When to Know When a Marriage Is Over: Key Signs to Recognize Before Deciding to Save Your Marriage
I’m going to share with you some of my story today about how I was able to turn my marriage around at the snap of a finger, once I understood some core principles and was able to implement them completely by accident at the time into the marriage. But I teach from a place of experience – I teach from what worked in my marriage and what I’ve seen work in other people’s marriages.
I get the question all the time – how quickly, realistically, does it take to turn a marriage around? Well, there’s really one answer, but two parts to the answer. The first part of the answer is that how quickly your marriage can be restored and reconciled really comes down to how quickly you can change. That’s what it’s going to come down to. And the second part is how quickly you can implement the key foundations of the marriage, the requirements for the marriage to be restored, reconciled, and healed.
As I’m going to share with you in just a minute, I was able to quite accidentally, at the time, implement the key characteristics that are required – the key fundamentals that are required – literally instantaneously, and the marriage changed literally instantaneously. So before I go into the story and tell you how my marriage was transformed in 15 minutes, and potentially how you can do something similar, let me share with you what those key fundamentals are.
So there are really three things that we work on in the “Win Your Wife Back” program, where we teach how to win your wife back. There are three things that need to be established. And the first thing is that there absolutely has to be emotional safety and security. Things are not going to get better until there is an environment of safe communication.
Establish a safe and secure communication where your wife can open up and communicate with you openly and freely. Nothing will get better until she talks, and all the problems need to be discussed. Your wife has a lot of things she wants to talk about right now. However, unless there is emotional safety and security, unless that foundational pillar is built, she won’t feel free to talk about it. The second key pillar that needs to be built is mutual admiration and respect. We must have mutual admiration and respect for each other, and if you’re watching this video, brother, there may not be much of it in your relationship. It’s challenging to have emotional safety, emotional security, and open communication if there is no mutual admiration and respect going both ways. That absolutely needs to be worked on. The third pillar is a shared vision for the relationship. The Bible says, ‘my people perish for a lack of a vision.’ They don’t perish for a lack of effort, resources, desire, or motivation. So, establishing these three pillars is crucial, and how quickly we can establish them will determine how quickly the marriage can heal.
Going into my story, our marriage was in a really bad place because of me. I had some drug and alcohol issues, and my behavior was terrible. I was turning into a nasty person, and I destroyed a lot of the emotional safety in the relationship. Obviously, it was challenging to respect me the way I was behaving. We had no shared vision and goals at this point. My vision in the relationship was just about me, doing what I wanted to do on a daily basis, which usually involved behaving badly and doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing. This caused more bad behavior, and it deteriorated to the point where separation and divorce were the only options left. I put my wife in a position where it was challenging to stay with me. I remember one night, I was up in my loft, which is where I did my bad behavior, taking drugs and drinking alcohol. This behavior was completely out of control for me at that point, and I knew that I was in trouble. It was a dependent behavior, not a recreational one, and I knew it was out of control.
All of a sudden, I decided to tell my wife about what I had been doing behind her back. Up until that point, I had been hiding it from her. All she could see was the negative, aggressive, erratic, and unpredictable behavior that was destroying both our physical and emotional security within the relationship. But that night, I decided to come clean.
My wife was in the shower when I came down from the roof, not knowing what to expect. I told her what I had been doing and what was going on. Her response was unexpected. She simply said, “I love you, and thank you for sharing that. We’re going to get through this together.”
That was a turning point in our relationship. It was where I was able to start getting control of my life and making changes. From that point on, everything got better. Looking back, I realize that I unintentionally established the three pillars of emotional safety, mutual admiration and respect, and a shared vision.
When I told my wife what I had been doing, it could have gone in a number of ways. She could have been angry, hurt, or betrayed. Emotional safety and security could have been destroyed forever in that moment.
So much damage could have happened potentially in that moment if she had responded the wrong way. I could have just gone right, “Well, I’m never going to tell you anything ever again. I’m just going to do this and hide this from this point on, and that is that.” But that’s not what happened. When she said, “I love you, and I appreciate you telling me this, and we’re going to get through this,” it created that emotional safety to where we could actually talk about the problems and start discussing the problems openly, which was absolutely completely absent in the relationship before.
The second thing that happened, if you’re tracking with me, is that mutually admiration and respect were also established in the snap of a finger. I really respected how she handled that, and she respected the fact that I came down and fessed up to it, and I owned my behavior. I was telling her, “Now I’m doing this.” It’s like the mutual admiration and respect came back into the relationship. Whereas prior to that, just a few minutes earlier, there was really very little, if any, mutual admiration and respect. All she could see was my bad behavior and not really knowing where it was coming from. She had no admiration and respect for that behavior. And of course, in my altered state of whatever we want to call it, narcotic use, I had very little admiration and respect for her just because I had a very negative view of the world because of the altered state at this point. So there was almost no mutual admiration and respect in the relationship.
The third pillar that was actually established instantaneously as well, and understanding this in retrospect, is a shared vision and goal was created for the relationship. So previous to this, her goal was to make the relationship better, which I wasn’t that interested in, to be honest with you. My goal was to just have some space to go and get drunk and get high and whatever. So we had completely different goals at this point. And the shared visions and goals that we had at the beginning of the relationship that brought us together, they had really disappeared. Now we were just in different worlds doing different things. And we really had nothing to work together towards in all honesty. But when she said, “We’re going to get through this together,” this created a shared vision and goal for the relationship, even in that moment, even though it wasn’t the big aspirational goal of conquering the world that we had at the beginning of the relationship when we started our journey together. It brought us back to a place of having a shared vision and having a shared goal within the relationship.
And the rest is history from that point. Has it all been plain sailing? Now, has it all been easy? No. But have we overcome our difficulties? Yes. Have we made it? Yes. Are we strong? Yes. Are we moving in the right direction? Yes. All of these things, and we really can pinpoint that conversation. So the question is, when the question asked is, how quickly can a relationship turn around? It really can be in 10 or 15 minutes. It really can, if you can establish that emotional safety and security. If you can establish that mutual admiration and respect.
We can quickly re-establish respect for someone who owns their mistakes, owns the situation, and takes control of finding a solution. Conversely, it’s difficult to respect someone who adopts a victim mentality. From there, we can build emotional safety and security and focus on a shared vision. Of course, there is more to it than that, and I’m simplifying, but I hope you can understand my story and how things happened for me. This was all learned retrospectively after saving my own marriage and deciding that I wanted to help others. By looking at the literature and ways forward, I was able to identify how these things played out in my relationship.
My advice and instruction come from personal experience, and everything I share is hard-fought and battle-tested. We know that it works, and if you need help turning your marriage around, there’s a link in the description to schedule a call. It won’t cost you anything, and we’ll let you know if we can help or not. If not, check out our other videos – we have over 100. I hope this helps you turn your relationship around quickly and save your marriage. When you understand the core fundamentals and implement them at a high level, it is possible. Bless you, and I’ll talk to you soon.
