Marriages are tough no matter how much you love your person. There’s always a chance that your relationship’s flame might burn out, losing the passion, the feeling of being in love, or even your attraction to them all in a span of a few years. It is why all married couples will tell you that it’s not just about emotions, but about logic and commitment as well.
You have to be entirely sure about the person you are going to marry before you go into it to prevent hardships that might come later in your relationship. You don’t want this to happen when you have children to take care of. But what happens if you’re already in the relationship? What happens when you still love the person and don’t want to leave them, but the very sight of them gives you stress and anxiety? According to Dr. Chantal Gagnon PhD LMHC, “Couples often feel that they know and understand their partner, and are compatible on most issues. However, this is a mistake.”
If you don’t want to spend large sums of money and time visiting a marriage counselor, there are various alternatives. The beauty of these programs is in how they have helped numerous couples fix their marriage, meaning they are tried and tested. These two programs specifically aim to provide troubled marriages with the tools and practices to fix whatever it is they’re going through.
Retrouvaille Marriage Help Program
The Retrouvaille program is predominantly a Christian marriage program with Catholic origins that caters to couples of all faiths or backgrounds. It focuses on practicality with the specific goals being to improve communication, build stronger marriages, and helping these couples reconnect, all things that need to be worked continuously upon when in a marriage.
What makes the Retrouvaille program unique is how the presenters are not exactly marriage counselors, but instead they are couples that went through the same things you are trying to fix. These couples share their stories about struggles in their relationships and the practices they had to implement to rediscover their love. It is crucial for the two of you to know that conflicts in relationships are normal and that other people went through and fixed the same things.
The Retrouvaille program has weekend retreats all over the world. Visit their website to schedule a retreat at a time and place that is most convenient for you. Following the retreat are some followup sessions designed to assess your marriage after spending a meaningful weekend together.
Love At First Fight
If the two of you simply don’t want to invest much of your time traveling to a location for your marriage counseling, you can do it in the comfort of your own home. Love At First Fight is a 7-week online relationship repair program. It provides step by step instructions on how to fix your relationship and includes 7 relationship mentoring phone calls.
The program provides three steps to fixing your relationship: watch their video training, apply what you’ve learned, and chatting with the online counselor. You will have videos every Saturday, teaching you relationship skills such as communication. Then while you’re working on applying these things, you get to talk to the counselor once a week to receive answers to your relationship questions. “Even better, these insights and skills that you’ll gain from marriage counseling and couples therapy can have great and lasting benefits in your other relationships, including in your relationships with colleagues, children, and other family members,” says Julie Williams, Psy.D.
“Through the counseling process, couples find ways to improve their level of relationship satisfaction, sometimes they can also identify obstacles or characteristics that are too much to bear for either person or for the relationship to overcome,” says Dana Baduna, Ph.D., LMFT. With these two programs, it’s safe to expect that your relationship will feel brand new. You’ll find the warmth, comfort, and the feeling of being in love again which is something that most (if not all) married couples are struggling to find. Not only that, you may find yourself physically attracted to your partner again, fulfilling not just your emotional needs but your physical needs as well. All in all these programs contribute to making your relationship fulfilling again.