It Takes Two: Commit and Work Together

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

Ultimately it will take a commitment—a real promise from both of you—to change and work together if you are going to rebuild your relationship.

If your spouse isn’t willing to change or even consider the possibility of looking at this book at this point, then go ahead and skip to “If Only One of You Wants to Change: Changing Your Marriage by Yourself” just below. There are some techniques there you can use to jumpstart the change process on your own.

If you and your spouse are together on this, and you both want to make a change, then you have already started down the path toward rebuilding your marriage.

Congratulations.

But keep in mind that you’ve only just started. You have a fair distance to go together if you’re going to make your relationship into the intimate, loving state of companionship you want it to be.

That means you will have to take the time to make that happen. You can’t repair your marriage if you don’t spend time together. Good intentions are a great first step, but you need to take it a step further. You need to commit to spending the necessary time together to heal the wounds you have suffered. Wouldn’t you find time to meet with your best friend? Even the busiest people find time to be with a lover when they are starting or having an affair. Surely, you can make time to rejuvenate your marriage.

This isn’t going to happen overnight. Some days it will seem like things are going really well and your relationship is improving. Other days it will feel like you have taken three steps backward for every step forward you take. That’s natural, and it’s part of the healing process.

Even in the best relationships, people have bad days. There are days when you just don’t get along, when you argue, when you’re grumpy. That’s part of the human condition. So you should expect it. You will have your bad days.

The techniques you will learn in this book are not meant to be a new standard for you to succeed or fail against. As you learn them, you should consider their implementation as a work in progress.

For example, if you have had problems communicating you will learn tools you can use to improve your communication skills in section 2. But you can’t expect to master these skills overnight. It will take time. It will take practice. And it will take trial and error.

When anyone starts to learn a new skill they make mistakes at first. That’s only natural. Expect this as you start down your road to healing and don’t let yourself be deterred when you make mistakes or seem to fall back into your old patterns. Just work on improving a little each day if you can.

Set aside the time to pay attention to the needs of your relationship and expect that it will take some time before things truly start to improve. If you consider that your relationship is either improving or declining at any point, then you can see that even small steps will make a cumulative difference over time. It might be that you will only notice the improvement when you stop and look backwards over time and see the differences between now and then.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.