After 25 years of marriage, Lois never expected to be here — sitting across from a man she barely recognised. David, once her best friend, now sat rigid and defensive, his jaw set in that stubborn line she’d grown to dread.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he’d say, arms crossed. “It happened. We either move forward or we don’t.”

No apologies. No remorse. Just a wall of defensive anger that seemed to grow higher with each passing day. His affair had shattered her world, but his response to it — this cold, distant defensiveness — that’s what truly broke her heart.

“I don’t know how to heal from this,” she told Pete during their first call. “He won’t even acknowledge my pain. How can our marriage survive if he won’t show remorse?”

Pete’s response surprised her.

“What if I told you your healing — and possibly even your marriage — doesn’t depend on his remorse at all?”

She almost laughed. “That’s impossible. How can I heal if he won’t even say he’s sorry?”

“Because,” Pete explained, “true healing comes from filling your own emotional system with unconditional love. And here’s the fascinating part — when you do that, it often creates a space safe enough for your partner’s walls to naturally come down.”

Lois was sceptical, but desperate enough to try anything.

Over the next few months, Pete taught her about her emotional system — how it had been running on empty, seeking validation and security from David and others. How his betrayal had exposed this emptiness she’d carried long before the affair.

Slowly, she learned to fill herself with unconditional love. Not because she was perfect. Not because she deserved it. Simply because she existed.

The first change she noticed was in herself. Initially, the pain didn’t disappear completely, but it stopped consuming her. She no longer needed David’s remorse to feel worthy.

Then something unexpected happened.

One evening, as she sat peacefully reading — no longer desperately trying to make him talk — David spoke.

“How do you do it?” he asked quietly.

“Do what?”

“Seem so… at peace. After what I did.”

For the first time, she saw his walls for what they were — not weapons to hurt her, but shields protecting his own empty emotional system. His defensiveness wasn’t strength; it was fear.

“I learned to access unconditional love,” she said simply. “And that made it possible to love you the same way.”

His eyes filled with tears — the first real emotion she’d seen from him in months.

“I don’t deserve that kind of love,” he whispered.

“That’s the thing about unconditional love,” she replied. “It’s not about deserving.”

Over the following weeks, she watched in amazement as her own inner peace seemed to create a safe space for David’s walls to crumble. Without her desperate need for his remorse, without her attempts to force him to feel guilty, he began to soften.

The apology, when it finally came, wasn’t forced or demanded. It flowed naturally from a man who, touched by unconditional love, could finally face his own pain and the pain he’d caused.

“I never understood,” he told her one night, “how someone could still love me after what I did. Your love taught me how to face what I’d done. Your peace taught me it was safe to feel again.”

Lois realized then what Pete had tried to tell her all along. Her healing hadn’t depended on David’s remorse. Instead, her healing had created the very conditions that allowed his remorse to emerge naturally.

Their marriage didn’t just survive — it transformed. Not into the fairytale she’d once believed in, but into something more real. A partnership between two people learning to fill their own emotional systems, while sharing that overflow with each other.

“The greatest power,” Pete had told her, “lies not in demanding love, but in becoming it.”

Looking at David now, at the man who’d emerged once his walls came down, she finally understood. Sometimes the path to healing a broken marriage starts with healing yourself. And sometimes the most powerful way to break down someone’s walls is to stop pushing against them altogether.

Instead, become so full of unconditional love that you create a space where walls are no longer needed.

That’s what true healing looks like.