Can Your Marriage Be Saved? What Really Determines Reconciliation

Is it too late to save your relationship? That is both a practical and emotional question that must be answered. Working on reconciling is an emotional and financial investment. If you can create a better marriage, it’s worth the investment. If not, it may be time to move on.

I’ve been in the marriage saving business for more than thirty years. I’ve seen thousands of people reconcile and even more not. Despite what anyone might tell you, there is no guaranteed way to reconcile, but there are ways that make it much more likely.

Today, I want to share with you what really determines whether you have a good chance to reconcile your marriage. Most people do not know what that is and there is a lot of misinformation.

I encourage you to test what I say with real life experience so you can see if it is misinformation. This idea comes from the Bible. Test prophets by seeing if their prophecy comes true. Test teachers against the word of God, and test people by the fruits they produce. Atheists who put the Bible to the test end up Christians.

Don’t blindly trust or blindly doubt. Experience is the best teacher.

One of the best ways to grow in your relationships is to clearly see what is not working and stop doing it–no matter how much you believe in what you are doing. I wrote my book Overcome Neediness and Get the Love You Want to help people to identify just such behaviors. If you are getting bad reactions from your spouse, their is a good chance that some of the things that you are doing are causing those reactions.

It won’t help to ask your spouse if it is possible to reconcile

If you are wondering whether you should attempt to reconcile with your spouse, you may think asking your spouse is the best place to start. It is not. It would be if people never changed their minds or feelings. Everyone who divorces has changed their mind and feelings from their original heartfelt intent to stay together.

Everyone who reconciles also changes their mind and feelings from wanting to divorce. Current feelings and intent have little to do with what actually comes about. Sincerity at the moment does not predict future behavior. Whether your spouse has promised to always love you, has promised never to cheat again, or has said there is no chance to reconcile, there is no assurance in their words.

Best friends can become bitter enemies and bitter enemies can become best friends.

Don’t put all your hope in a counselor or coach

Counseling and coaching, just like medicine, is more of an art than a science. The experience of the coach is a big factor in determining your odds of reconciling, but it is not the only one. In a minute I will tell you about the other factors.

Luck has nothing to do with relationships or reconciling

One thing that is not a factor is luck. I don’t think that luck plays a role. I believe in God, not in luck. “Luck” is a word people use when they don’t have any other explanation. In reconciling, the factors are pretty well known by those who know what they are doing.

Marriage Reconciliation: Key Factors That Decide Success

The major factors determining your odds of reconciling are:

1. Your starting point in working on reconciling. The worse it is, the harder it will be to reconcile.
2. Your spouse’s potential for finding someone better than you, Second best is not good enough. Uncommitted people want the best they can have.
3. Your willingness to give up ineffective and harmful behaviors, You can’t build your relationship while also doing harm to it.
4. The skills you use to reconcile, No matter how hard you work, if your method is not effective, you will just feel hopeless. This is where your coach, counselor, videos and books make a difference.
5. Your ability to learn those skills in a timely manner. Security, loving aptitude, and intelligence all play a role in learning relationship skills.
6. Your ability to consistently apply those skills. Discipline is necessary for building and maintaining relationships. Discipline means the ability to continue to do difficult things even when we don’t feel like it. It is the number one quality for success, including success in reconciling.

I want to point out to you what is not in this list:

1. The opinions and advice of others,
2. Your spouse’s current feelings toward you,
3. Whether or not your your spouse is intent on separation or divorce,
4. Whether or not your spouse is having an affair.

People will always try to discourage you from having what they don’t

Those who tell you that there is no hope for your marriage if your spouse is divorcing or cheating would be hard pressed to explain why many (although admittedly not most), are able to reconcile in these situations. Maybe they will tell you those people just got lucky. To me this means that they just don’t know how to go about reconciling.

