Our Counselor Told Us To Divorce... We Saved Our Marriage Instead

Everyone told Scott to walk away.

The affair. The lies. The cold distance that built for months. On paper, this was the marriage other people would tell you to end and not feel bad about it.

He didn't walk away.

Not because he was naive. Not because he excused anything. Because he still loved his wife, and he could not live with never having tried.

In this conversation, Scott takes me back to 2019, the year his marriage came apart, and walks me through how it came all the way back.

He found out at 4 in the morning. The phone going off. His wife not in the bed. The search he ran to figure out who was texting her is the thing that led him to Marriage Helper.

What he learned there changed how he showed up.

He stopped reacting. He stopped trying to control her. He stayed calm in the exact moments most people detonate. By the time his daughter pulled him aside and asked if he knew, he was already further into his own healing than anyone around him realized.

Here is the part people argue with me about.

"You're letting the cheater off the hook." "Once a cheater, always a cheater." We see it in the comments every week. Scott answers it head on. He never permitted anything. He was powerless to control someone else's choices. Accepting what you cannot control is not the same as excusing it.

For a year, they were divorced in every way but the judge's signature. She moved states away. The settlement was nearly done.

Then she came home. One year to the day after the workshop they attended together.

Today their marriage is stronger than it was in the first 24 years. Scott coaches on our team now. His wife leads breakout groups at our workshops.

If your marriage is the one everyone says can't be saved, this is the story to sit with.

If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free

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Transcript

The First Signs Something Changed

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Scott, what was happening in your marriage in 2019?

SPEAKER_00 0:05

My marriage was slowly slipping away from me. And I it was probably already on its way, but I was catching up to the fact. My wife was in an affair. I didn't know that. And so I was, I was, I was playing catch up the whole year. I was I was behind. And what I was feeling was every time I tried to reconnect, nope, not interested. And it was it was that cool distance or that coldness that we that we hear from our clients so much.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

And it just developed over time. When were when was the first signal to you in your marriage that something was wrong?

SPEAKER_00 0:48

So, in hindsight, the first time I thought something was off was in about January of 2019. We'd taken our daughter to a swim meet. My phone had died, and I wanted to look something up on the internet. And I grabbed from my wife's phone and she snapped at me and snatched it out of my hands. What are you doing? And I thought that was a very odd reaction because I was innocently looking, gonna Google something. Um and so it was the first time that had happened. I didn't recognize what that was at the time, so I kind of let it go. But that in hindsight, that trying to figure out when things may have started, it took me later to figure that out.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

So she started becoming cold and distant, whereas before y'all had a good marriage?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

I felt like we did. Um my wife might answer differently. I think she was probably disconnecting for me again in hindsight, 2020.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Those those couple of years prior to this, I probably didn't feel like it was awesome. And she probably wouldn't say that it was either. But neither one of us had the fortitude, neither one of us had the language to be able to articulate that to the other. And the ways that we would complain to each other were not healthy. And so it it came across as what we typically see as criticism and contempt and things that we know are not good.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

So in January 2019, that that instance happened. You felt something's maybe something's off here. What happened over the next couple of months that ultimately led you to say something really, really bad is happening?

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Just the distance led me to feel like something's going on. Is there is there another person? I started noticing that she would come home later. There, there was just always an excuse why I couldn't I where she couldn't come home. And um, and again, I'd say, let's go on a date, let's do something together. No, I I can't do it. I, you know, there was a always a flimsy excuse, or maybe, maybe no excuse, just a flat out, no, I don't, I don't feel like it. And I started to feel like there was an affair, and a couple of times I said, Is there someone else? Nope, there's no one else. And it was cold and dispassionate the answer, but I wasn't, I didn't have any way to say, I think you're lying to me. I, you know, so I just kind of let it go. And in fact, I was scared. I didn't, if that was going on, I didn't want to face it. So I accepted the no and and until I couldn't, until I couldn't hide under the covers anymore.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Um I was awakened

