How To Save Your Marriage

Religious persuasion aside, when you got married you entered into a covenant…a binding obligation in the sight of God, your family, friends, etc.  Undoubtedly you said some sort of wedding vow…Did you catch that word?  Wedding VOW.  Whether you spoke a traditional wedding vow or one that you and your spouse came up with, the point of that vow was to declare your (ready?) COMMITTMENT to one another.  After all, that is what a vow is!  I really don’t want to come across as harsh here — that’s not my goal!  But let me take this opportunity to remind you that no one promised you that your marriage would be problem free.  No one promised you that your marriage wouldn’t take WORK.

“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”

From this day….forward.  In all circumstances.  Until death do us part.

And if you are fortunate enough to be blessed with children, let me ask you this:

What are you teaching your child about the importance committment if you go ahead and break yours?

Seriously - think about that.

Him - 4
Her - 27

“True love keeps no record of wrongs”.  This is a big one.  Let me get real practical with you here… If your spouse admits his mistakes and screw ups, obviously you need to forgive him.  But you also need to do everything you can to forget about that wrong too.  Now obviously you’re not going to literally fail to remember how your spouse wronged you…our human minds rarely allow that to happen… But for all intents and purposes you CAN forget about the “past sins” of your spouse, and I highly recommend that you do…

You know how to do this?  You stop keeping score.

For a long time in my marriage I was guilty of this… it’s like I had a (long) scorecard in my mind where I made a mental note of every time my wife screwed up…  and the scorecard would get longer and longer….and every time we fought, I was very good at reminding my wife about all her past mistakes…all her screw ups.

Do I even have to tell you what this did to our marriage?

Let’s just say my continual reminders to my wife about her past mistakes didn’t exactly bring us together…In fact, it just drove us apart even further.

The truth of the matter is that both you and your spouse probably have a whole lot of things you could mark on the scorecard.  Past mistakes that happened…things you’ve since settled but not totally forgotten about…

You need to throw away the scorecard.  And even more importantly, you need to stop keeping score.

My advice is that when you forgive your spouse about a particular thing (either because he/she asked for forgiveness or you just decided to “move on”), then you also need to pretend that this thing never happened.  And like we said previously, it’s not that your mind will cease to remember..  It’s just that you are making a committment to not bring it up again.  Period.

Think your husband may be cheating on you?  It’s a shame but it certainly happens, and without getting into all the psychological reasons let me just give you some of those warning signs to look for.  Hopefully some of you wives will find this useful…

1) Your husband frequently stays up later than you do and rarely goes to sleep when you do.

2) Your husband seems markedly more “jumpy” and nervous than he used to be.

3) Your husband doesn’t look you in the eye as much as he used to.

4) Your husband shows little or no intimacy towards you anymore.

5) Your husband generally appears cold (not warm or affectionate) and aloof.

These are just some of signs that your husband may be cheating, there are actually many more (unfortunately).  But hopefully this post has helped some of you wives out there…hang in there.  Also I highly recommend you check out this book (How To Catch A Cheating Spouse) for excellent help on this topic…