Save Your Marriage in 7 Days: A Loving Blueprint
At the end of this week my husband and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary.
15 years!! I know, I know, unless it’s you and your marriage… that number doesn’t actually excite you all that much. I know that the passing of time for other peoples kids, lives, loves and milestones seems much much less exciting than it does for our own.
But for me… the fact that I have been married for fifteen years is wildly and absolutely preposterous! I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea of that much time passing…
And leading up to this anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on how our love feels right now. I am tempted to say that I love him more now than I did then, and while probably that is true… the love I feel now is in such a different category from where we started that it doesn’t even make sense to compare them.
And I’m reflecting on how comfortable this love is now…
And how uncomfortable it was just a few years ago.
Actually. To call it uncomfortable is a magnificent minimisation.
It was agony.
We were in agony. Every day. For weeks or months…years, maybe?
Locked in fights that kept repeating, sleepless nights screaming at each other - frustration and rage bubbling up to the surface far too often.
And truthfully, it didn’t seem that bad at the time. It was just… normal. We still loved each other, we still parented our kids and ran our business together, we still had our date nights and went on holidays. We just never knew when the next buried problem would thrust a root up to knock us on our asses again.
Looking back now, I can feel how painful that chapter of our life was.
The uncertainty of never knowing when another fight would bubble up to the surface, the lack of clarity around what was causing it and why, the desperate hope to just want things to feel easy between us… but with no clue how to do it.
How do you fix something if you can’t even truly figure out what the problem is? Where do you even start??
And I imagine that’s the state of thousands of marriages around the world right now.
We’re never given a class on relationships, after all. No one teaches us how to fight fair or how to be a safe space for one another. No relationship school to launch us into the most important dynamic we will ever face.
But the good news is (!!!) that almost anything is learnable, and the skills that make the most difference in relationships are fairly easy to grasp. So you do the work. And one day you look up, and suddenly everything feels easy once again!
I always remind myself that monumental change in only ever just one step away - one breath, even! Change is always coming, so just keep going for one more step. One more breath. You can do that.
For us, it took just one week to turn everything around.
One week to get our communication happening in the same channels again, to learn how to be nice to one another (super underrated, but also super important!) and even how to create that spark of desire between us again.
Three Steps That Will Save Your Marriage in 7 Days
Find a book on Relationship Advice that resonates with you.
Grab a book about relationships, any book will do. Do a google search on current books, ask your friends if they’ve read any, go to goodreads or amazon or a magazine article that catches your eye. There are thousands of people out there writing solid advice on relationships right now - and no one singular expert that’s going to have something that works for everyone! If there was one way to do relationships, we would have found it by now. So just find what works for you. Find a book that resonates with at least one of you (preferably both, but if you can’t agree, maybe you both pick one and do rock paper scissors to find out who’s book goes first!)
Read one chapter a week.
Once you have your book, you’re going to read just one chapter a week. Maybe one of you borrows the book from the local library and reads a few pages every afternoon sitting in the car at school pickup time. Maybe the other one buys the audio book and listens to the whole chapter at once on the train to work. Just pick a commitment I will read one chapter of the book this week, and stick to it. It’s really the least you can do.
Talk about it.
Every week, create one hour of space free from all other distractions where you can talk about what you learned in this one chapter. Carve out this space, and guard it with your life. The creating of the space itself is where you tell yourself and your partner that they matter to you -that this relationship matters to you, and that you are willing to show up and do the work. This is important. Everyone wants to feel chosen.
Then, the next important piece of this step is that you use this space you have carved out (I know it wasn’t easy! Life gets busy) to devote energy into the energetic container of your relationship. Which does not mean hashing up the same arguments again. Talk about the book. Focus on that. What have you learned from it? What parts stood out, where do you see your own patterns emerging. (Avoid a fight - focus on your own experience!! Don’t use this as an excuse to bring up all of your partners failings.)
“Small things are not small at all. They are the most important things of all. And they add up.” -Mel Robbins
Through this process you will create a strong ass relationship and the book you chose will have given you some good tools to work with that can help you in the future. This is it. This is how great relationships are made.
And just one week can be the catalyst that will make you look back on your 15th or 30th anniversary and think, thank fuck we did that.
That’s it.
That’s all you need.
Just two people who choose each other, (or more! This works if there are more than two of you in your relationship, too) who are willing to work through their shared pain, and who take small, consistent steps towards creating the life they want together.
There is no quick fix to anything, but steady pressure is the only thing that’s ever created lasting change, anyhow.
Good luck!
You can do this. And if you need a third party to help facilitate a space for you - if too much distance has grown between you or the hurts feel just too deep, reach out and I can tell you about my couples work! This will take a lot of work, and you can do it alone… but you don’t have to.
xx Cara
Sidenote: Before you do any of these steps, the most important thing that you need to decide on is if you want to save your marriage, and then decide that it’s possible. I spent so long looking for answers to the one burning question I had on marriage: is it possible to keep desire alive in a long term relationship?? It was a frustrating chase across dozens of chapters and articles and podcasts, and I won’t bore you with them all. Because no one would tell me!!!! No one else could. I needed to decide for myself. And I’m telling you right now: it is possible. Stop wasting energy worrying that it might not be possible - literally anything is possible. If you desire it, if you can think it, if you want it; you can have it. I promise you. Yes - it is possible to have whatever you want. Now you have to fully choose it.