You turned your back on the truth and chose denial when you started to notice the little things - the coldness, the redirected warmth, the quick temper where it used to be so chill. You thought that your spouse just needed a little bit of time off, so you gave it, and then you found them out. Not explicitly in a physical setting, but not in friend zone either. The pain got you asking how to rekindle a marriage when you thought such a question will never occur to you.
But here you are, wondering how to soldier on. Somehow, your spouse had not crossed the threshold of being unforgivable, and you have decided to keep the marriage intact, but that does not mean getting over any kind of affair, be it a physical or emotional one, is easy. The forgiving part is the hardest one to complete, and you do need to complete it before you can begin rebuilding what was lost.
When you found them out, you were thrown into a world of hurt. Your faith was shredded and your sense of invincibility was shattered. A little, or maybe a lot, of love was lost, but you have decided to stay and get it back. Here’s how you can start doing that.
Get some time alone and meditate on how good it used to feel. There is nothing as indescribable as love and surely, you want the good times back, right? Yes, you have already forgiven your repenting spouse, but that is not the only work you need to do. This is how to rekindle a marriage, or at least, how to start.
You have to reflect. You have to accept. You have to reconnect. You have to fall in love again.
Do you remember the feeling? Borne by trust and an undefinable connection that transcends background, age, societal barriers and norms, the raw and powerful emotion can bind together all sorts of couples, be they total opposites or exact replicas of each other. It certainly had bound you. With it, you had come to think of magic, destiny, serendipity, fate, and all other mystic terms of predestination, as true.
How can they not be? Sometimes, the partner we choose comes from a completely strange and foreign land, and yet there is that wonderful sense that you know nobody else better, and that person also knows nobody else quite like you. Or maybe you’ve known each other for a long time, best friends both in the quality of relationship and the quantity of years spent together and apart.
Opposites attract, but birds of the same feather flock together, too. When either one leaves indefinitely but returns with the new promise to stay true, you can draw from your pool of happy memories, focusing on how good it can still be, to fly straight.
The affair had taught you that there is still so much to learn about each other. You can still grow together, create new experiences, wearing your brand new perspective on things, until both of you come to the full maturity of the forgiveness, and love starts to flow again in both directions.
This will never leave you. It will hang as an interesting conversation piece to those who know the both of you, and their curiosity may restart the fire of anger that had already simmered down. This will come up in fights, unless you promise to never use it as a weapon, and this you certainly must do. You must promise to not let this issue take hold of either one of you again.
The forgiven must not always dwell on the guilt. This is the beginning of how to rekindle a marriage. It is just another way of lying when you do nice things not out of sincere want to rebuild, but out of guilt and want for persecution. The constant giving of apologies will just as easily provoke the anger of the one who was betrayed. Accept what had happened, ask for forgiveness, and once it is given to you, move on.
The Christian Broadcasting Network, on their article on rekindling the romance in marriage, suggests that you should court your spouse at least 1.5 hours per week. This should be “a time to not talk about insurance, the bills, or your work problems, but rather focus on each other”. With these dates, aim to proactively create new connections to replace those that were broken.
The forgiver must learn to tolerate the past. You will remember the pain from time to time. This is natural, but obsessing over it will make you mistrust every move your spouse makes, binding the both of you in a choke hold neither can escape. You have to remind yourself actively to get off the mud. You have to realize that the negative feelings are there not just to hurt you, but also to remind you how worse it would be if your spouse had not returned to you, and how destructive it would be to your spirit if you did not find the strength to let the anger and frustration go.
The Huffington Post gives some tips in their article 5 Ways to Rekindle Your Marriage, and these tips are applicable in your situation, too. The cause of the issue to begin with had probably been a dry spell, a boring familiarity, and a lack of excitement in the marital affairs. By adopting a “rekindling attitude”, you can both try to prioritize the restoration of your marriage, instilling the idea into everything you do until you get close enough again to laugh without an edge.
You have to let your guards down and slowly let each other in. The issue had caused you to disconnect, and you must exert an effort to re-align. Soften up and go act like teenagers discovering each other for the first time. Have some play dates, go to the movies, eat at a fancy restaurant out of town, fire up some exciting conversations, plan for a vacation for just the two of you, and make it happen. The last one is especially important. It may be the best time and place to go back to the issue and talk about it with the perspective of a couple who have gotten over the past and wish to review their plan for the future.
The above advice focus on communication and the want to restart the old machinery of love, but it will not work if taken out of step. You must cross the formidable gate of forgiveness first and foremost, or all the next steps will be done in fear and uncertainty. Put your hearts into it. The point is not to return to how it was before, but to create something better to replace the old system that had failed.
The secret on how to rekindle a marriage is simply this: you have to remember the promise given on the first day of your journey together when your marriage took flight - to love, to stay faithful until the end, and to plow through any difficulty that will come your way. You both can start believing this promise again because there is nothing truer in the world than the love that had been fought for.
C Mellie Smith knows firsthand the pain of betrayal. At Infidelity Healing her mission is to help couples overcome infidelity and restore their relationship. Visit: http://infidelityhealing.com/ to get started.