A Bosnian couple met online — only to be repulsed when they met in person?  It wasn’t that they found each other unattractive. The surprise was that the on-line daters turned out to be married to each other in real life.

Unhappy with their marriage, they each created online identities under fake names and had an “affair” with each other — each complaining about their miserable marriage and thinking they had finally found their soul mate.

But when they met, reality hit. Realizing they had only found the person who had disappointed them in marriage, they decided to get a divorce — claiming marital unfaithfulness!

There’s a lot you could say about this story, but consider what the couple was quoted saying about each other:

I thought I had found the love of my life. The way this Prince of Joy spoke to me, the things he wrote, the tenderness in every expression was something I had never had in my marriage.

To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the Internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.                                                                

Could it be that the time and effort they put into their online conversations were the necessary work needed in their marriage? Instead of looking for a way out, a way in was to rekindle that friendship and expressions of fondness they did online. The novelty brought out positive feelings towards each other. Same people, but different responses to each other–they were open to seeing each other with new positive eyes.

In person, our couple couldn’t see passed their negativity and built up resentment. their negativity overrode any positives that may have surfaced. When couples don’t deal with negativity and escape to new relationships, the problems follow with the next person. There are no short cuts to working through problems. Avoiding and starting over is an escape.

The lesson in this story. Find a way to forgive, deal with problems and build back the positivity in the original friendship and attraction. When this couple had a fresh start on-line, positive feelings emerged again–this was something that could have been worked with in couples therapy had they been willing to repair the damage and try again.