Trust is a difficult thing to attain and once it’s been broken is even more difficult to regain. However, if you really want to fix your marriage and save it from divorce, then you can work slowly towards creating a happy marriage once again.

The first thing to consider is what caused you to lose your trust in the first place. There has to be an understanding between both partners as to what led up to the problem. By talking about it and discussing the where’s and why’s you can work out how to try and rebuild the trust between you again.

There is no quick fix answer to lack of trust. Once you feel uncertain about your partner there is a constant feeling of doubt which is difficult to eliminate. It therefore has to be a joint effort and continuous openness in order to regain the feeling of security you once had.

Below are four ways of facing the problem and trying to overcome it:

1. You have to be prepared to forgive and to move on. If you are constantly feeling bitterness towards your spouse you will not be able to work together to rebuild the trust.
2. Talk, talk, talk. So often couples drift apart because they don’t talk to one another any more. By discussing your feelings and problems you can help each other to build a closeness and trust and feel secure in the knowledge that you’re helping each other to overcome any problems together.
3. Curb your suspicions and jealousy. Don’t watch and accuse every time your spouse is home late or spending time talking to someone else. Over possessiveness can lead to a feeling of claustrophobia and the instinct then is to run. You have to let go, and learn to trust again.
4. Try to keep the interest alive in the marriage by doing things together. Even making time to sit and dine together by candlelight one evening a week can help to reignite the romance you feel you may have lost.

Apart from your partner’s indiscretions which originally caused the problem, be it financial, another partner, or whatever other reason, you should also look to yourself. Could it be that you have in some way contributed to the situation.

Of course, at the same time, your spouse must be completely transparent. If they even seem to be hiding something, they are not making the effort that they should be making to earn your trust. For couples with trust issues, I highly recommend the book, Save the Marriage. This book lays out a plan for both the “guilty” party and the “hurt” spouse. It talks about how you have to step back from the problem and focus on the marriage. The step-by-step plan it gives can even help a couple recover from an affair… even make the marriage stronger afterwards than it ever was before. Click here to read more about this book…

Trust is a difficult thing to define, but to a certain extent we all want to feel we can rely on someone completely before we commit to them. The fact that this doesn’t always work out does not mean it can’t be rectified, and if there was once a deep love then it’s definitely worth trying to overcome the problems together for the sake of your family and to fix marriage.

Remember though, it’s a two way solution and you must both commit to it completely for it to work. You can fix a marriage after trust has gone, but it will take time and patience and a great deal of self searching. If the love is still there it’s worth the effort.

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In any marriage there comes a time when, for whatever reason, things become strained and arguments develop. In some ways it’s healthy to have disagreements, but when they start to take over the happy marriage you once new then it’s time to do something about it.

Below are six things that can cause a marriage to disintegrate:

• Spending too much time away from home and each other, either working or mixing with friends, doesn’t help a relationship. It’s inevitable that a spouse will feel neglected and start to wonder what the attraction is that keeps you away from home.
• Sex is important in any marriage as the intimacy between two people binds you closer together. If the sex becomes less and less then the chances are your feelings for each other will diminish and you will feel isolated.
• Financial problems are often a major cause of disharmony in a marriage. However, if you don’t try to work the issues out together your marriage will not survive. The first thing to do is assess the situation and see where the problem lies. Help each other to overcome the problem and face up to whatever needs to be done.
• Don’t let yourself go. A scruffy appearance and unclean habits can be a big turn off. It really doesn’t take that much effort to keep yourself looking good and it’s as much for yourself as your partner. By making the effort every day to look your best you will feel more confident and happier inside. A disciplined daily routine can be achieved no matter what your situation and will keep your interest in each other alive.
• Being affectionate does not always come easily to some people, but if you want to retain that initial feeling you had for each other it’s important to show affection. Everyone likes to feel loved, and it’s not enough to say ‘well you know I love you’. As the song from ‘My Fair Lady’ says…..”show me!”.
• Arguments are inevitable in any marriage, but to carry the grudge around with you, and perhaps sulk for days on end, is very destructive. It builds up even more aggression and makes it impossible to let go. It really isn’t that difficult to say ‘sorry’ and that one little word can make all the difference in the world.

A happy marriage is built on compromise, talking, listening, being prepared to not always be right, and sharing problems together. No problem is insurmountable if you face it together and work to ease the burden of it as one.

