This Marriage Saving Guide is intended to provide you, the poor soul who is about to lose his marriage if he doesn’t shape up, with a set of rules to help govern your behavior during the marriage rescue operation.
The authors of this guide are NOT counselors or lawyers, but are simply persons who have been through this mess and out of a sense of altruism are seeking to give back to their fellow man what they have learned.
First of all, it must be understood that there has been a great deal of myths promulgated by modern society on what constitutes a satisfactory marital relationship. You must unlearn everything you have learned from movies, popular culture, and especially about the way you grew up. What matters is not what you have been lead to believe by our society or the way you grew up, but rather your commitment to your marriage and your ability to learn and correct yourself. Let’s be real - your spouse may leave you if you do everything this guide says; somewhere in this whole process is a critical step of “letting go”. You may follow everything in this guide to the tee; however, if it is perceived as manipulation or “checking the box” your spouse will not believe you are sincere and all of your learning is for naught.
Consider an analogy to holding a batch of sand in your palm. If you squeeze too hard the harder it will become to hold the sand. This very core concept can not be taught to you - it can only HAPPEN to you. Until it happens there is no way for anyone to explain it with words. Another analogy may be trying to explain the love of one’s children to someone who does not yet have children or even to your own children. They can not understand until they have their own. Now with this said, make no mistake that there ARE things you can do to make matter worse which is why the practical steps are placed first. They are there to help keep you from making this any worse until you have the necessary moment of clarity.
There are themes to things that work and themes to things that do not. There are patterns and cycles in your own emotions and those of your spouse which you must learn. You must learn your emotional cycle to avoid getting desperate and doing something to lose any progress you have made.
There are expectations you have had of your marriage that have brought you searching on the Internet for answers. The persons writing on this site are speaking from personal experience. We have been there and will advise to the best of our abilities; however, ultimately it is up to you to learn everything you can about marriage and relationships to make this work. This is on a practical level.
Now with the practicalities out of the way, you may come to a point where after you have tried everything - everything is still not working. That’s because there needs to be a true change inside you. This guide will talk about God, aka Yahweh, Jesus, aka the Great Spirit, the Almighty, etc. from time to time, but realize it is based on things that have happened to us.
Call us back woods, bible thumpers, holy rollers, believers of ancient superstitions, or just plain silly heads still flirting with ancient religious ideals, but all of us have found something on the spiritual side of us that helped us make it through this. We truly believe that at some point, the step you must take is to turn it over to the Almighty and just give up. He does his best work once you let Him take over. Ironically, these last three to four sentences won’t make any sense to you until it happens.
As you proceed through the guide, we hope that eventually you make a spiritual connection with the Almighty. We don’t get any money for this - we don’t get any extra bonus points - everything in this guide is free. We just like to see others come to know the bittersweet joy of what we have found. It can take some a life time to find it, but once you do - miracles and great things will happen.
As it is written, even the demons believe; however, it is something greater than just mere belief. It is a way of life - a spiritual and emotional connection to something much greater than ourselves. All those questions you’ve had about why we are here, etc. - well there is a reason you have asked yourself that and perhaps one day you got caught up in the business of life and quit asking. You may not find your answers here, but you can still use the information to better understand your marriage. Stated succinctly, the easiest path to saving your marriage is actually just finding God, but then that is the very purpose of our lives and it takes some quite a while.
You may be able to do this by yourself without the Almighty’s help. We acknowledge that this is possible; however, we can attest that it will me much more difficult.
Let us begin!