Should I Stop Wearing My Wedding Ring If I Want To Reconcile?

On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches you how to figure out if you should continue to wear your wedding ring and gives advice on starting the reconciling process.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

• How to rebuild your marriage in seven steps.
• When to work as a couple and when not to.
• Get Coach Jack's book, Connecting through Yes!.
• Work with Coach Jack to reconcile with a rejecting spouse.

Transcript

Should I Stop Wearing My Wedding Ring If I Want To Reconcile?

(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: If you want to reconcile and your spouse stopped wearing his or her wedding ring, should you continue to wear yours? The answer depends on your approach and your spouse’s resolve. 

Matching is the basis of all connection. So, when we are working to reconcile, should we take off our wedding ring to match our spouse? Or should we leave it on to show our continued commitment? 

Reconciling is not a single step process.           

(0:56)

The wrong action can create more emotional distance and further damage our efforts to reconcile. The right action, done too soon, can also reduce emotional connection.

Just like a relationship when you are single, you have to go through several phases of relationship building. Only the last phase is seeking commitment and expressing our own. What does this mean? It means that in the last phase, you both will be wearing your wedding rings. 

What does your spouse taking off his or her wedding ring mean?

Unless it is to manipulate you or hurt you, two common behaviors in conflicted relationships, it means that your spouse is not committed to you at this moment. Your spouse is not in love with you at this moment. It is a behavior which helps us to understand where we are at this point in our relationship.

(1:52)

What you need to know is it does not matter whether your spouse wants to reconcile or not at the beginning stages–No one ever does. What matters is that you build up to that stage where he or she does want to reconcile. Asking your spouse to reconcile when your relationship is bad is like asking someone to marry you before you have even gone on one date. That is moving way too fast!

For me, a spouse taking off their ring is much more helpful than a spouse who continues to wear his or her ring, but has the same thoughts and feelings as the person who doesn’t. Many times, people don’t understand the depths of their spouse’s feelings until they take such an action.

There are seven stepsin the relationship building process. If your spouse is not complaining, you may think that your relationship is somewhere near the end of those steps, especially if things seem to be going along okay. Complaints may clue you in that you are actually somewhere in the middle. Your spouse taking off his or her wedding ring and saying he or she is done is a great clue that you are closer to step one.

(3:02)

Everyone starts relationships at step one. Many relationships are re-started at step one. We never ask someone to marry us or recommit to us when we are at step one. We have to build up to step seven first. When people try to jump from step one to step seven, they get rejected, of course. When we are on the first step, we need to work to go to step two. 

The chances of reconciling depend mainly on a person’s ability to grow their relationship step by step, and does NOT depend on the other person’s initial feelings or commitment.

Now, let’s talk about whether you keep your wedding ring on. You need to first…

Consider the message you are conveying by wearing your wedding ring.

(3:52)

If you tell your spouse you want to reconcile and work things through, but you take your ring off, then you are sending a mixed message. I never recommend sending mixed messages. They create doubt and confusion.

One of the basic principles of good relationships is to make sure your behavior matches your words and vice versa. This is the essence of clear communication.

Of course, if you are communicating commitment too soon, before your spouse wants commitment, it will just get you more rejection, because what you desire differs from what your spouse desires.

Keep in mind:

Another basic principle of good relationships is to create connection by matching the desires, values, and beliefs of the person you want to connect to.

Would you start wearing a wedding ring when first meeting and dating someone? Probably not, because that person would not be ready to commit to you. It would not make sense to commit to a person who does not yet want to commit. It’s the wrong step for early relationships. 

(4:57)

Even if you have been married for 30 years, your relationship may have returned to step one of the relationship building process.

Relationship success, like any success, requires the right steps, in the right order, at the right pace. To reach any goal in life, we must always start from where we are, then work through the steps to get to our goal–where we want to be. 

I know you want to be committed, but that is the goal, not the starting point.

Why I don’t use a pursuit approach to help my clients reconcile

The pursuit approach creates problems for reconciling. Pursuing someone who does not want to be pursued creates rejection. They will avoid being very friendly or interactive for fear of giving you false hope about the relationship. That will make it harder for you to develop the relationship further.

I don’t have any of my clients use a pursuit approach since their spouses are not wanting commitment and it hinders, rather than helps, creating connection. I have them take their ring off, if their spouse has, along with other empathy messages that create an early connection. Their ring will go back on at a later stage, when their spouse once again wants commitment. 

(6:13)

Like all relationships, starting with validation rather than pursuit creates similarity, improves relaxation, reduces distancing behavior, and helps the relationship continue to grow.

On the other hand, if your spouse is actually wanting your commitment, then both pursuit and wearing your wedding ring make sense. But, in that case, your spouse taken has taken off his or her wedding ring in order to manipulate you rather than to end your relationship. Your spouse has used it as a wake up call.

