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#475 - What If You Didn't Have to Fix Broken Relationships Anymore?

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I remember the exact moment I saw it. Early in dating the woman who would become my wife, and later my ex-wife, something didn't sit right. A pattern showed up. Nothing dramatic. Just a small flag waving in the distance.

I ignored it.

Not because I was foolish. Because I'm human, and humans are wired to look past what's inconvenient when we want something to work. That's not a confession. It's a pattern I've watched play out for nearly twenty years, across coaching sessions, counseling conversations, and pastoral care I've witnessed up close.

Here's the question I want you to sit with: What if your goal was never to fix a broken relationship, but to find the one that never had to break in the first place?

For decades, the entire industry around relationships, counseling, coaching, even the church, has centered on repair. Something goes wrong, and we bring in the professionals to put it back together. But almost nobody asks the earlier question: why did it break at all? Why do we assume struggle is simply the cost of admission?

Let me be clear about something first. Every relationship hits rough patches. That's normal. Most of those patches are resolvable with a little honesty and effort, and they never need to rise to the level of counseling or therapy. That's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about the deeper breaks, the ones built on a foundation that was cracked before the wedding ever happened.

Relationships don't have to break. What has to change is what happens before the relationship starts. You choose better up front, or you spend years untangling a choice you made in a hurry.

Three problems show up in my coaching conversations more than any others: money, cheating, and addiction. Each one usually has a warning sign that was visible long before the wedding.

Money. As a former financial advisor, I watched money habits predict marriage outcomes long before I ever coached someone through the fallout of one. It's consistently named as one of the top contributors to divorce, and for good reason. When one or both partners bring toxic money habits into a relationship, the mismatch doesn't disappear. It waits. Watch how someone handles money, not just how they talk about it.

Cheating. I don't excuse it, ever. But I've sat across from enough people to see a pattern: infidelity rarely comes out of nowhere. It tends to grow in a home where something was already missing, emotional connection, attention, intimacy, a felt sense of being chosen. That absence doesn't start after the vows. Often it's visible in how two people handle disconnection while dating. Better choices up front don't guarantee faithfulness, but they change the odds.

Addiction. This is the sneakiest of the three, because it hides well and for a long time. But it's rarely invisible. I've talked with people who told me plainly, "I saw it before we got married. I just assumed marriage would fix it." It didn't. It rarely does. If you notice it while dating, believe what you're seeing instead of betting on what you're hoping.

None of this means every relationship that struggles was doomed from the start, or that people can't grow and change. They can, and rough patches are proof of that. But most of the individuals I've coached after a broken marriage could point to a sign they saw early on, and talked themselves out of taking it seriously.

That's the shift I want for you. Not learning how to fix what's broken. Learning how to recognize what's true before you build a life on top of it.

If you want a place to start, I put together a free guide called The 5 Biggest Dating and Relationship Mistakes, the patterns I see most often that keep good people stuck in relationships that never should have gotten as far as they did. Grab your copy here.

You don't have to get better at fixing. You have to get better at choosing.

Blogs

#475 - What If You Didn't Have to Fix Broken Relationships Anymore?

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