It only takes one person to change a marriage for the better.

This can be a bitter pill to swallow.

When it comes to change and personal growth, how much, when, where, and even whether our partners choose to change is their business. Pouring your own limited energy into blaming, demanding, criticizing, and complaining about your partner’s need to change will get you nowhere faster than a toupee in a hurricane.

Focusing on your partner as the problem will reinforce their experience of you as a threat, causing them to shore up their defenses and buckle down in survival mode. At the same time, it will extend your own unhelpful self-righteousness. The higher you go on that soap box, the harder you fall in relationship.

Changing means you gather up the energy you’re investing in making your partner the problem and re-purposing it for yourself. However cold, flawed, or disappointing you find your partner’s behaviors, however frustrated or lonely you feel, you can always look at your contribution. This process requires a delicate balance of self-compassion, determination and curiosity. What will you discover? Ask yourself, why did I choose to marry this person? How have they helped me recreate familiar dynamics from my earliest years? How is this a healing opportunity? How am I failing to give myself precisely what I’m demanding they give me? These questions are starting points to deeper self-awareness.

We know what courage is: feeling the fear and doing it anyway. In a marriage, courage carries with it the risk of losing our favorite kinds of personal leverage. Cultivating a marriage worth having requires relinquishing the all-too-human need for excessive power and control while learning to trust, be vulnerable and court truth.

It’s a risk because there’s no guarantee things will go the way we want.
The reward is our own aliveness.