Four Rules to Guide Marital Recovery

After you are through withdrawal from the addiction to your lover, your depression will have lifted and you will no longer feel a craving to talk to your lover. At that time you will be ready to put into place rules that will guide you and your husband toward a deep love for each other. After you have followed the rules for a while (six months to two years), you and your husband will be soul-mates.

These are the Four Rules to Guide Marital Recovery that you and your husband should follow to help you restore your love for eachother:

1. The Rule of Protection: Avoid being the cause of your spouse's unhappiness.

If you and your husband want to be in love with each other, you must build your Love Bank accounts. But before you build them, you must be sure there are no leaks in the Love Bank. It's pointless to deposit love units into a sieve, where every deposit is promptly withdrawn by a Love Buster. So you must make a special effort to plug up those leaks by committing yourselves to avoid being the cause of each other's unhappiness.

The most obvious things spouses do to ruin their love for each other is what I call Love Busters. They are angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, annoying behavior, selfish demands and dishonesty. I describe these destructive habits in my basic concepts, but if you need special help learning how to avoid them, I suggest you read, Love Busters: Overcoming Habits that Destroy Romantic Love. This book will help you identify the Love Busters that keep emptying your Love Bank accounts, and show you how to stop inflicting them on each other.

Most of the Q&A columns I've posted on the Marriage Buildersﾮ web site focuses attention on the Policy of Joint Agreement (never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse). This policy protects both you and your husband from each other thoughtless decisions. Your affair was a blatant example of thoughtlessness on your part because you knew it would hurt your husband, but you went ahead and did it anyway. The Policy of Joint Agreement is a very important guide to helping you keep the Rule of Protection. That's because it helps you realize that anything you do that hurts your husband is off limits to you, regardless of how wonderful it makes you feel.

If you had followed the Policy of Joint Agreement, you would never have had an affair. But the Policy will also help you avoid hurting each other in a host of other ways, too. My book, Fall in Love, Stay in Love, can help you learn how to follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, and use it to negotiate agreements that are fair for both of you. Once you learn to negotiate with each other fairly, you will have learned how to follow the Rule of Protection.

2. The Rule of Care: Meet your spouse's most important emotional needs.

The way to deposit the most love units is to meet a person's most important emotional needs. Your lover did that when he wrote you all those e-mail letters because conversation was your most important emotional need. After one month of filling your Love Bank with thousands of love units that were e-mailed to you, you found him irresistible -- you were in love with him.

Conversation is not your only important emotional need. Affection, recreational companionship, admiration and sexual fulfillment may be some of the other important emotional needs that your lover met. Unless your husband eventually meets your must important needs as well as your lover met them, you will be frustrated and at risk for another affair.

Sometimes a spouse must learn to meet a need that he or she has never been very effective in meeting. Many of the spouses I've counseled have had to learn to be affectionate for the first time in their lives. They also have had to learn to be stimulating conversationalists and skilled lovers. They have had to learn to provide greater financial support, become more effective in their parenting skills and learn to become admiring instead of being critical. New habits that lead to need fulfillment can be learned by anyone. All it takes is a plan and willingness to follow it until expert level is achieved.

But your husband may already know how to meet your emotional needs. An important reason that you had an affair was that your husband's work schedule prevented him from giving you the attention you craved from him. When you and your husband agree to follow this second Rule to Recovery, his work schedule will no longer stand between you, because meeting your needs will become your husband's highest priority. All the needs that your lover was meeting for you will be met by your husband in the future.

If you need help identifying and learning how to meet each other's important emotional needs, I suggest you read, His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-proof Marriage. It describes the ten most important emotional needs for men and women, and how to become an expert at meeting those needs. When your husband has learned to meet your needs, he will be depositing so many love units that his account in your Love Bank will be overflowing. By then, you will be thoroughly convinced that leaving your lover to rebuild your marriage was the right decision to make.

3: The Rule of Time: Give your spouse your undivided attention.

You indicated in your letter that it was the lack of your spouse's attention that drove you into the arms of your lover. But it may have been more a lack of time than a lack of attention. As I already mentioned, your husband may already know how to meet your emotional needs, but unless he sets aside enough time to do it, all of his skill does you no good at all. It's the man who gives you time for undivided attention who will win your heart.

I suggest that you and your husband plan to spend at least 15 hours each week together, giving each other your undivided attention. Use that time to meet each other's emotional needs for affection, conversation, recreational companionship and sexual fulfillment. I have found that if that amount of time is taken to meet emotional needs, you can spend the rest of your 100 waking hours each week doing just about anything you please, without any risk to your love for each other. But if you do not set aside that time, your good intentions will not buy you a single love unit.

Since most everything we do must be scheduled or we don't do it, I suggest you take about a half an hour each week (say, Sunday afternoon from 3:30 to 4:00) to schedule your time together for the next week. Get out your schedules and write each other into your appointment books. Once scheduled, don't let anything interfere with your time together.

I suggest spending the same days and times together every week because it's easier to remember than a new time each week. Besides, you can be better emotionally prepared to be with each other if you always know that Tuesday evening you will be together from 7 to 10.

I also suggest that you spend time together when you have plenty of energy. Don't give each other the leftovers, give each other the best of yourselves. That's why I generally rule out time together after 11:00 pm. For one thing, you need your sleep for the challenges of the next day, and for another, there are not too many people who are at their best that late at night.

Finally, I suggest that you spread your time out every week, giving each other at least one hour of undivided attention every day. I am generally opposed to cramming all of your time together into a marathon weekend of 15 hours, because undivided attention is required, and 15 hours of anything makes undivided attention almost impossible.