The 4 A.M. Wake Up Call

SPEAKER_00 4:00

one night at four in the morning. My wife's song was going off. And I looked over at my wife where she should have been, she wasn't there. So then I got up to investigate. Who in the world is texting my wife at four in the morning? And so then I discovered that my suspicions had been correct all along and that she was, in fact, lying about it. And um all I want to say about that is I saw some things that I can never unsee. Um, but the fortunate part of that is that when I started Googling, I wanted to know who this person was that was that was texting my wife at four in the morning. So I was trying to figure out how can I how can I find out by just a phone number someone's identity. That Google search led me to marriage helper. And I'm super glad that it did.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

So you see, so you're trying to find this this person, which which, by the way, let's let's finish that story. So your wife's just out of the room at 4 a.m.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

She probably got up to sleep somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Left her phone.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

I may have been snoring or something. Um and we we have a guest suite. At the time we had a guest suite up in our house. That's where my office is now. But at the time it was a guest room. And she had evidently gone up there to sleep.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Did you tell her that day what you had seen? No, you just kept it in.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Intuitively, even before I found Marriage Helper. Yeah, intuitively I understood that if I went and confronted her and said, You've been lying to me, I found all this evidence on your phone, I understood that that was not going to be seen as a positive. It will be seen. I I kind of somehow, I think I subconsciously remembered that incident in January. And so I knew that if I presented this to her, it would it would resend in vitriol and and bitterness and how dare you look on my phone. And not like, of course, you would investigate a noise at four in the morning, you know.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

So I intuitively I I knew that I needed to keep that to myself for the time being. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I so I didn't do anything at the time.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

And you were just able to act normal that day and that week and in your interactions with her from that point forward?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

I was dying inside. I feel like I did my best to I I figured she had been hiding things from me, and so I could, I could reciprocate. I could, I could hide what I could hide what I was feeling from her.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

So you find this video. What about it? Like, why did you do why did you choose to watch it? It was the I'm guessing it was the one about your wife is in love with someone else, your spouse is in love with someone else. What do you do?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

It's a it's a video that many of our clients have seen where where Dr. Beam starts off by saying, so your spouse is having an affair, something along those lines. And I'm like, how did you know that? So I mean, I'm immediately drawn to that. And um, Dr. Beam is so calming and so he's such a good speaker. Um, I was drawn in by this, and I could see how much he cares about people, and so I watched that video, and then I watched another, and then I watched another. It wasn't long before I was watching as many of these as I could.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

What about it made sense to you, what you were watching?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

That's a great question. It it started to explain things to me a little bit at a time that didn't make any sense to me. Why would my why would my wife do something like this? My wife used to be outwardly vocal, go out of her way to to either shame people or to just be vocal about people who were having affairs and how terrible they were. How did my wife choose to do this? She this this is what she used to be. Trying to trying to compare then to now, the you know, watching the videos kind of helped me bridge that gap.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

You began to understand what was going on maybe in the mind of your wife.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Exactly. How did, you know, how did I contribute to this? Was a big part of it as well. But what's happening right now, how is this even possible? This is my worst nightmare. How did how did we get here? And the Merritt helper videos were you probably don't know how you got here. Let us help you get, let us help you understand that in a very genuine and real way. That that the other things that were coming up in the feed weren't very appealing.

Finding A Framework For Betrayal

SPEAKER_00 9:30

You could immediately see that those people were more about just do X, Y, and Z, and this magic thing will happen. And it's like, I don't believe that. This is a complex situation. It's not just an X, Y, and Z and get this result. So I really started to understand better how much I didn't know. That was really important for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

A lot of people, Scott, when they find out that their spouse is having an affair, at that point they would say, I'm done. Why not you?

