How To Protect Your Marriage If You Didn’t Have A Healthy Example Growing Up

Marriage is a beautiful, significant, life-changing union. It’s a lifelong commitment made to love one person, to grow with one person, to build a life with one person – which is why someone’s wedding day is often regarded as one of the most important days of their life. From that point on, their life will be different forever.

But this kind of marriage doesn’t just happen without any intentionality, determination, and humility on both people’s parts. A beautiful marriage is built, not a given. More often than not, we rely on the marriages we saw growing up – whether it was our parents’, grandparents’, or someone else’s – to inform us of what marriage is meant to look like.

And if the example of marriage you had growing up wasn’t a good one, this can make you wonder if having a healthy marriage is even possible for you. You’ve already noticed some of the same unhealthy dynamics occurring, felt lost as to how to be a “good” wife, and secretly thought you might have been better off never having gotten married at all. You love your husband, but you feel incapable of having a good marriage because you don’t even know what that looks like – the ones you saw either ended in divorce, were abusive, or were simply loveless.

But still, you desperately want this marriage to work. You want to have a beautiful, good, healthy marriage. So how do you do this, without having witnessed such a marriage before? How can you craft a healthy marriage for yourself when you feel totally in the dark?

Acknowledge Your Past, but Don’t Let It Have the Last Say

If your childhood wasn’t picture-perfect (whether your parents’ marriage broke apart, or you saw one or both of them deeply unhappy in their marriage, or you saw your mom or dad go from relationship to relationship), it’s understandable to want to ignore it all, to pretend it had zero effect on you. But the reality is, that’s not the case. 

Your past had a hand in making you who you are, but it doesn’t have to rule over the rest of your life.

Your upbringing undoubtedly has an effect on your present and your future. What your parents or caregivers did or didn’t do for you will continue to affect you well into adulthood. But you are ultimately in control of your life today, as well as what hasn’t happened yet. Your past had a hand in making you who you are, but it doesn’t have to rule over the rest of your life.

Be Honest About Your Shortcomings

While it’s true that it’s within your power to have a healthy marriage no matter your background, marriage also requires us to be upfront about ourselves – our shortcomings, our flawed internal narratives, and our areas that need growth. Before we can hope to have the kind of marriage we deeply desire, we have to take an honest look at ourselves in the mirror.

Be truthful about how your background has contributed to the ways you’ve negatively affected your marriage. Maybe you never witnessed healthy conflict, and your fighting style is one that harms your marriage instead of healing it. Maybe seeing your mom get cheated on made you suspicious and anxious that the same would be done to you, and you’ve accused your husband of having an affair without any evidence. Maybe you saw your parents get divorced and, in the back of your mind, always suspected the same would happen with your marriage, causing you to behave like you’ve got one foot out the door at the first sign of trouble.

Whatever the circumstances of your upbringing, accept and acknowledge how they’ve affected your marriage and which unhealthy dynamics you’ve brought into the relationship. It’s only when you know exactly what you’re fighting against that you can make any kind of healthy changes.

Talk to Your Husband

We get it – if a good marriage wasn’t something you were lucky enough to witness as a kid, there’s a good chance that healthy, constructive, loving communication between spouses also wasn’t something you ever saw or learned. And yet, communication is one of the key ingredients to a lasting marriage.

By letting your husband in on your various struggles, you’re making it so that you’re facing this dilemma together.

So it’s important that you communicate with your husband about your struggles. Tell him exactly what you’re worried about when it comes to the well-being of your marriage and your ability to have a healthy relationship. Open up to him about the pain you feel about missing out on an example of a beautiful, life-giving marriage, and the insecurity you now feel because of that. 

By letting him in on your various worries, struggles, and experiences, you’re making it so that you’re facing this dilemma together, not all on your own – and isn’t that what marriage is all about?

Get Counseling

Journaling, self-help books, and self-determination can only get you so far. Eventually, if you’re looking to make significant changes in the quality and well-being of your marriage, you might want to consider seeing a licensed professional counselor. 

Needing counseling doesn’t make you broken, irredeemable, or weird – it just makes you human. With a therapist, you’ll be able to sift through your past, understand how you’re being affected by it today, and figure out a way forward. Making and keeping positive changes in your behavior is challenging to do all alone – enlisting a professional will only help.

Along with one-on-one sessions, you might consider finding a couple’s counselor down the line to help replace any unhealthy dynamics with life-giving ones. Even the happiest couples could benefit from counseling from time to time, so don’t see going to a therapist with your husband as evidence that you’re failing.

Closing Thoughts

Marriage might feel daunting to you, especially if the only example of a marriage you had growing up was negative, toxic, abusive, or nonexistent. And while that will have a significant effect on your feelings going into marriage, you ultimately have the choice to cultivate health in your marriage. Another couple’s marriage doesn’t have to impact the quality and happiness of yours.

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