How to overcome marital crisis
By Tussy Afam-Obi
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Pray and forgive
People ask me what advice I have for a married couple having difficulties in their relationship.

I always answer: pray and forgive.
Over many years of marriage counseling, I have seen again and again that unless a husband and wife forgive each other daily, marriage can become a living hell. I have also seen that the thorniest problems can often be resolved with three simple words: I am sorry.
Asking one’s spouse for forgiveness is always difficult, because it requires humility, vulnerability, and the acknowledgment of weakness and failure. Yet, there are few things that make a marriage healthier.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor imprisoned by Hitler for his opposition to the Nazi regime, used to tell the members of the small community he founded about the need to live together in forgiveness, because without forgiveness no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don’t insist on your rights, he once wrote. Don’t blame each other, don’t judge or condemn each other, don’t find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts. This applies to our marital lives as well.

I often think about how our marriage might have turned out if we hadn’t learned to forgive each other on a daily basis right from the start. So many couples sleep in the same bed and share the same house but remain miles apart inwardly, because they have built up a wall of resentment between themselves. The bricks in this wall may be very small a forgotten anniversary, a misunderstanding, a business meeting that took precedence over a long-awaited family outing, etc.
Many marriages could be saved by the simple realization that a spouse will never be perfect. Too often, couples assume that a healthy relationship is one that is free from disagreements. Unable to live up to such an unrealistic expectation, they either bottle up their true feelings about each other, or else give up, disillusioned, and separate or divorce on grounds of incompatibility.

Human imperfection means that we will make mistakes and hurt each other, unknowingly and even knowingly. In my own personal life I have found that the only fail-safe solution is to forgive, seventy times seven if necessary. C. S. Lewis writes:
To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In a society like ours, where marriages are being stressed and threatened with divorce due to the current economic recession, the only weapons we have are apology and forgiveness. After seeing the healing effects of forgiveness in dozens of marriages, I find it impossible to suppress the hope that hundreds of thousands more could be saved.