On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches why unfaithfulness, even by agreement, leads to divorce.
After listening to today's episode, you may want to:
On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches why unfaithfulness, even by agreement, leads to divorce.
After listening to today's episode, you may want to:
Why Being Faithful in Marriage Is Important
(Podcast Transcript)
(0:00)
[Introduction to the podcast]
Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.
(0:29)
Coach Jack: We are now living in a time when sex and emotionally intimate relationships with someone other than your spouse is being actively promoted and touted as a good thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Almost on a daily basis, I see relationships which have been destroyed by a lack of fidelity between marriage partners. Often the unfaithfulness is committed by one partner, but sometimes it is done consensually, with so called open marriages.
(0:58)
Either way, the result is always the same–loss of trust, loss of respect, and loss of love. Trust, respect, and love are vital for maintaining a marriage. So, when extramarital relationships destroy those, the marriage fails. Make no mistake, this is the agenda of our time.
Extramarital relationships in no way fix failing marriages
Sometimes people agree to allow their partners to have affairs in the hopes that will save their marriage. I have worked with many thousands of people over the past 24 years and have yet to find when allowing an affair or being open to infidelity has ever led to marriage improvement, let alone saving a relationship.
You can’t promote a faithful and committed relationship with unfaithful behavior.
If you are considering having an open marriage or allowing your spouse to have an affair, you need to be fully aware that you will be doing as much damage to your relationship as your spouse does in having the affair. It is likely to become your biggest regret.
(2:05)
The best result you can expect from allowing unfaithful behavior is appreciation from your spouse. However your spouse will no longer be in love with you. The end result will be a friendship style relationship in which you will never be a priority.
Faithfulness does not sell
You and your family are the only ones who profit from your good marital relationship. This is why faithfulness isn’t promoted by anyone except the church.
It’s the same reason that hospitals don’t advise you on how to stay healthy. Broken marriages are big money makers for dating sites, real estate sales, attorneys, the travel industry, the medical industry, the psychology industry, clothing manufacturers, and many, many more businesses. Divorce and remarriage are big, big business. Staying happily married mainly benefits you and your family.
(3:05)
Never envy nonChristians who eat, drink, and make merry. They are seeking to fill a void that only God can fill. So, even though they have temporary pleasures, they are for the most part miserable, live trying to deny the reality of death, and die in fear and desperation. They also want everyone else to be miserable so they can feel better about themselves.
If you want to feel good about cheating and open marriages, for sure you can find articles and videos promoting that. They make their money selling what people want to hear, though their own lives are empty. Just like the myth that you can be happy through what is called conscious uncoupling, unfaithfulness leads only to depression.
The solution to marital unhappiness is not cheating or divorce, it is making your marital relationship loving and close again.
(4:01)
Learn from experience
Whether you believe in God or not, you will have the same consequences for your actions that everyone else does. Learn from your experience if you don’t trust what God says.
Ask yourself two simple questions:
Don’t trust anecdotal reports from people you don’t know. I could easily create an anecdotal report that a man was able to attract hundreds of women by culturing blue cheese on his head. It’s not hard to make up stories. People do it all the time to sell their products and ideas. This is why you must have a way to test what you learn. We only have the Bible and experience to do that. (Experience only if you are not a Christian).
(5:03)
I never tell you to trust me. I only tell you to test what I say and see for yourself.
If you don’t follow the Bible, it may be that you have never tested it. No one in the history of civilization has ever been able to show that biblical principals are damaging or that anything in the Bible is inaccurate. Find out for yourself. Many hate the Bible, but they have never been able to prove it wrong.
Guarding our hearts
The feeling of love can be eroded by our spouses treating us badly or neglecting us. It can also be eroded by what we say, think, and do. When we think of our spouses in a positive way, make our spouses a priority, talk about our spouses in a good way to others, our love remains strong.
On the other hand, if we focus on the negatives, talk about and to our spouses in negative ways, and behave in ways that are not faithful, our feelings of love will fade.
(6:04)
Society teaches us to be open and honest while the Bible teaches us to be loving and honest. One way leads to the loss of love while the other leads to building love. Try it both ways and see which works better for you.
Treating your spouse badly in order to build your relationship is like hitting your car with hammer in order to improve its appearance.
Beware of people selling hammers.
