More Marriages Would Make It If They Started Here

I refuse to renew my old vows.

Every year, my wife Kole and I get married again, with brand new ones. We are not down for a recycled part for two new people, we want a new one, written by the people we've become.

The first time people hear that, some think it's beautiful. Some think it's excessive. But I've watched enough marriages come apart to believe something plainly: more of them would make it if they started here.

Let me tell you what "here" is, and why it works.

Why I Wouldn't Do a Conventional Marriage

I'd been married before. So had Kole. And the only way I was going to do it again was outside of convention.

Every traditional marriage I'd watched growing up looked like a cage to me. It felt like a requirement. Governance by a church, by society, by a government. That wasn't something I wanted to live inside.

So before we got married, we sat down and had a real conversation about what a marriage between us would actually look like. And in those conversations, one idea kept surfacing. Let's do this every year.

Before the wedding, people told us what people always tell you. You're in the honeymoon phase. Just wait a few years. It wears off. So we made a decision together, out loud: we will always be in the honeymoon phase. And if that was the plan, then we'd have to keep rebuilding the marriage to hold it, because we are becoming new people every day. Over a full year, we've become new people entirely.

The Marriage Should Serve the People, Not the Other Way Around

Here's the inversion most couples never make.

When people get married, they start caring for the marriage instead of the people inside it. The marriage becomes the priority. The two humans start working for the institution.

We do it the other way. We build a structure that serves the two people growing inside it. The relationship is a container. Its whole job is to be strong enough to hold both of us while we move, change, and bounce around inside it.

Kole has her own way of seeing the world. I have mine. For us to coincide, the container has to be able to hold both. So every year we decide what that container looks like, the boundaries, the desires, the places we're each willing to go, the places we're not, where we're flexible, where we're not. We agree to it for a year. Then we tear it down and build a new one for the two people who grew out of the last one.

What Actually Pulls Couples Apart

Most of the marriages I've watched fail didn't fail from one big event. They failed from stifled growth and withheld truth. Slowly. A few degrees at a time.

Think about everything that changes over a few years. Money changes. Children arrive. Friends come and go. You move. You cohabitate. Careers shift. Health shifts. Every one of those things changes a person. And if the deal is that you have to stay exactly as you were the day you signed, then something quietly breaks.

A person starts thinking: this is who I was when we got together. This is what my partner signed up for. So I have to stay this. And so they hide their growth. They stop being honest about what they actually want. They may not feel the same attraction. They may want more time with the kids and less with their spouse, or the reverse. And they say none of it.

That's where the real damage lives. Not in the differences. In the silence about them.

The Truth You Didn't Say Out Loud Becomes The Shadow

When people stop speaking their truth, they create shadow. And shadow accumulates.

The truth doesn't disappear because you swallowed it. It piles up inside the person carrying it. So when it finally comes out, and it always comes out, it isn't one or two pebbles. It's a mountain. Stones, rocks, boulders, all landing at once.

That weight is often too much. Too much for the emotional system. Too much for the mental system. Too much for the body. There's a straw that breaks the camel's back, and that's the moment everyone points to as the reason. It was never the straw. It was the years of unspoken weight underneath it.

This is why renewing old vows can be so strange to me. Children arrived. You moved. Someone changed careers or retired or got sick. The entire environment changed. And the plan is to recommit to a contract written for an environment that no longer exists, often because it feels like the thing you're supposed to do.

People will rewrite a business plan every year without blinking. They'll go back to school, restructure the company, update the strategy. But ask them to do the same for the most important relationship in their life and it feels impossible. Saying "I love you" again is beautiful. Saying "I'll keep doing exactly what I've done for five years" when you no longer feel connected to any of it is destructive.

One Couple, Two Poster Boards

I worked with a couple who walked in looking happy. Surface-level connected. Easy with each other in the room. Inside, each of them felt like they were splitting apart.

One had grown spiritual, doing a lot of self-exploration, seeing themselves and their kids and the world in new ways. The other wasn't interested in any of it, and had stayed quiet about that for years. Both of them had privately decided the same thing: if my partner is changing, it's for the worse, but I made a vow, so I'll stay. So they stayed. And they were both miserable.

