How to Fix a Broken Marriage in 10 Steps
Can a broken marriage really be fixed?
“Yes!” is the answer to this question.
“You can save your marriage and rebuild your relationship if you’re willing to put in the work.
After getting married and making their relationship official, some couples think that staying together should be their main goal. But the most important goal of a marriage should never be to stay together.
If two people want to be happy, they should choose to stay together. At some point, you may feel like there’s nothing exciting about your marriage and that it’s become a burden. In this situation, you need to make changes right away that will bring new life to your marriage. To fix a broken marriage, both partners need to be mature, and they shouldn’t make any hasty decisions.
There isn’t just one reason why a marriage has lost the love and comfort it once had. In reality, there are a number of things that affect these marriages. Couples in these kinds of marriages need to think about these things and their relationship. They may realize that their marriage is in danger and wonder if it’s worth saving.
Change Your Perspective – Fix Your Marriage
However, you first need to change your perspective and accepting that your marriage is not working. You also need to realize that a marriage that works doesn’t lead to chaos but is a source of happiness. When you face problems in your relationship, it’s likely because you overlooked your obligations towards your spouse.
Many couples trying to do damage control and save their marriage from an impending disaster have a faulty approach. When they detect a destructive problem in their marriage, their first reaction is to address it and get out of the immediate trouble. However, this reactive approach overlooks long-standing, deep-rooted issues and hence doesn’t work in the long term. The real issues causing the spouses to experience grief and dissatisfaction remain unaddressed. When the couple feels that no progress was made, it forces them to take care of some other issues without actually get to the bigger problem from which they stem. Eventually, the couple becomes frustrated and opts for divorce.
We have learned about the pitfalls most couples fall into when trying to repair their marriage. You need more lasting solutions to fix a broken marriage. Knowing Having this insight makes re-establish your relationship’s foundation becomes reasonably easier.
Factors That Lead to a Broken Marriage
When building a relationship that is to last a lifetime, you have to put in some conscious effort. Healthy marriages aren’t a fluke; they require real work. You need to make sure your marriage meets the unspoken requirements of a mature marriage while also fulfilling your responsibilities towards your spouse.
Below are the five primary reasons that lead most couples to break up and divorce:
1- Lack of Constructive Communication
When you and your partner don’t talk enough, it’s almost impossible to have a healthy marriage and set goals for your relationship. Also, you start to lose the ability to understand how your partner feels from their point of view. Most marriages end because one person doesn’t care about the other.
Any couple can lose if they keep fighting over the same things over and over. The loop it creates can make it impossible for partners to talk to each other, which can put the future of the relationship at risk. Most of your arguments are caused by the fact that you don’t talk to each other enough. If you really want to save your marriage or relationship, you will need to break out of the communication loop that fights can create. Check out our 7 Communication Tips for couples.
2- Neglect
Maintaining and cultivating a marriage is very much like gardening. When you neglect the plants in your garden and stop watering them on time, they start to wilt and eventually die. Similarly, when you overlook your behavior and responsibilities, cracks start to show in your marriage, and then it falls apart.
3- Selfishness
Selfishness goes hand-in-hand with neglect. Marriage requires partners to act maturely and be ready to make a few compromises. However, when you always put your needs before your spouse, it causes resentment to enter the relationship. Once that happens, you can’t get your marriage back on track easily.
4- Laziness or Procrastination
Anything worth fighting for requires active effort, and that’s why several people believe that maintaining a marriage is hard. However, when you stop taking your relationship for granted and actively participate in it, your marriage becomes a source of endless joy and something you treasure.
5- No Compartmentalizing
Another source of strife that sours a married couple’s relationship is the lack of boundaries and safeguards that protect other parts of your life from interfering in your marriage. For example, some couples find it difficult to strike a balance between their private life, their social life, and their work. In this case, one cascades into another, blurring the boundaries between them and allowing them to reduce the private time that couples need to cultivate and enjoy their relationship.
In some instances, some people can’t seem to draw a line between being a parent and being a loving spouse. They let the responsibilities of raising a child take over everything else, including their marriage. Mixing these two aspects can burden a couple and make them view their marriage unfavorably.
Now that you’re aware of what contributes to a broken marriage, let’s understand the few essential changes you have to make to fix it!
10 Ways to Fix a Broken Marriage
1- Remember the Initial Spark
When you’re unhappy with the state of your marriage, you only seem to focus on the negatives – how fights over trivial matters have become more frequent, and how your tolerance for your spouse has worn thin. At this point, your instincts would tell you to get out. Still, a part of you wants the marriage to work, but you don’t know what you can do to mend the broken pieces.