Reconciling is like starting a fire in the rain

My specialty is marriage reconciliation, which means I work with people who are precisely in these difficult to reconcile situations. I’m like the guy who knows how to start a fire during a rainstorm. The people who are able to do that did not originally know how to do that and neither did I. I had to learn. Now, I help others to learn. It has taken many years to put a concise statement on what I do:

I teach people how to start a fire in the rain.

It is quite possible to start fires in the rain and you can learn to do it. It’s not easy and takes a lot of practice. You will be wet and cold quite a bit while you are learning. That is as unavoidable as falling down when you are learning to ski.

Falling down is part of learning. Don’t fear it.

The number of steps to reconcile depends on how bad your marriage is

I can tell you that there is no single step solution to reconciling. That’s like trying to put a match to wet wood and expecting it to light. Wet wood won’t burn. You need to start a little fire with dry tinder and gradually build the fire with larger pieces of wood. So it is with rebuilding a relationship. You must step-by-step add a little more tinder until you get your marriage burning again.

Do you remember that one of the things that affects your chances of reconciling is how bad or good your relationship is now? Just like with the fire analogy, getting totally soaked wood to burn in windy conditions is slow going, careful work. Marriages where a friendship still exists are easier and faster to get going. Not easy, just easier.

Say for example, your spouse is stressed just to see you coming.

You can’t just ask him or her out on a date. That would be like trying to light that wet log with a match or climbing a mountain in one step.. The first step is empathize, then to back off, without going no contact. Then, continue to be relaxed and friendly, without initiating conversations until you are getting relaxed responding. Each step of the way you need to be careful not to do so much that you get resistance.

If you are already friends,

then your main next step is doing things as friends while working on your desirability. When people tell me their husband or wife just wants to be friends, I think that is great! It is a far better starting point than the spouse who wants to only talk about business. The path to reconciling is the same wherever your relationship is now, just the starting point changes.

There are seven major steps in this path to reconciling

I recommend you review my post/podcast on that so that you can work on the right next step. Although you do need to keep your goal of reconciling in mind, your ability to reconcile is going to be directly related to your ability to focus on the step at hand. Remember, only people who can take a step by step approach are going to reach their reconciling goals.

Not everyone can do the skills

I have found that a lot of people can’t do that. They are too upset to take a careful, step by step approach to relationship building and so just go for the goal. They love bomb or constantly debate in an attempt to reconcile quickly. If you know that you are too resentful or too impatient to take a step-by-step approach, work on yourself rather than on your relationship.

Reconciling requires contact with your spouse

There is one factor in reconciling that may be out of your control and that is lack of contact with your spouse.

You cannot have a relationship with someone if you have no contact with them. You can fantasize about them, pretend you have a relationship with them, perhaps even be legally married, but if you have no contact you don’t actually have a relationship. It is just in your mind.

This is true for our relationship with God as well. If we say we are Christians, yet don’t pray, don’t read the Bible, don’t fellowship with other Christians, and have no thought for God in our daily life, then we have no relationship with God.

The quality of your relationship with your spouse or with God is determined by the quality of your interactions. Without those, there is no relationship. In the case of God, he has His arms open wide for you to come to Him as long as you are alive. After that, you are out of luck (or mercy rather).

As for your spouse it’s more likely to be a raised finger than open arms.

If your spouse will not have any contact with you,

then you will have no chance of reconciling unless they do. I can’t say whether someone’s spouse will eventually allow contact, but as a coach, it’s not something that I can make happen. God can and does do miracles and if you have the patience to wait for one while still being loving, you are a far better person than me.

Some people are confused about what no contact means. Just to be clear, no contact means no contact whatsoever whether electronically, face to face, by letter, or by smoke signal–none, nada, zip. No contact means it has been that way for an extended period of time–not just since last Tuesday. You can send a good empathy message to a no contact spouse, but if you get no response, then you are back to waiting for a miracle.

Is reconciling worth it?

