The Key to Saving a Marriage: Perseverance

When you get married, however, you make a promise to love your spouse for better or for worse, through both the highs and the lows, the good and the bad.

The good times are easy to get through. Enjoy them. Treasure them. Hold on to them.

Because you may need to remind yourself of the good times when bad ones rear their ugly heads. And it’s how we handle these so-called bad times that can set a precedent for your marriage.

When many people are faced with a difficult or trying situation, their first instinct might be to give up and call it quits. It’s easy to throw in the towel, right? Instead of working through a situation with your spouse and coming to a mutual solution, you can just avoid it altogether. You can be complacent. You can mentally and physically check out. It’s almost like the problem isn’t even there, right?

Not so much. Follow this path and you can watch your marriage fizzle away.

Instead, what you need to do is be true to your original promise and fight for your marriage. Put all of your effort into making sure your marriage thrives. Persevere.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines perseverance as:

“The continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition.”

It’s right there in the definition: perseverance can be difficult. Difficult is not fun.

But isn’t your marriage worth a little bit of difficulty? Doesn’t it deserve some hard work and effort? Especially if, ultimately, it means that you and your spouse will be that much stronger?

Regardless of the reason why your marriage is struggling – finances, family issues, communication problems, personal dilemmas, or anything that’s causing difficulties between you and your spouse – you can persevere and turn things around.

Just remember this: it took time for you and your spouse to develop your bad habits and poor behaviors. Because of this, it’s going to take time to replace them and find better solutions.

Saving a marriage and persevering won’t happen overnight. It requires commitment, just like you originally committed to your spouse when you got married.

But, luckily, if you are invested in making your marriage survive its lows and bad times, working on it will get easier. It will become a habit.

Of course, there might be times when one or both of you relapses. A relapse, though, isn’t an excuse to quit. It’s an excuse to try harder in spite of the relapse. It’s an excuse to persevere even more to win each other back and enjoy a satisfying, everlasting marriage.

Rooting for you!

Sara Freed