3 Tips to Deal with Relationship Doubts

By

Laura Doyle

By Laura Doyle

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Laura Doyle is a New York Times Bestselling Author, Relationship Expert, Host of The Empowered Wife Podcast at Laura Doyle Connect.

| Updated: 04/05/2023

Medically reviewed by Dr. Liz Hale, Ph.D.

Medically reviewed by Dr. Liz Hale, Ph.D.

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Dr. Liz Hale, Ph.D., is a Marriage & Family Therapist specializing in Discernment Counseling and Couples Counseling.

Everybody has doubts about their relationship from time to time. Like the time I woke up sick the night after a trip to Tijuana and my husband’s first response was “Ha ha ha!”

That was our first anniversary. And I thought “What is this thing that I’ve married?”

But I had much more serious doubts a few years later, so severe that I nearly ended my marriage. So I know how painful it is when you’re feeling like your values don’t match your husband’s at all or he’s engaging in behavior that you never would have condoned or his parenting is not at all what you see your children needing to thrive.

If you’re wrestling with those doubts multiple times a day, it’s an exhausting and scary place to be.

What if those doubts make you question your own judgment about having said “I do”?

What if your marriage is a big mistake and you can’t get back to the life you should be leading while you’re married? Then you should leave, right?

But what if you leave and you devastate your husband and your kids and you end up breaking your own heart too? What if you don’t really want to leave but you have a nagging suspicion that you should?

It’s a terrible quandary, and since you can’t know what your life in a parallel universe where you do leave would look like, how can you really know what the right decision is?

It’s very tempting to jump on the fence and stay there.

But doubt is the devil. It eats away at the joy and connection you could be having if only you could find your faith, and it pretends that you have no choice but to suffer or leave.

Here are three tips that will help you get off the fence:

1. Get Out Your Magic Wand

First, you want to ask yourself: If you had a magic wand and everything in your relationship were just as you wanted it to be, what would you have that you don’t have now?

Would you be getting more attention or affection, feeling more special, having more time to do the things you want to do? Maybe there would be more peace and playfulness in your marriage.

Think about what experience YOU would be having, not what he would do or not do, but what you would feel.

Also, see if you can phrase it as a positive instead of a negative. So instead of saying, “I would not have to do everything,” it might be “I would feel supported and taken care of.”

This is important because sometimes doubt is just a feeling that you’re not going to get what you want, but you can’t get what you want until you know what you want.

Thinking about what you don’t want is not the same. That might come out as a complaint, which reinforces and grows the pain you’re experiencing.

To get your butt off the pointy fence, you’ve got to figure out what you want.

2. Talk to Your Future Self

In the Harry Potter books, Harry has to create a patronus, a spell that he’s never done before and isn’t really old enough to pull off. He’s nervous that he won’t be able to do it.

But then he time-travels just a few minutes into the future and sees someone across the lake who looks like him create a patronus of a stag.

He thinks it’s his father, but then he realizes it’s actually him doing it! So when the moment to create his patronus comes, he knows he can because he has already seen himself do it, and he nails it.

Once you know what you want, you know what your intentions are. It’s time to have a talk with Future You from a year from now and ask her how everything went with your relationship.

Here’s a spoiler alert: Everything went your way!

You created exactly what you’re dreaming of now, and your future self is going to tell you all about it, in great detail so you can make your decisions about how you’re showing up in your relationship based on your confidence that it’s all going to come out just the way you dreamed it would.

What about him, you might ask! What if he doesn’t change? What if he can’t change?

The more important question is: Can you change? Because when you show up differently, he responds to you differently.

When you become your best self, he will follow suit.

3. Find the Evidence

Now it’s just a matter of gathering all the evidence you can that your dream, your intention for your marriage, is true.

What proof, however tiny, do you have that your marriage is becoming what you’ve set out to make it?

Can you find three things—or five—today? And a few more tomorrow?

The more you focus on the evidence that you’re already having the experience you want to have, the more that will become your experience, in my experience.

Just like Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

That applies to your dreams about your relationship too.

How will you start building your foundations today? I’d love to hear in the comments.

By Laura Doyle

Hi! I'm Laura.

New York Times Bestselling Author

I was the perfect wife--until I actually got married. When I tried to tell my husband how to be more romantic, more ambitious, and tidier, he avoided me. I dragged him to marriage counseling and nearly divorced him. I then started talking to women who had what I wanted in their marriages and that’s when I got my miracle. The man who wooed me returned.

I wrote a few books about what I learned and accidentally started a worldwide movement of women who practice The Six Intimacy Skills™ that lead to having amazing, vibrant relationships. The thing I’m most proud of is my playful, passionate relationship with my hilarious husband John–who has been dressing himself since before I was born.

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