In a recent interview for People magazine, Dean McDermott and Tori Spelling discussed their marriage after an affair, stating “We had to start over”. Although I’m not a celebrity watcher, their statement is worth noting.
Affairs bring a new reality and new sense of reckoning to your marriage. Both of you changed as a result of the affair. You can’t turn the hands of the clock back to blissful naivety, and blindly trusting your spouse. That blind trust idea didn’t work for you.
In dealing with marriage after the affair, you’ll have to start over. The marriage relationship you had is over. The rules and routines that the two of you had no longer work. They didn’t meet both of your needs, they didn’t prevent the affair, they didn’t work.
One of the things I point out in the Affair Recovery Workshop and other resources is how you will have to build a new foundation for your marriage relationship. Part of building of a new foundation, includes starting over.
That ‘starting over’ means you not only need a new foundation, the two of you will need new ways of doing things, new ways of interacting with each other and new dimensions of honesty.
Repairing your old marriage sounds nice. The reality is that it needs a massive overhaul. Sure you may want to keep some of the values and some of what worked. You also have to realize that many things weren’t working. The two of you weren’t working together. Needs were being neglected or ignored.
The two of you weren’t talking about some important issues. The ‘start over’ will need the inclusion of those things. With a start over, the two of you can build that new foundation. You also have something solid to build a life for the two of you and your family on.
It’s not about fixing a few broken items in your marriage. Your marriage needs more than applying some emotional band aids. You need the whole starting over. Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott hit on a basic truth when they said they ‘had to start over’. The Affair Recovery Workshop shows you how that start over happens and where changes are needed.
Best Regards,
Jeff
