When your wayward spouse and you decide to try to make it work, you have to work to reconnect with each other even if you feel distant. It’s a classic case of fake it until you make it, but with some protection for you against more hurt.
Ensure You’re Both on The Same Page
The most important thing you can do in order to reconnect with your unfaithful spouse is to ensure you’re both on the same page. Both people have to want to make the relationship work. Both of you have to be willing to do the work necessary to move forward and reconnect in a way that grows the marriage.
Make Your Relationship a Priority
Now that you’re both on the same page and your wayward partner wants to make your relationship work, you both need to agree to make your relationship a priority. This is over work, kids, school or anything else that you’re doing.
The reason is that, as long as you won’t be fired from work, lose your kids, or become unhealthy your relationship is the center of the family and needs to be considered the bricks and mortar of the family unit.
Institute Date Night
You know when you first met you dated. You worked to find time to spend time together without electronics, without TV, without anything but the two of you. Remember sitting and just looking into each other’s eyes and reveling in your coupledom? You need to do that again. At first, it will feel awkward but you need to do it.
Hold hands, sit near each other, pull the chair out for your lady, and wipe the food off your man’s face. Do loving things with each other. The loving feeling will come back even if you have an unfaithful spouse as long as they’re willing to let it go of the past and stop the cheating.
Find a Way to Connect Every Day
On a daily basis, you need to find a way to connect. If you see something neat, send a picture of it to your spouse. Say nice things to them. Send a text message that you’re thinking of them.
If you’re not sure of dinner plans, ask your spouse in advance during the day, what they want for dinner and then plan to pick up the things for dinner together by meeting at the grocery store after work.
Kiss Upon Greeting Each Other
Remember when you first got married to your spouse? When you were not together for several hours during the day and you finally got to see each other you were excited. You probably threw yourselves into each other’s arms and kissed with gusto.
Start doing that again. Make it a priority to deeply kiss your spouse before they leave for the day and when they come home too. Plus, any other time you feel like doing it.
Create Couple Rituals
A really great thing to do is to develop couple rituals. For example, perhaps every Friday night you implement “junk night”. You can both pick some junk food to eat, and an old movie to watch together. Alternatively, you could decide that the first Sunday of each month you’re going to go out for brunch with your spouse.
Learn to laugh at and with each other about your imperfections and flaws. If you find yourself in an argument, only fight naked. Often, couple fights aren’t serious, they’re over silly things like the lid being off the toothpaste, and so if you agree to get naked during fights, you’re creating a ritual together that will help you laugh about the hard times.
The Marriage Comes First
When you read the line “the marriage comes first” realize that this is the legal part of your relationship. When you start thinking of your marriage as a contract, one that you need to make work due to the legal promises you made to each other in front of your family and your God.
By putting your marriage first, and always asking yourself if a choice you’re making is hurting the marriage you can often avoid problems.
It’s sort of like having a mortgage. If you have a mortgage you’re not going to buy another house you can’t afford and then just stop paying the first mortgage.
It’s a legal contract, you’ll ruin your credit and ruin your chances of being a successful homeowner and wind up evicted because you can’t pay for anything and have bad credit.
Thankfully, you can rebuild your credit, just like you can rebuild your marriage. But, always think of your marriage first in any and all choices you make. Does this choice improve your marriage or not?
That might not sound very romantic but when you look at it in hard facts; you have no right to cheat when you have a legal marriage contract, even if you don’t think you’ll get caught.
Get Away From the Past
Sometimes it can help to reconnect with your unfaithful spouse simply by getting away from the past. Go on a long vacation together. Consider new jobs and moving. It’s important to do whatever you need to do in order to move past this situation.
And if that requires moving because your spouse cheated with the neighbor, or new jobs because your spouse cheated with a co-worker then so be it. You can start over and reconnect with your unfaithful spouse if you both want to.
You can grow back in love with your wayward spouse if you work toward it. It’s not always going to be easy and sometimes it might even be really uncomfortable and even scary. You’re scared they’ll cheat again, you don’t want to let go and have it happen again.
Keep in mind that even if you divorce, your next spouse, should you find one, may also cheat. If everything else is good in your relationship don’t let this one mistake end it without trying to reconnect with your former cheating spouse.