Almost 8 months ago my wife crying told me she was thinking to leave me and our sons (13 & 10) if things had continued to go as it had been in recent times.
Premise.
We’ve known each other and we’ve been together for over 20 years and have been living together ever since, before getting married and having children.
This is to say that ours is a long relationship that even in difficult moments we have been able to preserve.
I never cheated and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t too and, it has never been a toxic or abusive relationship, more a plain simple marriage like millions of others.
But I really hurt her and in the worst way… simply ignoring her and her need to be connected with me and our marriage for too long.
Reasons. Worries about work (mine and hers), buying a new house, money, kids growing, tight schedules, etc…
Back to that day, she pressed the panic button and for me, it was immediately clear that, somehow, I had to act.
I started to google questions like “how to save an unhappy marriage” or “how to make an unhappy marriage happy again” or “how can I make my wife happy every day” and even “how to make my wife happy when she is angry”.
I was soon overwhelmed by thousands of articles, pieces of advice, and tips.
After reading for a while I understood that I knew most of the stuff and I was used to doing that in most of my life with my wife. Only, in the latest years, I lost focus and drive.
So it was not that I did not know how to make my marriage happy, I simply lost the habit to the good things that make a marriage great.
And worse, I was annoyed with her for too many stupid things, while I was the real problem.
She was right.
My problem was how to establish these great habits again!
In short, overwhelmed by all these readings and emotions, I was lost and paralyzed, like when there’s too much stuff to do and you don’t know where to start.
I needed to solve this and quickly.
So I choose and wrote down a list of things to do (and not to do) that make sense to me and was actionable every day.
And I find a way to send me automated reminders every day with Facebook Messenger.
Day after day I started feeling better and to change my faulty behavior. This created a more positive family environment in just one week.
Then I went on exercising in one positive behavior every day (always helping me with Facebook Messenger) and in 90 days she went from “I want to leave” to “Your eyes are still beautiful like when I met you the first time”.
I don’t think this can work for every marriage, but if these 4 requirements are still in your relationship, then it can work.
Sure not every issue will be fixed with this system and there’s much work to do… but in short time I’d been able to lay down a common ground and a much better way to solve problems than: “I close my doors”.
Now, after a while, I can tell you that things are definitely better in my marriage and that if they didn’t improve in a short time, I was, in any case, ready to do everything possible to make my relationship go better.
Having said that, I can only add that this thing has served me so much that I thought it was good to share it with other husbands in my own situation, who are looking for a solution.
This is the reason why I decided to open the Happy Marriage Challenge to other husbands who feel they have the same problem and want to try to resolve it with commitment.
If you want to be part of it… It’s simple. You just need Facebook Messenger and tap GET STARTED HERE.