Marriage is not an easy institution, but then nothing that’s worthwhile ever is. You cannot expect to be happy ever after if you’re not prepared to put everything you have into the union and face up to whatever comes your way. It’s easy to lose sight of your hopes and dreams when life becomes difficult, but together you can overcome most things if you really want to.

To learn even more ways you can keep the love in your marriage, click here.

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My daughter was recently in her school’s performance of Fiddler On TheRoof. She was one of the daughters. If you don’t know the story, it focuses on the changing culture of marriage, from one where the marriage is arrainged by family and community to one based on mutual attraction.

In one of the songs, the main character asks his wife if she loves him. She replies that for 25 years, she has shared his bed, made his meals, tended his house, raised his children — so what kind of question is that? The point is that in their relationship, love wasn’t even a question or consideration. But after some back-and-forth, they decide that, indeed, they love each other.

This led me to think about what I know about marriage. And here is what I think about the question of love and marriage: we fall in love to get together, then spend the rest of our lives learning to love the other.

You see, the initial attraction is really about “I.” “I” feel a certain way, so I know I am “in love.” But that part of the relationship is driven by my need to feel that way, my need to be with the other person, my need to have my needs met. My needs are fueled by my desire to feel the intense emotion of “being in love.”

But in reality, love is a verb, something I do for the other. So, it takes the rest of my life to learn how to attend to my spouse’s needs. From my desire to be with my spouse comes my desire to meet my spouse’s love needs.

We are “fooled” into commitment by the overwhelming feeling of attraction, and then we have to put forth effort to create a sustained relationship. I say “fooled” because our culture has us believing that this love is the foundation of a relationship. It is not. It is merely a temporary starting point. It is not the destination. It is just a part of the journey to a lifetime relationship.

Those intense feelings will calm over time. The overwhelming need to be with someone that marks the infatuation portion of a relationship is not sustainable on its own. It’s like placing a flame in a bottle. Eventually, the flame will burn all the oxygen in the bottle and be extinguished.

So, there has to be some “fueling of the fire.” This is “love,” the verb. When I act in loving ways, I fuel the fire and keep it burning. If I stop tending to the other’s needs because I don’t feel that infatuation, the relationship will slowly (or not so slowly) die away.

When we continue to believe that “love” (infatuation) is the heart of a relationship, when that feeling is gone, we believe we are no longer in love. That is not the case; we have just failed to fuel the fire.

Reality TV has proven that any two people, given the right circumstances and settings, can fall into love (chemistry of infatuation). But story after story shows that it is harder to make the switch to “true love” that comes from action. Choose action, and don’t be fooled by chemistry.

By acting on love, by making love a verb and not an emotion, we keep the emotional fire stoked. And that is the great irony: if we depend on the feeling of being in love to keep us together, it will fail. But if we set that aside and focus on being loving, the feeling of being in love is sustained. Mature love is a verb, not an emotion.

Click here to save your marriage…

Each year in America alone, nearly 1 million marriages end in divorce.This is an incredible number! That would be as if all the citizens of Houston Texas were divorced (each divorce leaves 2 people).

The question is how many of those marriages could be saved. Unfortunately, that is an invisible number. If your marriage stays together, it is hard to find in the statistics. As Marian Wright Edelman wrote, statistics are stories with the tears washed off.

Can your marriage be saved? If I could answer that, I would be a wealthy man. I can tell you that if your marriage is in trouble and you do nothing, the outcome is guaranteed. If you do something, there is a much better chance that your marriage will be saved.

And I can tell you, in four simple steps what you can do to save your marriage. You can start right now. But you must understand that I said “simple.” That is not the same as “easy.” These steps are not easy. They do, however, give you a path that you must follow if you want to change the destiny of a marriage in trouble.

Here are the 4 steps:

1) Quit the blame game. Stop blaming your spouse and stop blaming yourself. This is the first step because marriages get frozen into a pattern of blame that immobilizes any prospect of progress. Instead, the momentum gets dragged down and down.

Blame is our way of avoiding seeing ourselves clearly. It is much easier to point the finger somewhere and say “It’s their fault.” But in marriage, you can just as easily turn that pointing finger on yourself and place the blame there, saying “it’s all my fault.”

Unfortunately, blame feels good in the short-term, but in the long-term, it prevents any shift or change. So, even if you can make a long list of why you or your spouse should be blamed, forget it. Even if that list is factual, it will not help you put your marriage back together. Blame is the fuel of divorces.