SPEAKER_00 10:15

That's an interesting question. I I think I felt those feelings early on. Um I felt like, well, I guess we're gonna have to divorce, or I guess we're gonna have to. Um but what I felt instead was everybody's telling me something that doesn't feel right. It felt like the world was telling me to do something that I've been raised not to do. Like every fiber in my being felt like pursuing that course was wrong.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Of divorce.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Yeah, pursuing a course of divorce was was the wrong thing to do. And at the end of the day, as hurt as I was, I still loved her. And I started to think about I had taken my son to a football game earlier that fall, and and I saw this older couple who were alumni of this this college, and they were they looked to be in their 70s, and they were just having a great day together, and they were enjoying the football game, and I was like, that's what I want. I don't want to start over with somebody new. I have a shared history with this person. I I plan to grow old with this person. If there's any way that I can still have that, that's what I want. So that's where I was at the time.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

You you said yesterday when you were and I, when you and I were talking about this, that you had this tenacity about you when it came to saving your marriage. Where do you think that came from?

SPEAKER_00 12:08

It's uh I've thought about that a lot. In in our marriage, I want to I want to give my wife some credit here. She's the one who's typically tenacious. She's the one. If I'm having a computer problem and I can't figure it out within 10 or 15 minutes, I'm yelling for her, can you please come help me before I break this thing? Um and in in my life, I've struggled with a fear of failure. That's a thing I've really struggled with for much of my younger life. Something about this situation flipped all of that. And during during all of this, my wife never experienced a fear of failure until we talked about potential reconciliation. And then she had a fear of failure. And throughout this whole crisis, my bigger fear than failure was what if I don't try? Now, as someone who has struggled with a fear of failure, I've always been like, well, it's easier not to try than it is to try and fit. Like, that's a it's a weird psychological thing that I've tried to figure out why I've been that way. Something about, and I really don't know what it is, other than it just felt so intrinsically wrong to me to pursue divorce. It just I did not have any. I mean, I I felt like I might fail, but I couldn't I couldn't live with myself if I didn't give it every last ounce of effort that I could.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Even if it meant failing. You had more peace about giving it your all than about trying and failing.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Exactly. That that fear of failure that I struggled with my whole life turned into I have to do this no matter what. It it turned on a dime.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

What was the thing that led you? Because you said you were watching the videos, you had this inner, just this deep intrinsic motivation of this is something I want to do. Why did you ever choose to become a client of marriage helper?

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Well, I mean, as soon as I heard that there was a workshop that could help save the even the worst marriages, the you know, the the ones with no hope, the ones that everybody else had written off. That's super appealing when you're in that boat. I certainly was.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Was that the first thing you did? Was the workshop the first thing that you did?

SPEAKER_00 14:52

No. I had before I found marriage helper, I had asked my wife if um if we could go to counseling. And she said, I guess. So I had found a local counselor. I I made the mistake that that many clients make. I found someone who said they were a marriage counselor, but we walked in there, and within 10 minutes, it was, what's your goal? And my goal was to save the marriage and what I thought could happen. And then she asked my wife, what's your goal? And my wife said, I don't think I want to be in this marriage anymore. I think I want to pursue being separate. And just like that, I I this is real. She turned and she looked to me and she said, Scott, this is going to be hard for you. And I feel like you could probably see my heart breaking in half if somebody had been filming that.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

And that was that was maybe no more than 10 minutes into an hour-long session.

Why He Refuses Divorce As Default

SPEAKER_00 16:00

And then the rest of the session was about how we're going to help you decouple and and Oh my gosh. So I'd hired this person thinking they were going to help me.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

And all they had done was make it worse.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So that was made the rest of the day. You didn't just leave in that moment.

unknown 16:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

That's such a hard situation. And so when you left that session, what was the what did your wife think was going to happen? That y'all were going to go through a like a mediated separation process?