Poor boundaries promote unfaithfulness and rejection
One of the most common places to see married people allowing affairs is during a marital separation. Due to their fear of divorce, they allow the unfaithfulness to occur. By doing this they lose respect, reduce their spouse’s feelings of love for them, take away any desire in their spouse to reconcile, and promote their own divorce.
(6:56)
The same problems occur for people who have sex with a cheating spouse. Emotional or physical welfare for a cheating spouse never motivates them to work for what they already get for free. Instead they become selfish, feel entitled, and do not change.
People can’t simply get sexual desires for others out of their system
Many women and some men think that if they only let their spouse get their desire for sex with others out of their system, that they can then have a monogamous relationship again after that. The result of feeding desires is never to weaken them, but to strengthen them. By allowing your spouse to have sex with others, he or she will be rewarded for it and have an increased desire to do it again.
Many times spouses will fall in love with the other person and most of the time they will stop loving you. They may find it impossible to fall in love with you again, even if they try. Allowing your spouse to have an extramarital intimate relationship will become your biggest regret.
(7:59)
If your dog desires to eat a steak, giving him one won’t get it out of his system. It will just make him want steak even more while becoming dissatisfied with his regular food.
Good boundaries save relationships.
By refusing to continue a relationship with a spouse who is cheating or who is planning to cheat, you prevent your spouse from being able to have his or cake and eat it, too. Your spouse will either need to remain faithful or lose you. If he or she does lose you, many times the relationship can still be repaired later when your spouse realizes his or her mistake and is willing to stop the cheating to be with you again.
This is something that could not happen if you allowed the unfaithful behavior. If you give in to a cheating spouse, your spouse will never learn that marriage and cheating don’t go together and will never fully commit to you again.
(8:54)
Good marriage counselors will not work with a couple when there is current infidelity
This is because they know that relationships cannot be built when the infidelity is still going on. Bad counselors, who are now in the majority, will work with you no matter your situation. If you have a counselor who has agreed to work with you and your spouse together despite an ongoing affair, leave that counselor! Better yet, work your own with a relationship coach to end your spouse’s affair. Only then can your relationship build.
Marriage counseling with an unfaithful spouse reassures the spouse that as long at the marriage counseling is going on, a divorce is not going to happen. They feel more confident to continue their affair. They also continue to distance in order to justify their affair. A lot of talking happens, but no progress is made. The only one who benefits is the therapist who only makes money as long as you keep attending therapy.
(9:57)
Marriage counselors often prevent reconciling by using methods that don’t work. If you are not making any progress in your counseling, you have this situation going on. Also, if you are attending counseling for emotional support, but are getting no help with creating emotional support outside of counseling, then you have a counselor who is just feeding on your dependency.
If it feels good, do it is a slogan from Satan.
Many things feel good for the moment but cause harm. Illicit sex is one of them. Just like drug addictions, illicit sex can make you feel not as bad, but it wears off and you feel bad again. Then you need it again. Then again, and so on. This is called dependency. You will need more and more to get the same result until you find it is consuming time and energy that should be going to other things.
(10:56)
Trade in your if it feels good, do it slogan for if it is the right and healthy thing to do, do it. You actually will enjoy your life and your relationships more and more.
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4:8 NIV).
How my wife and I stay faithful and keep our love alive,
It is work to stay faithful and to keep love alive, but it is rewarding work. The love my wife and I have for each other brings meaning and purpose to our lives. It gives us a reason to get up in the morning beyond our work. We want to see and be with each other.
(11:59)
So, how do we do it? First, we don’t try to get our needs met from each other. We depend on God to meet our needs and develop our relationship with Him by daily prayer and Bible study, and by worshiping Him at church each week.
The idea that we get our needs met by each other and that we should tell our spouse our needs is not a biblical one. It is another false teaching that makes marriages worse. Don’t believe it? Try it and see.
Secondly, we strive to be loving in our words and actions toward each other. Many people do that with their pets but not with their spouses. In addition, we never say bad things about each other to anyone else. I also thank God each day for giving me such a wonderful wife. Being loving is the key to getting love. Being thankful is the key to being satisfied.
The things I’ve shared with you today people have known for thousands of years. Don’t let the perversions of our current society prevent you from having a happy and fulfilling marriage. If you would like to work with me, I would be glad to help you create a faithful, loving, and fulfilling marriage.
(13:12)
[Podcast wrap-up]
Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.