As our friends and clients know, we were nearly one of those couples who fell into the unfortunate 90% of couples that would fail after a previous divorce. Marisa and I were both previously married, and we met in our mid-thirties. We fell in love right away, and everything pointed to our relationship being a wonderful romance for a long time. Marisa was a great stepmother for our daughter, and everything seemed to click. However, after we were married and began planning to have a child of our own together, the signs that we were headed for disaster became very apparent. Like most people in their thirties, Marisa and I had already established our own routines, habits, and behaviors as an individual. Just like all couples, we also had our own expectations of a partner and what a relationship was supposed to look like. The problem is that if these routines, habits, behaviors, and expectations are not aligned, even a so-called good relationship is really a ticking timebomb. At that point, neither of us were relationship experts, so neither of us knew what to do, other than “do what we’ve always done” and hope for the best. Needless to say, this didn’t work. So, like many couples who are facing relationship challenges, we enlisted the assistance of counselors, ministers, self-help resources, and anything we could find on the internet. In the span of a single year, we’d worked with three counselors, a deacon, and a priest at our church. We’d read all about Men being from Mars and Women being from Venus, the languages of Love, various principles for how to make marriages work, and a myriad of other books. Despite our best attempts, we were failing, and the harsh reality was that we were heading for divorce. To complicate matters more, in the middle of our challenges, we learned that Marisa was pregnant with our son. After over a year of trying to make things work in our relationship, Marisa ultimately decided to call it quits. She left our home at 9:30pm in mid-October and her petition for divorce was served to Tom in early November. Like many people, Tom was shell-shocked by the fact that he’d be facing another divorce and that his son would grow up in a broken home. For several days, he’d not eat, barely sleep, and bury himself in his work to dull the pain of reality that was setting-in upon him. At this point, Marisa had stopped all communication with Tom and there was really no way for us to ‘talk things out.’ Fortunately, Tom has never been an individual to give up easily and by the Grace of God, he stumbled upon a new strategy, with new tools, and a radically different mindset about creating relationship success. It was a strategy that not only Tom could execute upon initially without Marisa’s involvement, but it was also a strategy that would ensure that their relationship would NEVER degrade to this condition again. It has been nearly 9 years since Marisa filed for divorce, and as we look back upon our journey, we both feel genuinely grateful. Of course, it wasn’t easy for us to go through the difficulties that we encountered; however, those difficulties gave us an amazing education on what NOT to do in a relationship, plus took us down a very different road in our lives than we’d ever thought.

We’re fortunate to now be able to share our experience, our education, and strategies which enabled us to recreate our relationship. Beyond this, these strategies became the cornerstone of how we were able to overcome some of the most difficult challenges any couple will face, not to mention the COVID-19 Pandemic and Isolation. It's been an amazing journey for us personally, as a couple, and as coaches to have been privileged to work with some amazing people over the past seven years.