When a marriage hits a crisis
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes in the First Week After a Spouse Asks for a Divorce
It feels like fighting for your marriage. One of the best-known marriage courses online says it is the first of seven moves that push a spouse further away.
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Picture an ordinary weeknight. The plates are still on the side. Your husband or wife sits down across from you and says it: they're not happy, they haven't been for a long time, and they want out.
What happens next, in most homes, is almost always the same. Panic first. Then a flood of talk: promises to change, questions about who else might be involved, tears, a late-night list of everything you'll do differently from tomorrow.
It feels like the right thing to do. It feels like love. And according to the course I'm going to tell you about, it is the first of seven mistakes that make a marriage crisis worse.
The urge to fix everything tonight
Save My Marriage Today! is a 158-page course by relationship writer Amy Waterman. Chapter 4 lays out the top seven mistakes people make when a marriage crisis hits, and the first one surprises nearly everyone who reads it: trying to fix it as quickly as possible.
The book calls it damage control. You panic, do the first thing that comes into your head and hope the right words will arrive while you're speaking. In many cases, it says, that does more harm to your chances than the problem you started with.
The other six will sound familiar too:
- Trying to fix it as quickly as possible
- "It wasn't me": defending yourself point by point
- Begging for forgiveness
- Deciding that if your partner has given up, you should too
- Taking "I'm not in love with you any more" as the final word
- Suggesting a trial separation
- Wishing you had your old life back
If you've already done three or four of those, you're in very normal company. The chapter is there to show you what to do in their place, and that is where this course earns its keep.
The night Amy's best friend phoned her in tears
Amy wrote the course because of a phone call. Her best friend Jane had been married fourteen years and had two children. One night Jane's husband, Adam, came home and asked for a divorce. He told her it was over and nothing could change his mind.
Jane couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. She rang Amy in tears, and Amy took her under her wing and taught her everything she knew about saving a marriage, starting from the very beginning.
The first thing Jane had to do was stop: stop begging, stop blaming, stop playing the victim. Some of what came next seemed counter-intuitive at first. She learned how much she could do in those first few weeks, even while Adam wasn't responding. Bit by bit the barriers came down, and the two of them started to talk, really talk.
A few months after that conversation, Jane and Adam turned up at a party of Amy's, hand in hand and laughing, "like a honeymoon couple". Amy wrote down what she had taught Jane, refined it and tested it, and that became Save My Marriage Today!
Amy Waterman is a professional writer specialising in marriage and relationship guidance, and the author and host of Save My Marriage Today! Her co-author, Andrew Rusbatch, adds a man's point of view to each chapter.
You can start even if your spouse won't
This is the part that matters most if you are the only one who still wants to save the marriage. The course has 38 exercises across 20 chapters, and each one is marked "Do Yourself" or "Do Together". Plenty of them are built for one person working alone, so nothing has to wait for your spouse to agree to anything.
The chapters run from the life cycle of a marriage and the Love Bank (what quietly drains a relationship, and what fills it back up) to conflict and anger, money, in-laws, children, the mid-marriage plateau, sex and intimacy, and infidelity, with a four-step chapter on stopping an affair dead in its tracks. Chapter 19 is about the thing most people really want to know: how to get your spouse to fall back in love with you.
What readers wrote back to Amy
"In my heart I did not want to lose my wife and my family. I still had a great deal of love for her. During this time I was also continually trying to call her, email and track her down, pressuring her to tell me what was going on. Unwittingly I was making it worse."
"My wife and I are now going out on dates, laughing, talking and enjoy being around each other again, and for me that is huge."
Brett P., Longmount, CO
"The situations and solutions presented are real, practical and simple to implement."
Elsa K., Nelspruit, South Africa
"We were on the verge of divorce, thinking there was no way to repair the damage. Save My Marriage was a God send and we thank you so very much."
Fred and Maureen B., Putnam Valley, New York
What you get, and what it costs
The course downloads straight away. The main book is a PDF, with supplementary video and audio files, so you can be reading it on your phone tonight, privately, with no appointments and nothing arriving in the post.
Your order also includes Book 2: Save My Marriage Today! For Marriages in Extreme Crisis, a personal email consultation where you write to the Save My Marriage Today team about your own situation, and five bonus ebooks, among them How to Cheat-Proof Your Relationship and Stress: The Silent Killer.
RRP $97$49.95
One-time payment · instant download · 60-day money-back guarantee
Get Save My Marriage Today!The guarantee is the plain kind. You get 60 days, more than eight weeks, to read it and put it to work. If it isn't right for you, one email to the Save My Marriage Today team gets your money back, right up to the final day.
If your spouse has already said the word, the first week counts more than any week after it. Read Chapter 4 before you say another word, and you'll know which of those seven moves to stop making tonight.
One honest word: a course is not a replacement for a registered relationship counselor, and if you ever feel unsafe at home, please contact local support services first.