, it’s important to be sure you want to spend the rest of your lives in each other’s company.
Speaking exclusively to Fabulous, Ayesha explained: “One of the biggest problems I see actually is kind of an intellectual mismatch. This often happens when you’ve got one person who’s extremely pretty and attractive and the other person tends to be very bright, very dynamic.
“And the pretty person sometimes isn’t, but they’re very pretty – which is obviously very legitimate as well.
“But when there’s a mismatch between them, that can be hard.”
Ayesha explained that in your marriage, you’re likely to have 1000 dinners together, so you have to think: “Is this the person I’m going to enjoy having 1000 dinners with?”
She continued: “Everybody you know will lose their looks to a greater or lesser extent. It’s the personality connection that will keep them together… The ability to have fun, the ability to interest each other, the ability to make each other laugh.
“So personality compatibility – if you don’t have that, don’t get married.”
Value compatibility
Besides your personalities, you need to share the same values. What if you want kids but your partner doesn’t?
Do you really want to give up that kind of dream?
Ayesha explained that if one person has the mindset of lying, cheating and stealing their way to power and you have another who grew up with integrity, they might be a mismatch.
“You’re going to end up losing respect for each other because you’re just not on the same wavelength,” she said.
“People have this amazing capacity to be blase about everything they don’t like [in a person] and think they can change it when they’re attracted to them.
“They will just make every excuse for them. And then they’ll think, ‘Oh that doesn’t matter, I didn’t care about that,’ when ultimately they do.”
Meanwhile, Ayesha said the women tend to feel like they can “change” their partner.
“And, actually, apart from clothes and social circle a little bit, you just can’t, you can’t actually change anyone,” she went on.
“Fundamentally, different values, or attitudes to children, attitudes to money, attitudes to honesty, attitudes to how you behave towards other people… You need to be compatible.”
Complaining
Constantly complaining about one another’s behaviour is a sign that something is “going wrong”, too.
Ayesha said: “If you’ve got a woman who says, ‘I can’t believe you haven’t arrange for me to go out on a date, you need to sort this or do that for me…’
“Or, ‘you need to entertain me more, you need to go shopping for me more, I can’t believe you didn’t get me this handbag…’
“This is very demanding and it’s a sign – not necessarily that they are a bad person – but that person doesn’t fit well with you.”
Constantly complaining about how you want your relationship to be instead of working on it together appears to be a bad sign.
Instead, you and your partner should be able to negotiate, compromise and work towards finding a balance that suits you both.
Jealousy
If complaining is a bad sign then being jealous is definitely not a good one, according to Ayesha.
Sharing an example of what she means, the lawyer explained: “If you have someone who goes, ‘do you think she’s prettier than I am? Who is this woman at work?’
“Or similarly, ‘why did it take you so long to meet up with me last night? What were you doing?’”
If this is a common occurrence, Ayesha said, then it fundamentally means your self-esteem is low and you might even think your partner might be “tempted to go off with anyone and everyone”.
She continued: “That, again, is a mismatch. If you’ve got people second guessing each other, worrying about infidelity and trying to control one another – that’s a very bad sign.”
Unbalanced relationships
The last issue Ayesha shared on the list was around being venal.
Sharing a famous example where this appeared to be the case, she spoke of Melania and Donald Trump.
She recounted an interesting exchange that took place while Melania, 53, visited a business class at New York University.
At the time, Melania and Donald, 77, had just married and a student asked her if she would still be with him if he was not rich.
She replied: “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?”
“If what you have is a relatively balanced, transactional relationship, that’s all fine,” Ayesha said.
“But if one of you is in it for the romance and the love, and the other one is trying to get what they can from it and trying to be transactional – want money, power or influence from you – that’s a problem.
You need to take your time and, as they say: marry in haste, repent at leisure.
Ayesha Vardag
“That’s another sign you should get out.”
It’s not all doom and gloom though. When Fabulous asked the top divorce lawyer for her number one recommendation to people before taking the leap to get married, she simply responded: “Be in a relationship for two years.”
Further explaining herself, she said: “Either live together or see each other regularly for two years [before marrying].
“Psychologists say that it takes two years for you to really get to know someone because that’s when the gloss kind of goes off everything.”
Once the honeymoon period has faded you’re essentially left with the reality of who that person really is and you can assess whether they’re right for you.
“I can’t think of how many times I’ve imagined and thought, ‘I’d like to marry that person’ for a while then it fades off and it turns out that I didn’t,” she said.
“You need to take your time and, as they say: marry in haste, repent at leisure.”