Hey Cody here from Better Marriage, and I’m going to share with you today the number one and the first step to saving any marriage. So, if you want to save your marriage, there is one step that everybody has to take, regardless of what’s happened in the marriage, where you are, or how long you’ve been married. It doesn’t matter. If you want to save your marriage, then you have to take this first step, and that first step is to take responsibility for the marriage.
Take responsibility for where you are, take responsibility for what’s happened, and take responsibility for moving forward. Now, I know a lot of people are going to say, “How am I responsible for what he’s done? How am I responsible for what she’s done? How am I responsible for an affair? How am I responsible for XYZ?” And I get it. I hear what you’re saying.
You can’t be responsible for what your partner has done. I 100% agree with that. But what you can be responsible for, what you do have a responsibility to, is yourself and your reaction to it. You have responsibility.
Now, let’s break that word down and see what responsibility actually means. It’s the ability to respond. You have the ability to respond. If you get into a fight with your partner, that fight cannot take place. It takes two people to fight.
You and your spouse have to both agree to fight. Your partner can try to fight with you, but if you do not engage in that fight, the fight cannot happen, right? So, you have to say, “I am responsible for that fight. I am able to respond to that situation.
My partner can be trying to start a fight with me, absolutely, but I am able to respond to that fight, and I have the choice. I can choose not to respond. I am response-able. I have the ability to respond.”
Now, why is this important? It’s because it takes all of the power back. If you are in a situation where you say, “I am dependent on my partner changing. I am dependent on the situation changing. I’m dependent on my partner doing this,” this is a very disempowering situation.
You’ve given all the control of the marriage to the partner, and they may change, they may not, who knows, right? It remains to be seen. But when you say, “I am response-able. I have responsibility. I have the ability to respond to my partner,” all of the responsibility now is back in your hands. You have literally taken control of the marriage back.
If your partner wants to choose a fight, you are responsible for that. You are response-able; you are able to respond in a way that will not allow that fight to take place. If you’re fighting what your partner wants to do and you don’t agree with it, you have the ability, the response ability, to respond in any way you choose to that.
You can let that affect you negatively, you can let that affect you positively, you can let it affect you in any way you want, or in no way at all. You have the ability to take control of the marriage back, and you do that by saying, “I am responsible, I have responsibility, I have the ability to respond.”
Now, when don’t get me wrong here, let me put a caveat in here. When I say you are responsible, you take responsibility, and you say, “I am responsible, I have responsibility,” I’m not saying it’s your fault that the marriage has disintegrated. I’m not saying that the marriage is in trouble because of you and you are responsible for that.
What I am saying is you are 100% responsible for your reaction to situations, and you have the ability to respond to situations in any way you choose. There are 10 different ways or 100 different ways you can respond to any situation in your marriage, and it’s going to produce a different outcome, and you have the ability to choose that response.
Now, that is step number one. That is the first step into restoring, rebuilding, and repairing a marriage. It is to say, “I am responsible, I take responsibility.” It’s the grown-up, adult way a marriage starts to heal.
And if both people are serious about saving the marriage and both people are at a point where they say, “I take responsibility for this marriage, and I take responsibility for myself,” then we have the groundwork for a successful marriage recovery.
Well, when we’re blaming each other, when we’re saying, “I’m not responsible, I don’t have any responsibility in this,” nothing is going to get better, nothing is going to improve.
The marriage is not going to be restored. It’s pretty hopeless at this point. So, step number one is to claim responsibility, to take back responsibility, to take ownership of yourself, your response, and the way you behave in the marriage. And then that sets the groundwork for everything else, that sets the groundwork for every other marriage recovery tool that we use to restore your marriage.
It helps with the algorithm. And our goal here is to save marriages, to impact lives, to change marriages and lives, and we need your help to do that. And the way you can help is to give us a like, give us a share, click subscribe, and leave a comment. We really, really appreciate it here, and you are helping people to restore their marriages as well. Bless you, and we’ll talk to you.
