No More Perfect Marriages 10-Day Blog Series This blog series was originally published on www.JillSavage.org. We’ve created this pdf format to make it easier to read and share. Posting it on the blog was our first time to go public with our story of restoration after infidelity. However, we wrote this series—and eventually the No More Perfect Marriages book it laid the foundation for—for every couple. Every relationship naturally drifts apart and feelings fade. It takes intentionality to stay connected to each other. We hope you find our story helpful and hope-giving. If you’d like to tap into our other marriage resources, you’ll find them here: No More Perfect Marriages book Your Next Steps: What To Do When Your Spouse Is Unfaithful book www.NoMorePerfectDateNight.com #MarriageMonday Blog Posts No More Perfect Marriages FREE E-Challenge No More Perfect Marriages Seminars The Flirt Alert Book Mark and Jill as speakers No More Perfect Marriages FREE Video Curriculum JAM Savage Ministries, Copyright 2018 2 Day 1: Our Story Jill says: Some of you have been hanging around here for a long time and you may remember when I shared about Mark leaving 3 years ago and then several months later about him coming home. Some of you are newer friends and aren’t aware that my marriage has been through some hard trials. For many years, Mark and I did Marriage Monday posts together. We ping-ponged back and forth with “Jill says…” and “Mark says…” talking about marriage challenges, lessons learned, and practical take-aways. Those were very popular posts, but they came to a halt when Mark began to go through what we now know was a mid-life crisis. Today…and every weekday for the next two weeks, we will be unpacking the storm our marriage went through a little over three years ago. Today we’ll start with the facts: Mark says: I remember the day well. After a long season of confusion, a very hard season of church ministry, a decision to leave pastoring after 20 years, and my 50th birthday, Jill and I were in Florida on a getaway for just the two of us. I was emotionally depleted, disillusioned with God, and discouraged in every part of my life, including my marriage. We had enjoyed a few low-key days in her parent’s condo. On our last day there, all of my emotions collided. It seemed our differences were magnified in this time away, God wasn’t changing anything in my life that I was praying about, I wasn’t where I expected to be in life by the time I was 50, we continued to have the same challenges in our marriage year after year, and I decided I was done with it all. I now know that I was living out a full-blown mid-life crisis. I came home from that trip completely resolved. Shortly thereafter a relationship began through Facebook with someone I’d known long ago. Within a matter of months, it had JAM Savage Ministries, Copyright 2018 3 moved from an emotional affair to a physical one. I eventually left Jill to pursue this new relationship. I didn’t care what anybody thought. I was doing what I wanted to do. If you were following the blog back then and read her “From My Heart” post, you might have thought “What in the world was Mark thinking?” My thinking was skewed, no doubt. However, I want to tell you what I was thinking, and I want to share the “slow fade” journey with you because if I can prevent any husband or wife from dealing with their life frustrations the way I did, my vulnerability will be worth it all. When I left, I was headed out of my marriage into another relationship. I had a huge storm raging in my soul that involved myself, my God, the Church (in general) and Jill. I felt hopeless that anything in my life could be different, so I decided to take things into my own hands. Jill says… We have survived an affair and lived to tell about it. When you experience deep pain, you long for God to redeem it for His purposes. That’s what we hope to do with this blog series and eventually with the No More Perfect Marriages book we’re already working on. Sharing this kind of story in a public environment is something akin to standing in the middle of a public square with no clothes on. We’d rather keep it to ourselves; but we can’t. God has given us a platform and a calling to make a difference in families. That means sharing honestly about the challenges we have experienced, lived through, and found victory in on the other side. In order to share the story in a consistent way, we will be devoting the next 2 weeks to our story and the take-aways for every couple that can be culled from our dark season. Will you help us reach more marriages with this story? If you know someone going through a difficult time in their marriage, or a couple who is trying to put together the pieces of their broken relationship, will you share this with them? We also want you to know that both Mark and I are committed to be praying for any couple going through a hard season. If you want us to pray for you specifically, please send us a confidential email to [email protected] and we will add you and your spouse to our prayer list. There are no perfect marriages, but God uses marriage to perfect us…if we’ll allow Him to. JAM Savage Ministries, Copyright 2018 4 Day 2: It’s a Slow Fade Mark says: After our trip to Florida, I began talking regularly with an old girlfriend on Facebook. She had gone through a divorce and we had briefly interacted earlier in the spring on that. The more we talked on Facebook, the more emotionally connected we became. Jill says: I discovered the relationship before it became physical. I saw a text that Mark received from this person and it seemed to be way too friendly. I asked Mark about it and he indicated that he was just helping an old friend out after a divorce. After 20 years of serving as a pastor and helping people through crisis, this wasn’t unusual, but his method of using Facebook and texting greatly concerned me. We talked about the dangerous position this put him in emotionally and both decided that he would move the communication to email and copy me on it for integrity and accountability purposes. Mark says: I knew I needed to do the right thing, but I didn’t want to. I was dissatisfied in nearly every area of my life. With an enticing new relationship on the horizon, I became further convinced there was nothing good about my marriage. I moved our conversation to email copying Jill on the communication for a time or two and then the deception began as I moved the conversation underground. Even though we lived several hours apart, the relationship moved from emotional to physical within a couple months. Jill says: I discovered the physical relationship after finding Mark asleep in bed with the phone in his hand. I picked up the phone to put it away and saw the conversation on the screen. I wanted to throw up. I panicked, not knowing what to do. I had three friends who knew some of the struggles we’d been facing. They had been praying for Mark specifically as he walked through so much disillusionment with life, JAM Savage Ministries, Copyright 2018 5 ministry, and marriage. One of those friends said to me, “you can call me any time…even in the middle of the night if you need to.” I thanked her, but couldn’t imagine needing to call her in the middle of the night. However, after I saw the conversation on Mark’s phone, I now knew why she’d made that offer. At 1am, I made a phone call to the woman whose name was on my husband’s phone and told her that I expected her to never speak to my husband again. Then I called my call- me-in-the-middle-of-the-night friend and dissolved into a puddle of tears that would become a near daily occurrence for me for many months. Mark says: In 2007, Casting Crowns released the song, “It’s a Slow Fade.” The lyrics in the chorus are descriptive of the slow drift that any marriage or any spouse can experience: It’s a slow fade when you give yourself away It’s a slow fade when black and white have turned to gray Thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid When you give yourself away. People never crumble in a day It’s a slow fade. Jill and I were doing many of the right things in our marriage. We knew each other’s love languages and spoke them often. We had date nights. We did getaways on a regular basis. We were intentional about communication. In the midst of that much intentionality, infidelity became a part of our story. How in the world did that happen? Jill says: Looking back, it wasn’t the big things that made a difference. It was the little things. Things that simmered under the surface. Things unnoticed.