I can tell you whether reconciling is possible, but you have to decide what it is worth to you. I can tell you that I have had many clients who started out desperate, but who ended up saying that their marriage crisis was the best thing to ever happened to their marriage because it led to their developing a deeper bond and happier marriage. I have also had clients who didn’t reconcile who were grateful for learning how to love better in the process, even though they lost to someone else.

I have been really honest with you.

Now it is time for you to be honest with yourself. I’m going to ask you ten questions. Think carefully and answer “yes” or “no” to each. If undecided, then count that as a “no.”

1. Are you willing to look at whether your actions or inaction are preventing your relationship from moving ahead?
2. Are you willing to give up your current ineffective methods (needy behaviors) that damage, rather than build, your relationship?
3. Are you willing to give up attempts to persuade or pressure your spouse to reconcile?
4. Are you willing to validate your spouse’s feelings, beliefs, and desires, even when they differ from your own?
5. Are you willing to be the first to change the way you and your spouse interact, even if you didn’t cause the problems?
6. Are you willing to earn your spouse’s respect with self-control and healthy boundaries?
7. Are you willing to learn the skills you need to have in order to improve your relationship, even if your spouse does nothing?
8. Are you willing to use those skills to improve your relationship for your spouse’s benefit as well as your own?
9. Are you willing to let go of short term “quick fixes” and work toward long term intimacy?
10. When you don’t know what to do, are you willing to get necessary professional help even though you will have to pay for it (coaching, books, etc.)?

The more of these questions you can answered “yes” to, the greater the hope for your marriage. A “no” response to even one of them may negate any chances you have for saving your marriage.

Reconciling often requires we work on ourself

That means any question to which you answered “no” has to be worked on if you want to reconcile. Pride, fear, impatience, and anger are enemies of reconciling. These qualities handicap most people from enjoying life.

Love, responsibility, empathy, and security are necessary qualities. Christians will recognize these as benefits of growing in our relationship with God. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a Christian to reconcile or even that most Christians have these qualities. Life is a process and some people are further along than others.

Here are some things that stop a lot of people from reconciling:

• Waiting for their spouse to desire then without actually becoming desirable,
• waiting until their relationship is severely damaged before taking action,
• refusing to work on their marriage unless their spouse does.

The great lie about reconciling is that it takes two to repair a marriage.

The truth is that It only takes one person to either save or destroy a relationship. A little bit of thinking will help you to see that any person who does unloving and unhealthy things is going to damage their marriage even it their spouse is terrific. One person can do a lot of damage without any help.

On the other hand, any person who works to become more enjoyable and more desirable is going to improve their marriage or other relationships. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, one person making consistent changes can greatly improve their marriage or other relationships.

Of course how your spouse behaves determines how much you enjoy your spouse. It works both ways. If your spouse’s unenjoyable behavior was caused as a reaction to your damaging behavior, then their behavior will improve as you build your relationship. Don’t decide prematurely not to work on your relationship because you don’t like how your spouse is anymore. Their behavior may be a normal reaction to your behavior.

If you want to save your marriage and you still have contact with your spouse:

• Start at the point where your relationship is now,
• work on the next step,
• be consistent,
• don’t expect quick improvement,
• enjoy the process and feel good about it, and
• get help if you get stuck or if things get worse.

Remember that you have to be able to do better than the competition, even though you are married. Half-hearted attempts to reconcile are a waste of time. Be hot or cold–all in or all out. Don’t be lukewarm.

If you have what it takes to reconcile My Re-Connections Coaching Package will help you with all the skills you need for reconciling with your husband or wife. It will help you to avoid many common pitfalls so you can reconcile faster (not fast, just faster)… Get it and I will teach you how to build a fire in the rain.

For further study:

Fackrell, Tamara A., “Wandering in the Wilderness: A Grounded Theory Study of the Divorce or
Reconciliation Decision-Making Process” (2012).
Theses and Dissertations. 3136.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3136