How do you ruin a marriage? We are gonna talk about so many ways to ruin a marriage and the opposite on today's episode of the What Could Go Right? podcast. Hi, I am Emily Orton. And I am Erik Orton. And we talk about personal growth, family connection, and raising adult kids. And today we're talking about how to ruin a marriage. Okay, so Emily, you and I did a gathering with couples and we talked about double return parenting. And this is part of our double return parenting series, would you say? This is close to the beginning of it. If you wanna catch the whole thing, go back and listen to it.
previous episode, but we asked this question to a group of couples in this very room that we're in right now. And why don't you- How do you ruin a marriage? The hands shot up. Everybody knew the answer and there are so many good ones. Easy question. Yeah. We know how to ruin a marriage. So here's what they said. Contempt for communication, being selfish, neglect, jealousy, control, lack of trust, neediness, backseat driving that everyone had a story about that Cheating nobody had a story misaligned priorities Shutting down silent treatment stonewalling and Criticism and this is actually a design technique or an ideation technique where you instead of Saying what your goal is you say the opposite?
What would be a complete and utter failure and how do we get to that? And then once you've listed out all of the ways to fail or in this case, how to ruin a marriage, you can then go back and say, all right, well, we wanna do the opposite of those things. And that's how we are gonna have a marriage that is flourishing. So that was the technique that we were doing in this session is first asking how to ruin a marriage. Do we have the answers or do we wanna just try like go down this list and...remember what the opposite. Yeah, we don't have what they wrote. We didn't write it down. We just looked at every answer that was here's how to ruin it and then made something that was going to be the positive or the answer in the opposite of that.
So for example, contempt, that would be kindness, right? Yeah, consideration, generosity, courtesy, generosity. And so many of those words were coming up here like good communication, being open, being humble, being receptive, listening, looking out for the good of the other person, being their fan, having their back. That was one of the phrases I really loved that came up. It was like, when you are in a good marriage, a thriving marriage that's flourishing, you know your partner has your back. So. Do you wanna share your story now or later? Yeah.
Well, this is actually a story about kindness, I think. So, when we were newly married and we were having our first child, we were at the hospital actually, sitting outside of the hospital. I was in labor. I wasn't having active contractions in the moment, but we were both a little nervous because we heard some horrible labor and delivery room stories about how couples were snapping at each other or, you know, the women yelling or, you know, things like that. And I didn't want to have that experience. We wanted to have like a really unified, you know, together teamwork kind of good feelings experience.
And there were a lot of things that I didn't know going into that first baby delivery, but we sat in our car outside the hospital and said a little prayer that we would be able to treat each other kindly through this whole process. And I thought that we did pretty well, but there was, there was one moment where they wouldn't allow me to eat. Once you check in to have the, they don't let you eat. And then they still brought food. And so I was like, well, why don't you go ahead and eat it because you're not on any kind of restriction here and I'll just enjoy this food. But for some reason, my sense of smell was heightened and as I did go into active labor, it was induced, so it's maybe worse than... Anyway, you don't need the whole birth story. The point is, I was starting to feel a little bit annoyed, either at the sound of Eric eating this muffin or the smell of this muffin. And I could feel the tension behind it. I tried to use kind words, but I was like, when is he going to finish that muffin, you know?
And he looked over as I got really big and he just popped the whole thing in his mouth. And anyway, I feel like it all turned out just fine and we didn't have any real like yelling at each other. But it was just that we knew that contempt could come up in that situation. And we want to try to avoid that. I love that I can show love to you for eating muffins.
I mean, thinking about it, I'm like, why didn't you just throw it in the garbage or something? Oh no, we're not wasting this up. It's going, it's like contrary to Eric's nature to waste food. So it wasn't going to, it wasn't going to like stop eating the muffin. No muffin should go uneaten. That's my mantra. That's true. So anyway, those, that was one of the things that you can do is figure out what is not working and how can you do the opposite from that? And content is one of the fastest ways to ruin a marriage, to break trust, to close down communication, to increase your selfishness. Like it is the gateway drug to so many of these other problems that can come up to ruin a marriage. So you are gonna share one of yours. Okay, so my weakness is backseat driving.
I, my kids know and Emily knows that I am not a great passenger. Please, please share this with any of your loved ones who is not a great fast seat passenger. So I, we just sort of have a standing rule. If we're going anywhere, I'll drive. Not because Emily is not a good driver, but because I'm a terrible passenger. And so we would, hey, and that's love. So we were driving across country and we were making tracks.
We were doing it fast. We had a bunch of our, we had all of our kids with us. And so. We had five and we were trying to get to a solar eclipse. Yeah, we were trying to get to Idaho in time for a solar eclipse. So we were moving fast and we were basically driving nonstop and I had been pulling a long shift. And finally I was getting a little bit loopy and we pulled into a Wendy's and decided to get Frosty's. But right before we got to, we'd gotten something to eat across the street.
