So your marriage is in trouble, and you’re looking for ways to save it. Here are seven ways that you can save your marriage right now. Hey, Cody here, a relationship and marriage coach, and founder of Better Marriage. Today, I’ll talk to you about seven things you can do, seven steps that you can take, that will help to save your marriage right now. So let’s get going right away.
1. Provide Hope
Step number one is to provide hope. When people lose hope, they check out of the marriage. When somebody leaves a marriage or asks for a divorce, it’s because all hope has been lost.
There’s no hope left, and once that hope is gone, that’s when the relationship is gone. So step number one is you have to provide hope. If you want to save your marriage, you’ve got to put hope back into it. Your partner can’t be going, “This is a hopeless situation, there’s no hope here,” because they will check out, and they will not come back.
Now, how do you do that? How do you provide hope for the relationship? Well, the easiest way is to acknowledge what the main and the fundamental problems in the relationship are.
If you can’t communicate and you don’t communicate what the fundamental problems are, then there’s no way that you have a solution, right? So when you communicate to your partner, “I understand, partner, that this is the problem or these are the problems. I understand that, I get it now, and I’m taking these steps to rectify those problems,” that puts a glimmer of hope back into the relationship. So step one is to provide hope by acknowledging what the real core fundamental issues of the relationship are and demonstrating that you’re actually taking steps to rectify those problems.
2. leads
Now, step number two leads on from that, and that is to get help. If you’ve let the relationship get to the point where it’s falling apart, potentially ending, then let’s just be honest, right? You probably don’t have the relationship skills that you need to have a serious relationship.
And even if you can pull the relationship back together for a short period of time, the skills don’t exist to hold it together. There’s no glue there. And the answer to that, the solution to that, is you’ve got to educate yourself.
You’ve got to get skills. Professional athletes get coaches. Professional business owners and CEOs get coaches. Every top performer, everybody who’s successful in every field gets education and they get coaches, and they get ongoing education and support. And your marriage is no different. The more support and education you get in your marriage, the better your marriage is going to be. So step number two, after acknowledging what the problems are and providing hope, is that you’ve got to get some help to back that hope up.
3. Commit
Now, step number three to save your marriage is to commit to doing whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes, commit to doing whatever it takes to save your marriage. Saving your marriage is not going to be easy. It took a long time to get here, and it’s like losing weight. You can’t overeat and not exercise for years and expect to just turn it around in a second. You have to commit to losing the weight, you have to commit to getting fit. And exactly the same is true in your relationship.
It took time to get to the state that your relationship is in now, and it’s going to take a little bit of time to get it back. So commit to seeing it through, commit to doing whatever it takes. Say, “I will do whatever it takes to save my marriage. I will do whatever it takes to save my relationship. I will do whatever it takes to get the skills to make this relationship work.”
4. Better Communication Skills
Now, tip number four is to get better communication skills. Men and women speak different languages, and most of the time, the majority of problems in a relationship come from miscommunication. It’s not that the couple is not compatible, it’s not that they don’t love each other, it’s not that they’re not attracted to each other, it’s not that they don’t have things in common.
It is that they don’t know how to communicate. Men speak “man” and women speak “woman.” Most women don’t speak “man” and most men don’t speak “woman.” You’ve got to get the communication skills.
You’ve got to learn how to speak to your partner in a way that they understand, in a way that they relate to, and in a way that brings you together. Now, if you want more on that, check out the links in the description.
I have some classes for you, some free workshops where we talk about how to communicate with each other to get more sex, to get more intimacy, to stop the fighting, all of that stuff. It’s a free class, and it’ll give you a lot of the steps that you need to take to get the communication skills to save your marriage.
5. Conflict Resolution Skills
Now, tip number five for saving your marriage is to learn conflict resolution skills. We just have fight after fight after fight, and we do it the same every time. We have the same fight over and over again, and it escalates the same way.
The fight happens repeatedly in the same manner. We’ve got to get some conflict resolution skills. Unless you bring some skills into the relationship from outside, unless you seek the skills, unless you seek the education, then these problems are not going to resolve themselves. Again, many conflicts and fights within a marriage can be avoided through good communication and through conflict resolution skills, by becoming emotionally intelligent, taking control of yourself, and developing emotional skills and conflict resolution skills. So the fights don’t have to happen in the first place. But when they do start to happen, when the passion turns into hostility and it becomes a fight, you have the skills to resolve the conflicts easily, effortlessly, and without causing catastrophic damage to your relationship.
6. A Relationship Vision
Now, tip number six is to create a vision for your marriage.
It says in the Bible that my people perish for lack of vision. It doesn’t say that they perish for lack of skills. It doesn’t say that they perish for a lack of effort or a want of trying. All of these things, it says, my people perish for a lack of vision. And the same is true with your marriage. When you came together, I’m guessing you had a common vision that you shared. You were walking down the same path. And over time, that vision disappears. So ask yourself right now, if your marriage is struggling, if it’s on the verge of falling apart, ask yourself, “What is my vision for my marriage? What is our vision for our marriage?” And you’ll probably find that you don’t really have one.
When I ask this question in counseling with couples, quite often the answer is, “We don’t have a vision for our relationship.” And it’s like, well, you’ve asked for nothing, and you’ve got everything that you asked for, right? You asked for nothing, and you’ve got nothing. And now you’re surprised. The real secret here is to have goals, couples’ goals together, and a vision of what you’re moving towards.
This brings us to tip number seven, which we kind of touched on. There is to have common goals, have shared goals. The relationship vision is where you want to go, the overall direction of where you want to be at some point in the future. The relationship goals are the component steps that get you there.
There’s going to be a number of goals that you have to achieve in order to achieve that big overarching vision. So tip number seven is to have clear relationship goals that you bring about together, that brings you together as a couple, and acts as glue, acts as a binder, and a bonder within a relationship.
A lot of times, after several years of marriage, there’s no glue in the relationship. There’s nothing to hold the relationship together. If this person goes this way, there’s nothing to stop that. And if this person goes this way, there’s nothing to stop it.
We need some glue, and a common vision and shared goals become the glue that holds the relationship together, and it gives you something to work towards together as a couple. Because if you’re not, if you’re just working towards separate goals and have separate visions, then you’re two individuals, and there’s no reason, there’s no need for you to be in a relationship or marriage.
7. Relationship Goals
So tip number seven is to have relationship goals. Now, put in the comments what do you think? What are some tips to save a failing marriage? And if you want more help, if you want some training on this, some more in-depth training, then check out the links in the description.
We’ve got some free workshops where we talk about how to have a better relationship, how to build your relationship from the ground up and reconstruct it, how to have more sex, how to have more intimacy, how to get the passion, the excitement back, and how to fight less.