Marriage experts suggest remembering the things that made you fall for your partner in the first place when you start to doubt your relationship’s strength. There’s always an initial spark that ignites into a roaring fire when entering into a relationship. Once you remember the good times, your hope rises, and believing in your relationship becomes relatively easier.
2- List Down the Problems
When frequent fights become the norm, spouses start to lose interest in their marriage and feel nothing but indifference towards each other. In such situations, you can’t expect an all-in-one solution to fix all the problems in the relationship. Hence, the couple needs to come together and talk to each other calmly and rationally and list all the problems plaguing their relationship. This step can be a bit challenging at first, but you can expect to see improvement with time.
When making this list, reflect on your actions and not get defensive or make any cutting remarks. Making a separate list of issues is crucial for both partners so there’s no resentment from either side.
3- Take Responsibility for Your Actions
When taking steps to fix your broken marriage, take responsibility for your actions instead of pushing all of the blame on your spouse. You can’t expect to make any progress if you start playing the blame game rather than figuring out where you went wrong. The same goes for your partner, as both of you should be held responsible for your actions individually.
4- Be Honest with Yourself and Your Spouse
When healing your relationship, you need to know that honesty is the best policy for resolving conflicts. When you say you’re responsible, you’re admitting that your actions put the marriage in danger. This level of honesty can be uncomfortable, but you should accept it and tell your partner everything. Also, make sure that when you tell the truth, you do it in good faith and not in a way that could hurt your partner. When it comes to these kinds of things, being completely honest can sometimes hurt badly.
When both spouses know how to be honest with themselves and their partner, they take the first healthy step towards saving their marriage. Moreover, this exercise helps learn how to rebuild lost trust in a relationship between you and your partner.
5- Take the Time to Listen, Then Talk – Constructively
Once you and your partner have taken the time to identify issues hurting your marriage, it is best to go over each point in detail by yourself before discussing each problem together. After that, one partner can begin sharing their point of view regarding a specific issue. Partners shouldn’t interrupt each other when they share their grievances. Spouses should let each other say their piece without being defensive.
What your spouse has to say may hurt your ego, but you still shouldn’t avoid this step. Otherwise, you might have to pay the price of avoidance with your marriage. Moreover, only when your partner has finished talking should you begin conveying your thoughts to your spouse. However, before you say anything, reevaluate your opinion based on what your partner has just shared with you.
6- Make a List of Mutual Goals
Once you and your partner have had a calm, rational discussion, create a list of shared mutual goals. You can think of it as a bucket list rather than chores that need to be done. Moreover, while making these plans, discuss the pros and cons of the mutual goals and how you can accomplish them together.
7- Ditch the Technology and Spend Quality Time Together
People in healthy relationships emphasize a lot on spending quality time together. Hence, you need to free yourself from work and distractions like gadgets and be with your spouse. The time you spend together is for concentrating on each other and not for worrying about work-related obligations or other activities.
8- Tackle One Problem at a Time
When there’s a long list of things to change or improve in your relationship, you might consider tackling multiple problems at a time. However, taking this action will only tire you within a few days rather than making you feel accomplished. Sooner or later, you will lose your resolve to fix your marital struggles.
Avoid running yourself into burnout by tackling one issue at a time. This approach may make the process of fixing your marriage longer. However, you’ll be able to sustain your momentum and not back down halfway.
9- Work Around the Issues That You Can’t Fix Yourself
You can’t fix all the issues you have with your spouse. All you can do is trust them to act responsibly. However, you can work on issues that are caused by you. Both partners in a marriage need to realize how they can’t afford to take each other for granted and make conscious efforts to improve their behavior towards each other. They’ll eventually start working together to make the changes need to make their marriage a successful one.
However, you can’t solve all your issues yourself. Tackling certain issues can be complex and require professional help from a marriage coach. This insight leads us to the last and the most crucial step you need to take to fix your broken marriage.
10- Don’t Delay Talking to a Professional Marriage Coach!
If you want to fix a broken marriage, you should really think about hiring a professional marriage coach. Even though talking to close friends and family about your marriage problems may help you feel better, it doesn’t solve any of the problems in your marriage. To save your relationship, you and your partner would need to get help from a marriage coach. Let the coach tell you how you can save your marriage based on their experience. The experts in this field may even be able to help you find the negative cycles that have been affecting your relationship even though you didn’t know they were there.
Marriage Means Moore has expert coaches who will work with you to save your marriage and make it stronger than ever.
With the help of our life and relationship coaches, your marriage will get back on track and get better in less than 90 days! In the meantime, you can check out our website’s blog, where we have written a number of articles to help you deal with problems in your relationships. Lastly, we think you should read our book, How Communicating Saved Our Marriage, to learn how to talk to your partner in a healthy way.
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