And then I was like, I can't drive anymore. We were going to step for gas and then we're like, now we're going to go get Frosties. And our daughter, one of our daughters got in the driver's seat and she was now in charge of the vehicle. And I was going to go all the way to the back row of our minivan and sit in the corner in the back and just try and sleep. And Allison was driving, she's a great driver. And she's getting us across the intersection to the drive, you know, to the drive through.
And all of a sudden I had all these opinions and I was like, no, don't go this way. You're going to need to go around this way and turn sharper so that you don't hit. And I was like, all of a sudden from the back row, I was legitimately trying to drive the car from the back corner. And finally our kids were just like, stop it. Stop trying. Well, I think they started laughing because they were like, you cannot, you just said.
"I don't want to make any more decisions. I'm just going to go back here and sleep." And immediately popped up with all kinds of decisions. They were like laughing. They were like, Dan, I thought you weren't going to make any more decisions. I'm lucky that I have kids that can have a sense of humor about my weaknesses, but I'll say this. So anyway, the message landed with me and I shut my trap and we got the Frosties and we obviously made it across the country just fine without me trying to drive the whole way.
But imagine in a marriage if you're the spouse that is always trying to tell your spouse how to do things. And poor Emily, she knows that she bears the brunt of this because I have a lot of opinions on how things should be done and all of them happen to be right. And she just has to bear with my obstinance. And so this is an area where we... it's a known issue.
And so we speak to it and we address it. But you know, something like this, you know, you get enough of these and you let them grow big enough and you pile them on top of each other. And yeah, that's how you ruin a marriage. And so we're slowly trying to reduce our behaviors in these areas. I will say I don't know if it was a known issue when we got married because we didn't have a car. We couldn't afford a car.
We got married, we were married for like a year before we got a car. We had a bicycle. That's when it emerged. But I'm just teasing you. But it does remind me of a line from Much Ado About Nothing, where I think it's the sheriff is saying to the governor or something, he says, I bestow all of my tediousness upon you. And we love to use that line every now and again to kind of tease each other. And we have lots of opinions. I can still all of my tediousness. It's the Michael Keaton's line. Yeah, yeah. So that's funny. Anyway, okay. I would be happy to share this story with you also about jealousy. And I have had a struggle with jealousy for most of my life. And certainly in my dating years, it did me no favors.
And I... I had made a lot of progress in it before we got married. And I did, but the stakes are also higher and there's more opportunities for jealousy in marriage. And so that has been something that you have done, the brunt of, I bestowed all of my tediousness upon you because I would come forward with jealous questions or jealous fears or jealous comments. And that is a great way to break trust because at the end of the day, underneath that is just this, this fear of abandonment. And I had, again, I feel like this was sort of a miracle for me, but it wasn't until 2018. Sorry, it was 2019, and we were in New Zealand, and I had been doing pretty well, but something came up, something very small, and I felt jealous about it. I felt like maybe you were putting somebody else in front of me, and you were like, I don't think that's what's happening.
I was very upset and I was just praying about it. And I was like, how can this ever be resolved? Like I always have these feelings. And to me, it felt like a hole in a bucket that could never be patched. And so the bucket could never be filled. And as I was praying, and we've been married over 20 years at this point, I felt like I was looking at a story of my life and two of the pages were stuck together. And in my mind, these pages became unstuck.
And I was able to see for the first time, truly, a piece of the story that I had been missing, which I had always been aware of competing distractions, you know, for your attention. And in this new version of the story, what I saw is that for every obstacle that might come up, you are always fighting to get around that obstacle or through that obstacle or over that obstacle to connect with me. And that's when I realized, oh, there's not a hole in this bucket. I didn't see the whole story. And I saw your true devotion and I felt so grateful to be relieved of that it really did go away in a moment. I told Eric, I'm not jealous anymore, but you don't have to believe me. Like just wait.
And now it's been several years and it has stuck, right? Like it was a true transformation in that moment of understanding and recognizing a new story. So I know that jealousy was one of the thorns in our side in our marriage and that was something that we were constantly working on and that was a major transformation. So there is something that I wanna say here though that we didn't talk about beforehand and Erik had mentioned how when some little thing piles up or compounds, you get this negative interest, right? Like this bad kind of, it's like a relationship debt or something that builds up till it becomes overwhelming and you declare bankruptcy and get out. The same thing can happen for good as little beautiful memories and kind words and those things that pile up and compound over time. That is, you know, your love bank that is awful.
The other metaphor I like to use is as a garden and so that we don't let these little things out because it's not that we never have contempt or selfishness or like we have or a desire to control like all of those things emerge and what we like to do is look at it like a garden and say let's address it right away there are some weeds cropping up and we need to eat. It's time to weed this garden.
