Dear Pastor,
I am a reader of your column and I would like to commend you on your work. I am a Jamaican guy living in America. I am married to a Canadian woman. My problem started when my wife asked me for a divorce. We have known each other for nine years and we have been married for four years. We have been unhappy for a long time, but I was too involved with my life to pay any real attention to our problems. Hence the request from my wife for a divorce was a surprise.
I love my wife so I promised her that I would change everything and she decided to give me a chance. We started seeing a counsellor. Soon after I found out she was in a relationship with another man. We had a big fight and I moved out of our home.
After I moved out she called and told me that she had made the biggest mistake of her life and she wanted me back. To be honest with you, I have never completely been faithful to my wife from the start of our relationship, so I decided to give our marriage a second chance. We talked and I confessed everything that I had done and in the process she told me that she has cheated on me many times. It was a lot to deal with, but I figure what goes around comes around and we continued with counselling.
It has been about six months since the confessions and I can't learn to trust her. I know that I have done the same thing and I love her, but I keep having dreams about her cheating on me and I have to know what she is doing at all times. It's driving me insane. I have decided that I am going to give our marriage a fair chance this time. We have even been working on finding a good church, but my trust issue is a black cloud over our marriage.
Please give me your advice. I feel like I could never trust her again. I love my wife and I hope there is some way I can get over my feeling of not trusting her. May God continue to bless you.
M. S., Texas, USA
Dear M. S.,
Life is unfair. Think of what you have done and you expect your wife to forgive you, but you are not willing to forgive her. I know you have not forgiven her because if you had, you would begin to learn to trust her. You raised the matter of trust, but really it is the thought of her cheating that is haunting you. You believed that while you were ignoring her, she was a nice little saint at home. You were not aware that someone else was meeting her biological and emotional needs.
How do you know that she is not finding it difficult to trust you? It takes a long time to rebuild trust in a person. It is not an overnight thing. Your male ego has been wounded and you are finding it very difficult to deal with that. Which man in his right mind would want to know that his woman has been playing around with other men?
My dear, sir, continue to go through counselling and be very honest with the counsellor. You need sessions alone with him/her. My prayers are with you.
Pastor
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