SPEAKER_00 16:28

This counselor had told us that we should arrange for an in-house separation. And so at that point, my wife decided it would be okay to move upstairs into our guest area.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

And then you never went back.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

We were having guests for Christmas, though. So she waited until after the new year. But but that gave her permission to move into our into our guest room at that point.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

So that was December of 2019 that you went to that counselor.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Did your did your wife know you knew about the affair at that point?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

I don't think she knew at that point.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

When did she find out that you knew about this affair? You had kept it secret for a year.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Not quite a year. It ended up being about five months.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Okay. Okay. You didn't find that's right. In January of 2019 was when you Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

My daughter was 17 at the time. And she also suspected that something was going on. And she was getting the same kind of response. Nope, there's nothing going on. And she was really struggling with why is mom being so cold to dad? She, my my wife was actually vilifying me to the children. And that was really hard for them. And she would come to me sometimes. Um, my daughter is is what we would consider a completer. She's a lot like your mom in that way.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Very loyal, laid back, hates conflict, wants peace.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

It's the connection between all the people. Like she's making sure everybody at the party is having fun. She's she's making sure all the people got invited, like all of it. Um so it was devastating for her to see that there was very little connection between her parents. And so she would come to me and and want to ask certain things. And so I'm trying to be honest with her on the one hand when not give her too much information, walking that fine line. Um, and then one day, after um a lot of times we had to split duties. There was a weekend where my my wife took our daughter down south for a um a swim meet, and I had stayed back with my son to do, I think it was baseball at the time. And um they got home, she came and pulled me aside. And do you know mom's having an affair? I'm like, Yes, sweetie, I know. Why didn't you tell me? Sweetheart, that's not the kind of thing. You want to tell your daughter. Why didn't you confront her? And so I said the way I found out about it was I looked on her phone. Her phone was making noise in the middle of the night, and I found out about it like that, and if I tell her I found out about it by looking on her phone, she's just gonna accuse me of of violating her privacy. And so my daughter kind of started to follow. I didn't tell her what to do, um, but she saw that I wasn't confronting mom, so she didn't confront mom immediately until about I'll say it was three or four weeks later. And my wife was very um quick to get annoyed with things at that time, and she was kind of picking on our daughter. Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? You didn't do your homework, whatever it was, tiny things. And my daughter just lost it. Well, at least I'm not blah blah blah blah blah in defense of herself. At least I'm not doing this thing that I know you're doing. And she screamed it, and so that's how my son found out. And so at that point, you could have probably predicted this. My wife, I can't believe I can't trust my own daughter, and she stormed into the bedroom, got her keys, and she drove off. We had no idea where she was. She spent the night. I found out later she spent the night in her car in the parking lot of her office.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Um, and then she came home the next morning and she said, We need to talk. I said, Yeah, we do. So we went into our bedroom for some privacy and and we talked. But that's how that's how it came to light.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

How did that talk go?

SPEAKER_00 21:41

By that point, I was prepared.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

I had already started to forgive her. I'd already started to learn a lot from Marriage Helper. I was able to be safe. Um, I expected her to lie, which she did, and I didn't accept the lie. Said, I understand that this is hard, but I know that that's not true. Well, it's it was really blah blah blah. I I know this is hard, but I know that that's not true. I've I've seen these things the way that I and I explained the way that I found out you stayed calm. I was able to stay calm, and that was different. My wife was shocked by that. I'm sure she expected me to bring a verbal oozy to her to cut her down, and I didn't. And probably for the

Counseling Gone Wrong And Truth Comes Out

SPEAKER_00 22:40

first time in my life, I didn't react that way, at least in her mind. Sure. And so it was an opportunity for me to really show that I was starting to make these changes, and and some of the things that I was trying to show her, she got to see in real time. I don't know how much of an effect it had at that time, but I do I did feel like I handled it well. It was it was powerful, and it was it was a good thing that I did not let her have it in that moment.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

I can imagine, Scott, that there's people listening at this point and they're thinking, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard. Not the situation, but the way you have reacted. Because people are thinking, and we get it in the comments on our YouTube videos all of the time. Uh, something like, you're just letting the cheater off the hook. You know, once a cheater, always a cheater. Why would you be so nice to them? That that basic mindset, like you're excusing their bad behavior. What would you say to that person who's thinking that right now?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

If you're feeling that way right now, I get it. Because I've been there. I didn't make the decision to step outside the marriage. That was not my decision. I wasn't allowing those things to happen. They were happening despite my objections. They were happening despite the fact that I desperately didn't want those things to happen, but I couldn't control it. And every time I did try to control it, it backfired. There were times when I did things to kind of say, oh, I made these plans, such and such and such, because I suspected she was going to try to go see her affair partner. So I invented something for us to do, and all that did was backfire. It would blow up on my face, yelling, screaming. Um, so I quickly learned like that's not a good thing to do. In our vernacular, that was a huge push.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

