All marriages go through troubled times. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been married, there will a come a time when your love for your spouse will be tested and it will take more than that love to save your marriage.
How to Fix a Marriage
1. Giving up is not an option. To save your marriage, you must right away decide that divorce or separation is not part of your options. If you fill your head with thoughts of separating with your spouse, you will find more excuses to leave than to stay.
2. Dismiss fault finding. You and your spouse are two different individuals who made a vow to love each other for the rest of your lives. This means that more than the lovable qualities, you are marrying the person’s faults and flaws as well.
If you focus on the shortcomings of your spouse, you will find it harder to see the good side of your partner and appreciate them for all the reasons you married them in the first place.
3. Marriage is not a fairy tale. If there’s one thing that married couples should immediately get rid of in their heads, it’s the misguided notion that true love brings forth fairy tale endings.
The happy ever after only happens once you have sifted through the pile of rubbish that you have swept under the rug for all the years of your marriage and deal with them one by one.
4. Have an open conversation. A lot of marriages fail because spouses do not delve into their deeper feelings about the marriage for fear of damaging it some way.
Instead, one or both parties decide to keep mum about issues in the marriage and go on pretending everything’s fine in the hopes that the issues will die down eventually.
Open communication therefore is a very important factor that could save your marriage. Open communication also means really listening to what your partner is saying and keeping an open mind about what they’re feeling.
5. Forgive. Whatever wrongdoing your partner may have done, the only way to save your marriage is through sincere forgiveness. Bear in mind that when you forgive, you also forget what your partner may have done. One of the biggest issues that spouses may need to forgive is infidelity.
Do not condemn sinner. Find out what brought on the infidelity into marriage and openly talk about it. Forgiveness may take time and you may need to work on it one day at a time but if you are truly bent on saving your marriage, forgiveness is essential.