2) Take responsibility. Decide you can do something. Change always begins with one person who wants to see a change. Understand that taking responsibility is not the same as taking the blame (see above).

Instead, blame is saying “regardless of who is at fault, there are some things I can do differently, and I am going to do them.” What buttons do you allow your spouse to push? What buttons do you push with your spouse? Decide not to allow those buttons to be pushed and stop pushing the buttons.

What amazes me in my counseling is that everyone knows what they should be doing or not doing. But it is difficult to move in that direction. Don’t be caught in that. Decide that you will take action.

The difference between blame and responsibility is this: if I am in a burning building, I can stand around trying to figure out who started the blaze, why it has spread so quickly, and who I am going to sue when it is over (blame), or I can get myself and anyone else I can out of that building (taking responsibility). When a marriage is in trouble, the house is on fire. How will you take action to save the marriage?

3) Get resources from experts. If others have been helped, you can be, too. Experts with a great deal more perspective and experience can be a real help in these situations. Do your research and divide the useless from the useful, then take advantage of the useful.

Don’t assume that your situation is so different from every other situation. I can tell you that after 20-some years of providing therapy, not too much new comes through my doors. Don’t get me wrong; the story changes, but the dynamics are the same.

Remember what Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” In other words, what got you into trouble will not get you out of trouble. That requires a whole new level of thinking. And that is what you get from an outside expert, someone with a fresh perspective.

4) Take action. More damage is done by doing nothing by taking a misstep. It is too easy to get paralyzed by the situation. Therapists often talk about “analysis paralysis.” This occurs when people get so caught up in their churning thoughts and attempts to “figure things out” that they never take action.

It is not enough to simply understand what is causing the problem. You must then act! On a daily basis, I find people coming to my office with the belief that if they can just understand their problem, it will resolve itself. That simply does not happen. Resolution of the situation takes action.

Will your marriage be saved? If you follow my suggestions, you have infinitely more opportunity for saving your marriage than if you do nothing. Marriage is one of those places where it takes two to make it work, but only one to really mess things up. You can only do your part, but many times, that is enough. Resolve not to ask the question but to begin to act.

Are you ready to take action? Grab the best-selling resource on the internet for saving marriages: Save The Marriage, Even If Only You Want It! You can find it HERE!

Do you nurture hidden feelings of anger and resentment toward your spouse? Are you constantly suffering because you are reminded of the past wrongs of your marriage partner? Are you finding yourself tallying all the injustices you feel have been committed against you down to the last detail? Have you ever been cheated by your spouse?

If your answer to all the questions is yes, you are carrying heavy baggage that will surely be harmful to your marriage and to your family as a whole. You may have had your trust betrayed or felt pain because of a cheating spouse. Maybe it is time for you to forgive.

Before you shake your head and say “no way,” it would help you to see that you need to forgive not just to save your marriage or your family, but for your own sake as well. It is normal to feel miserable either because you have been cheated or simply because of your partner’s insensitivity to your needs. But walking around feeling depressed, disappointed, and frustrated will have an impact to the people around you, especially your children, not to mention, your physical disposition as well.

You tend to overlook all the good things and people that come your way. You keep your head too low, looking at the dirt and the mud you fail to see how blue the sky is or how bright the sun is shining. Forgiveness is not easy to give. It requires humility and acceptance, something many see as signs of weakness. The wounded would rather build walls around them to keep their distance from their partner, refusing to “let go” or “make peace.”

One thing we have to learn about forgiveness is that it should be made as a conscious decision. It is difficult and it takes time and sheer determination but it is also possible. In saving your marriage, you have to decide for yourself that you would like to start all over again despite the risk of being hurt again. In a way, you are little by little rebuilding your trust on your partner.

Think of forgiveness as a gift you deserve for yourself. In the process, you accept that your partner did you wrong, or betrayed your trust, or broke you to pieces. You admit your grief, your pain, and your suffering before you acknowledge that you are ready to forgive to save your marriage or for the sake of your children and whole family. You will forgive because you love your spouse, which is why you were hurt because of what he or she did to you in the first place.

Another thing about forgiving is that it is not synonymous to forgetting. When you forgive past wrongs, you still remember your partner’s wrongdoing but without feeling as resentful as in the beginning. Many couples who found themselves in the same situation make the mistake of blaming each other so they find it hard to move on. It is usually harder for the children seeing their parents resent each other.

You could still save your marriage. Start forgiving and allow the wounds to start healing.

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