So um if it feels like you're permitting it, you're not permitting this. You never signed off on this. You didn't say, oh, go, you go ahead and do whatever you feel like. You know, that's not what people are saying. What we're what we're saying is, I'm powerless to control this. I'm not in control of this person's decisions. But it takes a while to get there.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

What made the shift in your marriage? When did things start to turn around?

SPEAKER_00 25:30

There were several different points that that happened. Um the night that the affair was exposed, and then the next morning, I think that was a pivotal moment. Um we attended an online couples workshop. That was very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

How did she agree to go?

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Relentlessness from you. I just kept asking.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

I started to position it as you have this thing that you want, and I'm not gonna give you this thing that you want unless you also give me this thing that I want.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

And for her, it was the divorce. She wanted the thing that she wanted was the divorce.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

She wanted the divorce, and I said, I think that this is gonna benefit us, whether we stay married or not. I'm asking you to do this. If you'll do this with me, I want you to fully participate. I want you to just give it a little time afterwards. But if you still feel like a divorce is the only option, then I'll stop fighting you. And we can go to mediation and we can we can we can mediate this. But we can both get what we want here. And because she was getting more and more frustrated with how long this process was taking, she saw it as a means to an end. So she and she will say this. We talk about this sometimes when we work in our workshops and tell our story. Um, she was just trying to appease me.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

And ultimately, you basically, for all intents and purposes, did end up getting the divorce.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

Yeah, for all intents and purposes, we were divorced for a year. I have to say it that way.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Because technically, a judge never signed the divorce decree. We mediated the settlement, it was 99% done, and we we had to do the things that we agreed to do. And where we live in Texas, the the governing document was the mediated settlement. So a judge would never technically have had to sign the decree, they would have reverted to the mediated settlement. Um, it was COVID. And so there were fluky things that happened. And um, you know, people got sick and and deadlines were missed and certain things like that.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Shut down, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

Yeah. And then one of the things was that we needed to sell our house. Neither could afford to buy the other out of the house. We had to sell it. And then my wife on her own decided that rather than sell the house, I'll move back to Colorado where we're from, because I've got this offer to take a much higher paying job. It'll allow me to pay the mortgage and have an apartment. And therefore, we don't have to sell the house. So, completely disregarding the mediated settlement, she unilaterally made that decision, which actually put, like, I asked my lawyer, like, she can't do that. And she's like, Well, we could take her to court and make her come home. And I'm like, Well, that's not what I want to do. So my lawyer was able to somehow just get that thing tabled, and it just stayed in this weird limbo state. It felt like a guillotine hanging over my head for a year, but but the divorce didn't ever, the judge never signed it.

unknown 29:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

And then eventually, when she came home and we reconciled, she was able to call her lawyer and ask that it be dismissed.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

So And what was the thing that led her to come home?

SPEAKER_00 29:16

A couple of things. She had seen it it took a while for her to see that the changes that I had made were real and permanent. And she saw them not just in me, but she saw my kids

Workshop, Divorce Limbo, And The Turnaround

SPEAKER_00 29:30

emulating me.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

In a good way.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yeah, in in a better way.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Um I had asked her to go on a spring break vacation with us. I planned to drive a road trip down through the southern states. And so I kept asking her to come with us. And eventually she agreed to do that. And I I treated it like a taste and see. If you would be willing to come home and explore just the possibility of whether we might could reconcile, this is what it would look like. And I started to count. I I at one point I counted like 52 out of 53 times where I handled situations well with smart contact, and and one where I got upset and whatever. But then I realized that even in that moment, even the one that I messed up, the way that I came and did a did a repair attempt, even in failure, there was still an opportunity for me to show the changes that I had made. And that was that was super insightful for me to realize. And so I try to point that out to clients now. Um, I stopped counting at one point, but um that gave her a little confidence, I think, to see that things could be different. And then as we approached the end of that school year, there were a lot of seminal moments in our kids' lives that she was gonna miss if she wasn't there. Our son was turning his 13. And so in the church we attend, that means he can be confirmed in the church. And he was, he, he was being confirmed. Um, it would have been her first Mother's Day without the kids. It uh, our daughter was going to her senior prom. There was graduation, you know, all these big things. And I kept talking about like these are big moments for your kids, and I know you don't want to miss them, and I I know they don't want you to miss these things. What if you came home? What if we, you know, and again, I was gently guiding. At that point, I wasn't pushing.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

