So, what are the seven mistakes that you can make that are absolutely guaranteed to ruin your relationship or marriage? One key question to consider is **how to know if marriage is over**.
Hey, Cody Butler here, relationship and marriage coach, and founder of Better Marriage, where we help you have the marriage and relationship of your dreams. So, what are seven things that you can do? What are several mistakes that are catastrophic to a relationship that will ruin it?
How to Know If Marriage Is Over: No Vision for the Relationship
Now, number one is to have no vision for the relationship. It says in the Bible where people perish for lack of vision. It doesn’t say they perish for lack of skills or lack of motivation or lack of effort or lack of wanting a great result. They perish for lack of vision, and the same is true for a marriage. A lack of vision in a marriage will cause the relationship to fail.
Now, when people come together in a relationship, they’re generally moving in the same direction, and they automatically have a vision for the relationship because they come together through hobbies or through social clubs or through schools or something like that, and they’re automatically walking on the same road, and they’re automatically moving in the same direction.
But as the relationship grows, the vision starts to separate, and before you know it, if you’re not careful, you have two people in a relationship with two individual visions for their lives and no vision for the relationship.
Mistake number one is to not have a unified vision for the relationship. Where do you want to go as a couple? What do you want to achieve as a couple, not as individuals?
Not Understanding
Big mistake number two is not understanding that your partner is not your ex. Now, a lot of us, we come into relationships and marriages from past relationships. The long-term soulmate relationship, the marriage relationship, is not the first relationship, and we bring baggage into the relationship, and we view our partner, and we treat them as our ex. Maybe there are some trust issues, maybe there are other issues in the relationships that this person does not have, this person does not cause.
Yet, we are bringing those issues into the relationship. We’re projecting the traits of our past partner onto our current partner, very unfairly, and it is causing friction, and it ultimately will cause the relationship to fail. So, mistake number two is to understand that the partner you’re with right now is not your ex, and they’re also not your parents, and it’s not fair to treat them as if they were.
Not Getting Relationship Education
A big mistake number three that will ruin a relationship is to not get relationship education. If you want to be a doctor, you get trained as a doctor. If you want to be a pilot, you get trained as a pilot. All top athletes and team athletic teams have coaches. Top businesses have coaches. Top CEOs have coaches.
And all top performers at every level are receiving consistent and ongoing coaching and education. So why do we think that we don’t need coaching within a relationship? If you want to be successful in a relationship, then you need relationship education.
None of us are born with the skills naturally to have a relationship. None of us understand how to communicate with the other sex intuitively without education. So, a big mistake is to not get the education.
Now, if you want some free education, some free training on how to get more sex, how to get more communication, how to get more emotional and physical intimacy, how to stop the fighting in the relationship, and how to build your relationship and restore your relationship from the ground up, check the links in the description. We’ve got some master classes where we’ll share with you for free how to do these things so you can start to get the education to build your relationship up.
Poor Communication
Now, mistake number four, which carries on from the previous mistake, is poor communication. Men and women are different, and men and women speak different languages. Now, very rarely do we set out to annoy our partner or to hurt our partner, but quite often we do it, and the reason is because of miscommunication.
It’s not because we want to hurt them or because we want to cause a fight. We just don’t know how to communicate with them. We just don’t know how to communicate what our needs are, and we just don’t understand what our partner is saying when they’re trying to communicate their needs. So, a lack of communication understanding, poor communication, is a massive mistake.
One of the success principles that all, and I mean all, 100 percent of successful couples have is they understand how to communicate with each other. Men learn how to speak women, and women learn how to speak men. And again, if you want some help with that, there are some free classes. Check out the links in the description, and we’ll get you some free training on how to communicate better with your partner.
Not Allowing Your Partner to Be Yourself
A big mistake number five is not allowing your partner to be themselves. It’s effectively crushing their spirit. It’s forcing them to be somebody else. And again, we don’t intentionally do this. We don’t set out to deliberately change our partner. We have the best of intentions.
But ultimately, we try to help our partner, and we try to change them for the better. We try to make them a better person or we try to correct their faults when the reality is there’s no such thing as a fault in a person. There just is. The person just is. And our job is to accept them as they are and to love them as they are and to not change them. Because even if we’re able to change them, which we probably won’t be able to do, we’re just going to crush their spirit, and we’re just going to make them passionless, and we’re going to make them enthusiasm-less, and we’re really going to destroy the relationship. So, the key really is to love your partner unconditionally and to accept them as they are unconditionally.
So, allowing your partner to be who they are and who they want to be is to love them unconditionally. And again, all successful couples do this. So, step number five or tip number five is to unconditionally love your partner as they are and allow them to be the person that they want to be.
Going with the Flow
Mistake number six that can absolutely and will absolutely ruin a relationship is to just go with the flow versus being deliberate. Are you creating a life of passion, excitement, enthusiasm, love, joy, all of the things that you want? Or are you just going with the flow? Are you going with the path of least resistance and just hoping these things show up in your relationship? Because all that’s going to show up if you just leave your garden untended, and your marriage is like a garden, right? If you just leave your marriage untended, all that’s going to show up are weeds.
And pretty soon, your garden is going to be completely choked by weeds. And this beautiful landscaped garden that you once had is just going to be this big mess of overgrown weeds, grass, snakes, and everything else, and spiders and bugs. So, a big mistake is to just go with
The flow and not being deliberate in creating your marriage. What’s your vision for your marriage? What are your goals for your marriage? What do you want your marriage to look like, and what steps are you taking to make that happen? Or are you just going to accept whatever shows up in your marriage? Because if you’re not creating a deliberate future, if you’re not setting that vision and you’re not setting that path, all you’re going to end up with is what shows up, and what shows up is going to be what other people just don’t want. You’re going to get leftovers, right? If you don’t create a plan for your own life, you’re just going to become a part of everybody else’s plan.
And if you don’t create a vision for your own marriage, then your marriage is going to crumble, and it’s just going to become decrepit, and whatever it is. If you don’t create and actively implement a plan and a vision for your own marriage, your marriage is just going to deteriorate, and it’s not going to be the relationship that you dreamed of.
Taking Your Partner for Granted
Now, the last mistake here that’ll absolutely ruin a marriage is to take your partner for granted. After we’ve been together for a long time, we just assume that they’re not going to leave. We just assume that, for all intents and purposes, we’ve got them, right? We own them to some extent, and they’re going to stay with us. And that might be true. A lot of relationships are in a state of obligation, of mutual obligation, and you’re not going to split up. You’re not going to go apart.
You’re not going to go your separate ways. You’re committed to each other, and that’s very admirable. But that doesn’t mean that the marriage is passionate and enthusiastic and has the energy and excitement that it once had. And that’s a real shame because it can have that. 100%, you can get that passion back. You can get that excitement and enthusiasm back. But one of the things that absolutely will kill that is just simply taking your partner for granted.
And this is really a very dangerous thing because it’s very insidious, right? It will sneak up on us, and we don’t realize what we’re doing. We don’t realize that we’re starting to take our partner for granted before it’s too late and the marriage has either gotten on real shaky grounds or it’s just settled down to just obligation, and all the passion and excitement has gone. So, mistake number seven is taking your partner for granted.
So, what do you think about my seven tips? Leave your comments in the comment section. What are some mistakes that you can make in your experience that would absolutely destroy a marriage? And if you like this content, please help us get it out to other people who need this content. We want to help people save their marriages.