4 Shifts That Brought a Struggling Marriage Back From the Brink

A marriage on the brink finds breakthrough 

 On a tiny, Wi-Fi-free island in the Kodiak Archipelago, our lunches and dinners were chef-prepared. Our host said we were on our own for breakfast. On Day 1, Greg was up and out of our room early. Jet lagged and disoriented from Alaskan summer nights, I rolled over and skipped breakfast, grateful for the whole bed and quiet room. On Day 2, he tiptoed out again, and on Day 3 … same.  

At lunch that day, the conversation of a couple seated behind me revealed the truth. Before breakfast every day, my man hightailed it to the kitchen to prep potatoes. Then, he short-order cooked everything from eggs-over-easy to pancakes. For strangers. 

I never saw it coming. He scrubbed, peeled and diced his way back into my heart. 

Greg was who he had always been – a servant. I just hadn’t seen it in a while. The stress and strain of tending to the affairs of deceased parents, being at odds over how to parent a boundary-bucking teenager (and holding difficult emotions when he moved out), and navigating health challenges had taken a toll.  

We walked along the beach and I told him I admired his servant’s heart. He said he loved how I firmly established myself as the class clown on Day 1 of our trip. And we both felt it. Something shifted. We started an upward spiral. 

Our trouble spots weren’t fixed on a walk along the beach. (That would be a Hallmark movie.) But a counselor worked with us to help us yield with humility and empathy toward each other. Tears fell. Grudges died. Bad patterns came into the light. Marriage counseling is hard. The drive home can be long and silent or exuberant with breakthrough. But stack it all up together, and Greg and I found something stronger than what stood before. 

If anything in our story sounds like your story (or you’d like it to), how do you find your way back? Better yet, how do you not drift apart in the first place?  

Here are four small shifts that made a huge difference for us. (They’re all found in Shaunti Feldhahn’s book The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages. I have a fun footnote on that at the end of today’s blog.)