Working to Make Your Marriage WonderfulFrom: Dr. Frank Gunzburg Great marriages take work. There’s no way around that. Some people think that having a relationship should be easy. They think, “Gosh, if I have to work at it, that probably means we aren’t supposed to be together, right?” No, that isn’t right. Whoever said that a marriage didn’t require work? Of course it requires work. All great marriages require work. That’s the way it goes. Remember, it only takes one person to break up a relationship. But keeping a relationship together is a skill. Think of it like this. There are skills you have to acquire to get dates. There are other skills you need to make those dates a success. Still more skills are required to make long-term dating work. Getting engaged requires yet another set of new skills. Getting married and staying together the first couple of years requires…skills. And then there’s another skill you need to learn to get beyond that. There’s a skill you have to learn to make a long-term marriage work. All the skills you learn in the previous phases help you practice for long-term marriage, but they aren’t enough. Part of doing long-term marriage successfully is working at the marriage, making sure that you minimize whatever problems there are and that you maximize the positive things you’ve got in your relationship. Regarding the skills for long-term marriage, we don’t get many chances because we are limited by our life-span. There are benefits to long-term marriage that cannot be explained to someone who has never been there. It would be like a butterfly trying to explain his change and new life to a caterpillar. If you have been through a difficult time with your partner, if your spouse has betrayed you in ways that you can’t currently imagine forgiving, you can use this as an opportunity to rebuild your marriage. You can take the pain you are suffering from right now and transform it into a foundation on which you work to heal your marriage and yourself. You can overcome these troubling times and build a marriage that is better than ever. The only way it is going to work for you is if you throw yourself into the process. You have to work these steps in your marriage as much as you need to until you come to a place where you can honestly say that your relationship has healed – even more – that it is better than it was before. I know it seems strange to think of it this way, but betrayal can be an opportunity. You can use it as a motivator to do the work you need to do on your marriage to make it better than it has ever been. This path is open to you right now. You can travel the road of acceptance and reach the light of forgiveness if that is what you choose and you are both willing to do the necessary work to obtain that. Work the steps in this guide – in time, you will move past this offense and into a brighter future together. Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years. For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/ |