Dr. Diane: Welcome back to another episode of the Libido Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Diane Mueller, board certified sexologist, and I’m so excited about our guest today. As you heard in the intro, we are talking today about things like you do not need your spouse on board initially to save your marriage alone. We’re going to talk about how to save your marriage when only one is trying, how to reconnect with a distant spouse, and so much more. And I also think the best time to work on saving your marriage, as I imagine our guest does as well, is before the problems even start. So, we’re going to talk about that, too, about how to save your marriage before you even realize it needs saving.

Dr. Diane: To help me we have marriage coach Dr. Lee Baucom and welcome to the show Lee.

Dr. Lee Baucom: It’s Diane thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Dr. Diane: Same same. So let’s look at this like initially as because I do think we have a couple different categories. We have like the people that there’s not really a known problem, the people that they both know they have a problem and probably a third category of like one person thinks they have a problem and another person thinks they’re fine. Would you say that’s correct and what you see?

Dr. Lee Baucom: I think that’s a pretty good description of the topography we’re dealing with here.

Dr. Diane: So let’s deal with this like and have a conversation like you know one at a time. What tends to come up more frequently?

Dr. Lee Baucom: Generally when people find themselves in a crisis sometimes the other has already kind of gotten past that. And then there are those who find themselves in the midst of a crisis and a spouse going, “Oh, we’ll get past this. It’s just a phase.”

Marriage Disconnection Signs: The Hidden Pause Button

Dr. Lee Baucom: What I see is people hitting the pause button, not consciously, but kind of subconsciously hitting the pause button. They spend all this time finding each other, falling in love, building their relationship, deciding they want to be together for life. Then they get married and say, “Okay, all that energy we put into building the marriage, we now need to go conquer the rest of the world.” And they go, “But it’s okay because we’ve got this nailed down. So we’ll come back to this.” And that’s when they hit the pause button.

Dr. Diane: Is that kind of what we’re saying by the pause button?

Dr. Lee Baucom: The pause button starts to mark a decline because the disconnection is in their connection obviously and they’re creating distance without knowing it. And what I watch is that the “when we’ll come back to us” is always future. The problem is that you’re establishing the habits of disconnection after all of those habits of connection.

Dr. Diane: Do you feel like this happens like the pause button in many ways to couples almost on a subconscious driver? Is this something that most people are just destined to pause unless something is done to intervene?

Dr. Lee Baucom: Yes, that is very common. We start instead of connecting on an emotional soul level, we connect on a highly logistical level.

Saving a Marriage by Yourself: Changing the Dance

Dr. Diane: So we have this group where one person in the couple realizes there’s a problem and wants to work at it and then the other person either doesn’t realize there a problem or they recognize there a problem but they just don’t want to do anything about it. Where do we start?

Dr. Lee Baucom: That raises the question can one person save a marriage? And that’s often what people come to me and say, “How do you think that one person can do that because it takes two to tango?” And my response is you’re already tangoing. It may not be going well, but you’re already in the dance. So I think of a marriage as a system. If one person changes a piece, the spouse is likely to shift how they do it too.

Dr. Diane: Would this be a true statement: it doesn’t take two to tango to start to revive the marriage but it does take two to tango to finish reviving the marriage?

Dr. Lee Baucom: Yes. Ultimately, one person cannot finish saving a marriage. It takes both people to say, “This is something we want.” But one person’s actions can often make a difference. Humans are connectors by nature.

Dr. Diane: How do you guide that one person? Are those initial steps of change purely internal or are you actually working with that individual to do things that are also more externally facing?

Dr. Lee Baucom: It happens both. There are these three C’s of the approach: connecting with the spouse, changing yourself — that’s the internal part — and creating. Marriages that really work have created a “we” like we’re in this together.

Common Mistakes When Trying to Save Your Marriage Alone

Dr. Diane: What do a lot of marriage therapists do wrong or what do couples do wrong in the beginning?

Dr. Lee Baucom: Three things I see: First, a therapist who treats the two people as separate clients rather than the relationship as the client. Second, believing that communication is the problem rather than a symptom of the problem. Third, dragging a spouse into therapy who doesn’t want to work on it.

Resources to Save Your Marriage When Only One Is Trying

Dr. Diane: Lee, can you just tell us about a couple of the ways that you work with people and the unpause your marriage or the save your marriage model and a little bit about how we get a hold of you?

Dr. Lee Baucom: If you’re hearing the waterfall off in the distance and you’re in that chronic disconnection, I’ve created an app to help people to get out of that pause button marriage at unpauseyourmarriage.com. If you’re closer to the waterfall and you need crisis action, that’s at savethemarriage.com. I also work with clients one-on-one and have a team of coaches.

Dr. Diane: You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, and check out our Modern Libido Club for so much more!