4. The Rule of Honesty: Be completely honest with your spouse.

We have already discussed honesty as an extraordinary precaution to prevent you from contacting your lover, so I won't say much more about it. But what you begin as an extraordinary precaution, must become the standard way you and your husband communicate with each other -- with openness and honesty.

You have not been honest with your husband. If you had been honest, you could never have had an affair. Your honesty is your husband's greatest protection because it lets him know what you are up to. It also helps you both make adjustments to each other. Instead of having an affair, you should have told him how unhappy you were with his negligence of you, and how you were falling in love with another man who would give you his time and attention. If you had ended the budding relationship then, and focused on getting more of your husband's undivided attention, you would not have put both of you through such an ordeal.

The Basic Concepts section of this web site contains a section entitled, "the Policy of Radical Honesty." It outlines precisely what the rule of honesty is. It's complete honesty. I want you to read it over very carefully, because it explains precisely how honest you and your husband are to be with each other.

But be careful not to let Love Busters ruin the purity and value of honesty. Keep anger, disrespect and demands out of your honest expression of facts and feelings. If you can do that, you will find your honesty will not only help you find solutions to your problems, but it will also draw you closer together, and help you become the soul-mates that you can be.

If you are willing to permanently end your relationship with your lover (never see or communicate with him again), get through withdrawal, and then you and your husband follow the Four Rules to Guide Marital Recovery, I guarantee you that you will have a great marriage. And I also guarantee you that neither of you will ever suffer through an affair again.

Using resentment as a way to control and punish a spouse

I'm convinced that what's kept the resentment of S.R.'s husband alive for so many years is that he has found it to be an effective way to control and punish her whenever she doesn't do what he wants. Whenever they have a fight, he brings it up, and it causes her such guilt that it gives him a decided advantage in winning the argument.

By this time, I don't believe that her affair is the problem that she thinks it is. Instead, it is an issue that her husband is using to get the upper hand in his relationship with her. It probably shows up the most whenever she has been reluctant to have sex with him. It throws her off balance whenever he mentions it, and makes her feel guilty, wanting to make it up to him somehow. He may also bring it up whenever she is winning in a power struggle he is having with her.

What she describes to me in her letter is abuse, pure and simple. There is no excuse for the way her husband keeps bringing up her moment of weakness she experienced years ago. He is disrespectful and abusive.

Recovery may not be complete

Resentment usually appears when an experience of the present reminds us of a painful experience of the past. For example, if a wife had been abandoned by her husband after a fight on a vacation, left to find her way home alone from Jamaica, the resentment of that experience would pop up whenever her husband walks out the door during an argument. Very often, continuing resentment means that whatever it was that caused the painful experience is still lurking in the background. And it jumps out every once in a while when evidence of it's existence surfaces.

The procedure for recovery that I suggest usually eliminates the root causes of infidelity, and that makes it unlikely that present experiences will remind a spouse of experiences associated with an affair. If the only time you feel resentment about a spouse's past affair is when your needs have not been met, when your spouse is engaged in a Love Buster, or when the Policy of Joint Agreement or Policy of Radical Honesty has not been followed, then it's the completion of recovery that's your problem, not resentment.

Couples are not only ignorant of ways to improve their marriages; they are often ignorant of the problems themselves. To avoid conflict, they sometimes deliberately misinform each other as to their feelings, personal history, activities, and plans. This not only leads to a failure to meet an important emotional need, and a withdrawal of love units when the deception is discovered, it also makes marital conflicts impossible to resolve. After all, how can you and your spouse solve a problem if your cards are not on the table?

To help you understand how honest you need to be to have a successful marriage, I have written the Policy of Radical Honesty. I call it "radical" because that's how many see my position on the subject. But I view my policy as simply advocating complete honesty in marriage. In our culture I guess that's a radical idea.

The Policy of Radical Honesty

Reveal to your spouse as much
information about yourself as you know;
your thoughts, feelings, habits, likes,
dislikes, personal history, daily activities,
and plans for the future.

To help explain this policy, I have broken it down into four parts:

1. EMOTIONAL HONESTY: Reveal your emotional reactions, both positive and negative, to the events of your life, particularly to your spouse's behavior.

2. HISTORICAL HONESTY: Reveal information about your personal history, particularly events that demonstrate personal weakness or failure.

3. CURRENT HONESTY: Reveal information about the events of your day. Provide your spouse with a calendar of your activities, with special emphasis on those that may affect your spouse.

4. FUTURE HONESTY: Reveal your thoughts and plans regarding future activities and objectives.

To some extent this policy seems like motherhood and apple pie. Who would argue that it's not a good idea to be honest? But in my years of experience as a marriage counselor, I have constantly struggled with the belief of many clients that dishonesty can be a good idea under certain conditions. Moreover, pastors and counselors themselves often advise dishonesty when a spouse has committed a particularly thoughtless act, such as infidelity. And many marital therapists warn against complaining, something that some consider one of the seven deadly sins of marriage. So instead of complaining, spouses often stuff their feelings and try to put a good face on a bad situation.

Granted, dishonesty can be a good short-term solution to marital conflict. It will probably get you off the hook for a few days or months or keep the problem on the back burner. But it's a terrible long-term solution. If you expect to live with each other for the next few years and still be in love, dishonesty can get you into a great deal of trouble.

You cant force him to, and if you have tried your hardest to be the best woman and spouse that you can be and he is not willing to do what it takes to make you feel safe and loved then you go to Plan B. To protect yourself from him, to protect the love you still have for him.

Soon you will have none left and then you have much less of a chance at recovery, because you want recovery anymore.