Neither was talking. One stayed silent to let their partner have what they wanted, while resenting it. The other stayed silent out of fear, fear that growing outside the family's religion would get them rejected or abandoned. Two people protecting each other from the truth, and dissolving the marriage by doing it.

When they flew in for a private session, we sat down, I didn't ask what was wrong. I asked each of them to write out their dream relationship, as individuals, on their own board. Then they brought the boards together.

They didn't recognize what they saw. "I had no idea this is what you wanted." Here's the part that broke it open: each of them had assumed the other was already living inside their dream relationship. Both were way off. They realized they'd been living a lie for years, not out of malice, out of silence.

And the moment they saw it, their bodies settled. They got curious. The one who'd had no interest in the other's spiritual life suddenly wanted to understand what was driving it, because now there was context instead of a wall. The communication gap closed. And when it closed, the romance came back. The curiosity came back. The chase came back. They'd been acting like they knew each other, when what they actually knew was the person from five years ago. Now they had someone new to get curious about. They got to date the new person.

Underneath all of it, their core values were still aligned. They'd never stopped matching. They'd just stopped talking as life piled more stuff on top of them.

How We Actually Run It

This is the practice. You can run a version of it at home. Notice where it starts — not with everything that's wrong.

• Start with the dream. Each person takes a blank board and writes their dream relationship for the year ahead, as if the current one isn't even a factor. Trips, work, money, the people you want around you, the people you don't, life with the kids. Give it real time — twenty minutes to an hour, as detailed as you can make it.

• Compare notes and make agreements. Sit down together and look at both boards. Where something sits high for one of you and low for the other, the other makes an accommodation. We don't call this compromise. We call it agreement. Do we agree to the terms?

• Name what's in the way. Only now do you look at what's not working. What in the current dynamic could block the relationship you just described?

• Build a "what happens when" plan. Walk through the bumps you can see coming, past and future, so that when they show up you already know how you'll handle them.

• Clear the air. Anything left on your chest, say it now. When it's done, you feel clean, clear, and ready to lean in.

There are three entities in the room the whole time: you, your partner, and the relationship itself. You start with the two individuals' needs, and from those you build the third thing, the marriage, into something that's actually life-giving instead of something you both serve.

Lean In and Align, or Let Go

Sometimes couples run this and discover the honest answer is that they're no longer a match. That's real, and it's not a failure of the process. It's the process working.

When that happens, the same practice runs in reverse. I have each person write out their dream life without the other one in it. Then we bring the boards back and ask a hard question: are you willing to support your partner in that dream? Sometimes someone says no, I don't want them to have that. When it gets that intense, we slow down. Having my wife there in these sessions means each partner can feel supported in being heard, seen and validated. Then when both people are ready to be amicable, I have them write something else: what they wish for the person they're leaving. Freedom. Love. Connection. Their fullest life, with you or without you.

Writing that is what dissolves the spite. Because underneath the animosity, they still love this person and want the best for them. That's where an amicable ending actually begins, not in a courtroom, in a genuine wish for the other person's dream life.

And there's grief. When someone realizes it's over, grief comes online immediately, right there in the room. I watch them become new people in real time. So we talk about what grief is and where it leads, because grief leads you into newness, and most people run from it. They'll return to a familiar pain rather than step into an unknown one. The couples who make it through amicably are the ones willing to walk into the newness instead of back into the old wound.

Your First Move

If you read all of this and you're not sure whether the relationship you're in is the relationship for you, your first step isn't about your partner at all.

Get clear on yourself first. Who are you, as an individual? What do you actually want? What does your most awesome life look like, with a partner, without one, with money, without it? Most people I work with can't answer that. So start there.

Then invent your ideal partner. Not a name, not the person you already have. Make them up. How would they talk to you? Look at you? Show up for your work, your kids, your family? Write all of it down.

Then, and only then, sit with the honest question: does the person I'm with fit into this? Are they willing to? Because until you know what you want, you can't know whether you're already standing in it.

If you and your partner are ready to do this together, to lean in and align, or to let go from a place of love instead of lawyers and spite, that's the work we do. Reach out to me directly to learn more. [email protected]