That way, nothing ever becomes too overwhelming. Nothing ever overtakes us. And we're able to let those beautiful feelings and experiences grow that help our marriage flourish and identify and praise and compliment those things and focus on them to help them grow. But we also do tend to these weeds and try to get to them while they're small. We don't believe in this concept of quote unquote, keeping the peace of not saying anything.
Not confronting something because the longer you wait, the harder it is. You try not to kick the can down the road. Have I used enough metaphors? Hopefully one of these works. Hopefully one of these works for you and will give you the courage to say, oh, but we need to read our garden. This is totally normal that this is happening. There's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you. And we are gonna choose to read this garden and put the water and other good resources in to a flourishing marriage.
Because the grass is always pretty nice. Where you water it. I'll say this, because we've been, and going through our first year and change of home ownership, we bought this house that was a real fixer upper and it did, there was a lot of back maintenance, I'll say, to get it to a place that we were happy with. We did a lot of heavy lifting early on.
Both inside the house and I'll say outside, just sort of like the outdoor spaces since you're talking about weed in the garden. And here's the good news about weed in the garden is that when it happens regularly, it's really easy. When you let it go for a long stretch or a season or two, then it turns into a pain point and it requires heavy lifting and then you've got to get out big tools and make big moves to make things happen.
But honestly, every day we go for a walk, I come back and I kind of glance around the yard and was like, oh, plunk, plunk. And in 90 seconds, two minutes, whatever, anything that started to grow that we don't want there, we're able to just pour it out. And it's in one hand, I throw it in the bin and it's done. It gets easy when we do it regularly. When we neglect it and let it go, that's when it becomes a real burden and a weight. I love that you mentioned that. It makes me think of...
For many years in our marriage, we used a tool called a couple council agenda. And you can call it whatever you want. Like, please feel free to submit your main suggestions. Anyway, but the point is- Can we make out meetings? What? Okay. I'm sorry. That's important. We had this meeting of-
We would get together every week. It had a time limit, so it was never gonna be for more than 30 minutes, and it could certainly be shorter than that, because it doesn't take long if you're meeting every week. And in it, we would just address certain topics, like how are each of our kids doing? How are we doing extended family? Is there anything we need to be aware of? And like a little bit of calendaring. And we would also always make sure that we talked about our romantic life. And...
So that there was always a forum where ideas or questions or whatever it might be could be discussed. And it wasn't like, oh, we have to make us like, when am I gonna bring this up? That this isn't working for me or that this is working for me. And I just feel like it allowed us to just like have so much peace and confidence.
In all the areas of our life because we knew, oh, we're gonna touch base on this, essentially like read the garden or tend the garden on a weekly basis. And we didn't have to like, for example, as far as our romantic life, we never were like waiting many months or years to kind of broach a subject, you know, like because it was too tender or too vulnerable.
It just got us in a really good habit of communicating about those things on a regular basis. And so, you can just use that outline or adapt it to yourself. And I do recommend though, if you're interested in having a regular meeting like this with your spouse or gathering up or chat or whatever you wanna call it, that doesn't make it feel too formal or intimidating is do have a time limit on it. So you know what you're in for, maybe all the difference. You wanna go back and kind of- Yeah, yeah.
So if you're struggling in your marriage and you want it to be better, think about, make a list of all the things that can ruin your marriage or are ruining your marriage. And then, as Emily talked about this design technique, just flip it and say, okay, if those are the things that are ruining my marriage or could ruin my marriage, what's the opposite? And how do I, not your spouse, how do I start to do those things in my marriage? And it will make a big difference. And Emily and I really believe that
Whether your kids are married or they're going to be married, if you live and create the kind of marriage that you wish on your kids, you get the double return. You get to enjoy a happy, beautiful, harmonious marriage and you're modeling it for your kids and they're gonna get the benefit of seeing how it can be done so it makes it that much easier for them. And so if your kids are married and you...
Just live the marriage that you wish on your kids. Anything else you'd say? Yeah, I think that's a really good guideline. If you, not to add additional pressure on you or be like, if I don't have a good marriage, my kids won't have a good marriage, but to say like they are gonna learn more by example than they are gonna be by you telling them things. And if you can show them, yeah, this is how we apologize in our house and this is how we compliment and this is how we have each other's back, then.
They're gonna be like, oh, that's what a resilient relationship looks like. We're not going for a perfect, never have an argument, never disagree, never disappoint each other or hurt each other's feelings. That's not realistic, that's not true. But if you say like, we have our ups and downs and we focus on our ups and our ups keep getting higher, then that is a great thing for your kids to aim for. So I love that as a guideline that I wanna live.
you know, live in the kind of marriage that I would wish on my kids. That's everything for me. If you had anything else to add, I'd love to hear it. Okay. That's all for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us on the What Could Go Right podcast. We hope lots of things will go right for you and your marriage.