Determining whether your spouse is doing an intervention to get you to pursue or whether your spouse actually wants to end your marriage changes little except your starting point in working on rebuilding.

(6:58)

My first meeting with a client is determining the correct starting point and getting them started on the skills to move forward in the relationship building process. That is exactly the same thing you should be doing. That is how you make progress.

Reconciling means restarting, typically without a ring

You may not feel like taking off your ring because of your commitment to your spouse. That is natural. It seems to be moving in the opposite direction from what you want. I have helped many people to improve their sexual relationship by backing off sexual pursuit and instead helping their spouse to enjoy them nonsexually. That also seems backwards to a lot of people.

Pursuing commitment from a person who doesn’t want it, like pursuing sex with a person who doesn’t want it, results in rejection. It is necessary to step back to where they are comfortable and then to build forward from there.

(While we are at it, let me say that fighting is the worst way to get either sex or commitment, yet is probably the most common way for people to try to get both).

(8:03)

Reconciling depends on gradually building feelings in our spouse, from where they are to where we want to be. That is no different from what single people do when they go from first date to getting married.

The best way to reconcile is to restart the initial relationship, from the point where your spouse currently is. Starting anywhere ahead of that brings rejection.

Many people need coaching help with the first steps, but then are able to continue relationship growth on their own. If you can’t identify first steps to take, then you may want to get a little help with that. It’s going to differ from person to person, depending on their degree of connection and attraction.

The less connection and attraction your spouse has with you, the more you are toward beginning relationship steps.

Learn to think like a coach to reconcile or reach any goal

(8:57)

Real relationship coaches are not counselors. They are coaches. They are less concerned with your feelings than they are with your skills. Coaches provide training and skills to help someone to reach their goals. It doesn’t matter whether it is for sports, business, or relationships.

Coaches believe that good feelings follow success, and not the other way around. We must do what works, regardless of how hard it is. We get good things by doing hard things. Your spouse taking off his or her ring is not the time to sit around waiting for your feelings to improve. It is the time to work on what will help to rebuild and restore your relationship with your spouse.

You can develop your own success style of thinking by asking yourself whether something is helpful or not. Successful people put aside feelings to work on achieving goals. Good feelings follow. Unsuccessful people put aside what is helpful to be true to their feelings. Typically no progress is ever made.

(10:02)

If it feels good, do it is a recipe for disaster. If it’s helpful, do it, is a recipe for success.

If you want to have success thinking, then regardless of how you feel, decide which action will help you achieve your goal. And then, regardless of whether you feel like taking the action, take it if it is a helpful one.

More specifically, in this case, …

Two important questions to consider are:

1. Will wearing your ring help make your spouse more relaxed with you or avoid you more?
2. Will wearing your ring, help your spouse to feel that the two of you are similar or that you want something he or she does not?

When attracting and connecting with others, we need to consider their perception of our behavior. 

Wearing a ring with a spouse who doesn’t want to do the same is like wearing clothing in a nudist colony.

(10:59)

Is there ever a good time to keep wearing your wedding ring? Yes, there is…

If your spouse is not wanting to leave you, keep wearing your wedding ring

Our spouses can have emotional struggles and do hurtful things. Like taking off a wedding ring. That doesn’t mean they want to end the relationship. Your spouse may recover and regret taking off his or her ring. But, if you also did that, it would escalate the situation by your rejecting your spouse. 

We must be committed for better or for worse and show that–unless our spouse consistently and seriously wants to end the relationship. Even then, we stay committed, but don’t necessarily show that. Instead, we match where they are in an empathetic way, so they will relax with us rather than fight us. Then we build the relationship from there.

(11:56)

Building your relationship does NOT entail convincing your spouse to do anything. It just entails rebuilding attraction, and connection, just like you originally did, while also using good boundaries. Never try to problem solve or work together with someone who has an opposite agenda from you or you will just create conflict.

A lot of people wrongly believe rebuilding takes two people agreeing to work on their relationship. Their belief prevents progress. Unfortunately, that is why so many people give up on building their relationship when they don’t have to. 

Think relaxed, friendly, and similar, if you want to start or repair a relationship with anyone

Whenever our emotional expression gets ahead of the other person’s feelings, it will result in stress and resistance. This causes relationship improvement to stop or go backwards. 

(12:51)

Taking off your ring can help your spouse to relax with you, especially if you are combining it with an empathy message and friendly, non-pursuit behavior. That is important for increasing positive time together. Taking off your ring may feel like a step backward, but when we run into obstacles, we have to back up in order to get around them and go forward again.

For your own sake, and your spouse’s memorize this: 

Unwanted pursuit brings rejection; being relaxed, friendly, and similar brings connection. 

Your ability to do that is a much better predictor of whether you can reconcile than how your spouse feels about you right now, or what your spouse has decided to do. You, like many others, can start your relationship moving in the right direction today. If you would like me to help you get started, see the Re-Connections Coaching Package on my website.

(13:59)

[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.