But I was I was making suggestions and encouraging and asking how she thought. What do you feel? Tell me what you know. So she started to get a little bit more confidence, but still had a lot of fear.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

Was the affair still going on or had it? It was over by the way. It was over. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

After it was exposed, because it was COVID, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for her to see her affair partner. And what we would call deterioration of those limerence feelings, she was already kind of the in deterioration. And I think the shame that she felt by being called out by her daughter, she was still dealing with that, but she never, she never saw her fair partner after that, that I'm aware of.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Um, so it had ended, but but the desire for her to be separate didn't end.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

That was still there.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

That was still there.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

So ultimately she got this taste and see, you had become a big pull in her life. P-U-L-L of some she liked how she felt when she was around you. She saw that the future could be different than what the past was. And so when did she come back?

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Ironically enough, it was one year to the day after the after the Sunday of the workshop that we attended.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Um and I remember this specifically. I uh I had wanted her to come home a couple days before that. It would have been a Saturday, and I thought it would be a perfect day or whatever. And she was really like, no, I'm gonna do it on Monday. And I'm like, why am I arguing about this? She can do it her way, it doesn't have to be my way. Fine. I'll see you on it. And so it was a really big moment for me, another seminal moment where I could say, I don't have to feel like I'm in control of all this. Yeah, I don't, I can let go of this. And so she came home, she brought two weeks worth of clothes and her laptop, and she had permission to work remotely. And there was an apartment full of things back in Denver as a as a safety valve, as an escape route, just in case I need this in order to feel safe. I didn't love that we were still paying for that, but I knew that she needed that. So I I just didn't say anything about it for about four months or whatever. And then eventually I helped her go back there and break her lease and move those things back.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Scott, what would you say to someone who's listening to this and they are in the shoes that you were in in 2019?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

I would say there really is always hope. If you look at my situation back then on paper, most people would say, not only is there no hope for this marriage, there's these people should not be together. I was controlling, I was dealing with a with a spending addiction, we were not good to each other, we couldn't communicate, we were talking past each other, there was an affair.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

So many reasons, it would just be easier if you guys would just split up. It would be better, like people would justify it in any kind of way. If there's if there's a marriage that on paper you could go, that one,

Always Hope And What Healing Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 35:30

that one shouldn't be saved. I felt like that was me. Yeah. But I still had hope. Marriage helper helped me have that hope. And so I kind of look at it like if you're going through a divorce, I get it. Because I've been there. If you were divorced, I get it. Because I've been there. Whatever it is, I relate to it. There's always hope. Dr. Beam famously says, and I like to repeat, like, heaven forbid, unless one of the two of you passes from this earth, we still have hope for your marriage because of the because of the miraculous things that we've seen.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

100%.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

If it were just me, I would say, well, maybe that's an anomaly. That's a special case. That can't, you know, it's not just me.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah. Yeah. It's not. And now you're a coach on our team, and your wife is one of our breakout leaders for our workshops. Exactly. And so your marriage is reconciled. Is it better than it was?

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

That's a yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Yes. If she were here, she would also tell you unequivocally that we have a better marriage now than we ever had in the first 24 years of our marriage.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Oh, you know one day I would love to inter I would love to interview her and hear her side of this story.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Yeah. She was very busy this week.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

But I would love to bring her back here and have her get to meet you in person.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

I would love that too. Thank you, Scott.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

My pleasure.