Fix Your Marriage Before It Breaks

By Noah Root

Cambria and I spend a lot of time with marriage experts, and around people wholly dedicated to teaching people of all ages how to do marriage well. The number one thing we have observed from everyone we’ve talked to is the majority of them are focused on how to fix the problems of marriage. 

Now don’t hear me saying that this is wrong in any way. What I am saying is that no one seems to be talking about the preventative maintenance that our marriages desperately need. 

You couldn’t have possibly thought that this marriage thing would work just because you loved each other. Yes, love certainly IS the reason that we get together, and decide to get married, but we can’t be so naive to think that love alone will hold this bond of two imperfect people together.

So what does it take?

There are tons of different theories and techniques that we could give anyone of you on how to “keep the romance alive” in your marriage. That being said, we believe that without having God at the center, your marriage will not bear the fruit that it possibly could have, and it has an even higher likelihood of failure. Think of marriage like a triangle. The closer you move to God, the closer you’ll move to each other. 

If you don’t believe in that stuff we are not here to convince you otherwise, we just want you all to understand our stance on it. 

Marriage is a team effort, but something that we see many people doing is trying to “fix” their spouse to make their spouse into the person they want their spouse to be. We’ve seen this several times on Instagram recently. We get a lot of spam comments from people recommending a special “love doctor” that can solve all your problems and make your partner fall back in love with you. Now, normally we just delete these comments and move on, but I’d finally just had enough and decided something needed to be said. I’ll put the short conversation below…

Here’s the point we want to get across. The only person you can control is you. The only person you can fix is you. Yes, marriage is a team effort, but it’s two individuals that come together, with God in between, and decide to do life together for a greater purpose, to glorify God. I didn't expect that Cambria would change to be my perfect wife, but I did expect that I would work on myself to be the best husband that I could be, she would work on herself to be the best wife she could be, and we would grow together. But I don't try to “fix” her, because that would be selfish of me, and marriage is not selfish, it’s selfless. 

A mistake we see in a lot of marriages is either waiting till there’s a big problem and then trying to fix it, or pushing issues down and letting them pile up until one day they just explode. Let me give you a car analogy…

You have suspension components that hold your tire on. They allow you to steer and brake. If all of that wears out to the point that one of your wheels falls off, your car could get totalled. But if you take it to a mechanic regularly and have them check it, and they tell you a part needs to be replaced, you replace the part! You don’t wait for the tire to fall off to replace the whole system. 

This is why we encourage couples to begin working on their marriage from day one instead of waiting until their marriage is at a breaking point to start working on it. 

One of the easiest ways to work on your marriage is to have tools to help you. Something that is very important to us is couples retreats, or a time to get away, just the two of you, and spend time building the foundation of your marriage. There’s several of these retreats, or conferences, all around the country, but the one we would recommend is called Weekend to Remember®. It’s a three day conference (Friday night - Sunday morning), and it’s one of those events that just gives you a lot of marriage tools. 

The reason Cambria and I recommend this particular conference is because we actually volunteer at it, running the tech side of things. We’re not at every event, because there’s 75 different locations, but we volunteer at about 4-6 a year. One of the biggest concepts we have gotten from attending so many of these conferences, is how important it is to surround yourself with good examples and people who are on the same path as you. Find a couple who has a marriage that you look up to, or a couple that is in the same stage of marriage as you.

I know I mentioned before how important it is to keep God at the center of your marriage, but something we find ourselves doing often is forgetting about God. He's not physically right in front of you like your spouse is, so it’s easy to not acknowledge him. But in the same way that we forget about God because we can’t see him, we can also just as easily forget about satan. He is here, he is your real enemy, and he is out to get your marriage because he knows it’s good.

We’ve mentioned our weekly marriage journal time before, but what we may not have mentioned is that our marriage journal is supposed to take us a year to complete, and ours took us two. We started by trying to fit in that time in the evening, but we soon had to make a rule that we can’t talk about important things after it gets dark. Our marriage journal only caused conflict, so we gave up on it for a while. We thought it wasn’t good because it caused conflict. In reality, it was just the opposite. Satan made it cause conflict because he knew it was good. He got right there in between us to keep us from the good that it could bring. And that’s what he does! You can kind of tell when something’s important because it’s hard and often comes with conflict, because satan doesn’t want you to have a healthy marriage. So if you’re doing something that’s going to help your marriage, you better believe he’s going to be right there, trying to get in between it. I’m not saying that it’s not ok to fight, but don’t let that fight lead to him winning. 

I’m going to close with this… one of the most popular pieces of marriage advice that you hear people give is, “Don’t go to bed angry.” While it is good advice to work on your problems and not let them just build up, I’m not so sure solving a problem right before bed is always the best option. We’re all tired before we go to bed, and that can cause us not think very clearly. We recently watched a clip of Josh Peck, and I think he summed it up pretty well. He said, “I learned it from my wife, because when we started dating, we would have a conflict or get into a fight, and I finally understood that family doesn’t leave. And so she made me understand that like, oh we can fight, we can even go to bed angry, but family doesn’t leave. So where am I going? We’ll figure this out today, tomorrow, or maybe in a week from now, but family doesn’t leave. So when we’re ready, I’ll be here.”