The Shocking Truth About Which Marriages Won't Be Saved

Can your marriage be saved after an affair, separation, or even after divorce papers have been filed? Is there a point where a relationship is truly "too far gone"?

In this video, Kimberly from Marriage Helper reveals the shocking truth about which marriages actually won't be saved. The answer might surprise you—it has nothing to do with how much time has passed, the severity of the infidelity, or legal proceedings. Instead, it comes down to three specific roadblocks that stop reconciliation in its tracks.

If you are wondering, "Is there hope for my marriage?" this video is a must-watch. Kimberly shares insights on why complaining, making excuses, and letting fear paralyze you are the real reasons marriages fail—and exactly how you can start doing something different today.

In this video, we cover:

The psychological danger of focusing on the negative.

Why making excuses creates a barrier to intimacy.

How to overcome the fear that "nothing will work."

Why affairs and separation do NOT mean your marriage is over.

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🧠 WATCH NEXT: Kimberly mentioned that mindset is everything. Watch this video next: "5 Mindset Shifts You Need to Save Your Marriage" 
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Chapters

• 0:00 Can Your Marriage Be Saved
• 0:12 Which Marriages Don’t Make It
• 1:20 Mindset And Negativity Bias
• 3:13 Complaining Keeps You Stuck
• 4:22 Excuses And Fear Of Pain
• 5:47 Future Hope Over Past Hurt
• 6:51 Change Begins When Pain Exceeds Fear
• 8:03 Action Beats Anxiety
• 9:33 Nothing Is Beyond Repair
• 10:29 Do The Right Next Things
• 11:09 Get Guided Help And Apply Now

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

So, what if your husband or wife has had an affair or you're currently separated in your marriage, or maybe even divorce has been filed? Can your marriage be saved? Here's the thing. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about which marriages won't be saved. And honestly, the answer may surprise you. And if we haven't met before, hey, my name is Kimberly, and I've been working with Marriage Helper for over 14 years and helping couples and people in situations a lot like yours, where you're wondering, can I save my marriage or is this too far gone? Now, in today's video, as I said, I'm going to be talking about how do you know if your marriage can be saved by telling you about the kinds of situations that I have seen over 14 years, but also what our entire team here at Marriage Helper has seen over the past 30 years in the thousands of situations that we've been working with. And these are the types of marriages that can't be saved, that aren't saved. So you're going to want to listen in, you're going to want to lean in, maybe even take notes, because this is important to know. So here's the first type of situation that just isn't going to be saved. It's if you just want to complain. Now I know that's likely not what you were expecting me to say, but I want you to think about it. When you are looking for the negative all of the time in your spouse, in your marriage, in your relationship, then what ends up happening is you always see the negative. I think about my son. I've been noticing this so much. He's in third grade and he's been coming home from school at the beginning of the school year. He was coming home every day and just saying, I had a bad day today. And the very next day, he would say it again. And he was just focusing on the negatives. It was a new school. He didn't have the same friends that he had had from the year before. But even though it's always hard and there are always things that might go wrong in a school day, the fact that he was so focused on the negative led him to consistently only be focused on the negative. And he would come home and he kind of got in this groove where he just wanted to complain. Now, I see this all of the time in people's marriages. The person that comes to me, even who even wants to save their marriage, they can't see anything but the bad. I know that is how I felt when I was going through my marriage crisis over 10 years ago. I just wanted to complain. I felt like if my husband would change, if he would just do the things I wanted him to do, then we would be fine. Everything would be better. But the more that I focused on the bad, the more I saw the bad. You will see what you expect to see. That is a principle that is true in psychology and in life. So if you are just wanting to complain, then you're never going to see the good. And ultimately your marriage won't be saved because you will only be focusing on the bad. You'll keep finding the things to complain about and you'll keep staying stuck in the rut that you're currently in. Now, I know that maybe, maybe some of you have already even stopped watching this video at this point because I'm not saying what you want to hear. But here is the thing, y'all. The thing is, this is the truth of the matter. So much about saving our marriage has to do with the mindset we bring into it. Honestly, that may be one of the biggest parts of saving your marriage is the mindset that you have. Now, listen, I have two more points that I want to get to you that are really important, but I did another YouTube video on the five mindset shifts that you need to have in order to save your marriage. We're gonna put that in the show notes. That should be the next video that you watch. Here's the second situation I see that your marriage may not be saved if you're experiencing this. And that's this you make excuses. I was talking to a guy just yesterday who was talking about how he had had an affair, how he was trying to win his wife's trust back. But honestly, he just couldn't do anything right now because they were trying to move, they were trying to get all of these other things done in their life and in their marriage. And ultimately what I heard was excuses. There were all of the reasons in the world to not do something now, because the pain of what you fear you might experience as you go through what needs to be done to try and save your marriage, to some people, just truly isn't worth it. That's a hard truth for many of us to think about. Are you just so dreading the pain, the emotional turmoil that it might take in order to save your marriage? And have you made that such a big monster in your mind that it's keeping you stuck? Well, here's the thing. I have had people ask me before or even just say to me before, they say, Kimberly, I just don't know that I want to go through the Marriage Helper program, to go to the three-day workshop because I'm so scared that it's going to bring up past pain and I just don't want to live through it again. Well, here's the great thing that you need to understand. We at Marriage Helper don't focus on your past pain. We focus on your future hope. We focus on how you can look to the future and start doing things differently now without hashing up unnecessary trauma and things that happened in the past that bring a lot of things to the surface that aren't ultimately that like it happens a lot of time in counseling and therapy, those things end up bringing up way more problems that aren't dealt with well and end up causing way more problems. So that's not what we do. We say, yes, there's things that from the past that need to be forgiven and dealt with and not done again, but we're not gonna live there. We're gonna live in the future and of how things can be better moving forward. And so what you'll find when you come through the process that we take you through at Marriage Helper is that it is hope-filled. It is life-giving, it is actually change-based in the fact that it actually leads behaviors to change and the future to look different than the past looked for you. You'll find that it's actually not as painful as you think that it will be to go through the process. But the other truth that I know is this that people don't actually make change until the pain of staying where they are is more than what they can bear. And that leads me to point number three. The marriage that isn't going to be saved is the one who doesn't do anything. There was a couple of years ago where I had this really weird nose thing going on. Anytime I breathed in through my nose, it it there was so much pain and irritation that I would cry. And it was so frustrating. I know it's like a really weird thing to think about, but it was something that you do so normally, just breathing in, something that should be easy, just became extremely painful. And I was really scared, number one, that it was always going to be this way and that I was never gonna be able to breathe normally through my nose again. So ultimately what I ended up doing was going to the doctor, and the doctor gave me this pack of this steroid pack. And ultimately, the second thing I was scared of that was that I would take this pack and it wouldn't work. So I just left it on my kitchen counter for two days without taking it, just thinking, if I can do some home remedies, if I can just wait it out, then maybe things are gonna get better, which didn't make any logical sense. I remember calling my dad and talking him through this process. And he said, Kimberly, why don't you just take the medicine? That's exactly what it's there for. And I said, Because my ultimate fear is what if I take it and it still doesn't work? And then I've tried everything, and then I'll know that there's no hope for me to be able to breathe normally through my nose again. Y'all, I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. How often is that true for our marriage as well? We don't go to counseling, we don't do that thing, or maybe we did that thing in the past. We did counseling before, it didn't work. We did another program that said that it was going to save our marriage and wasted a bunch of money doing it and it didn't work. And now you are hopeless because you've tried all of these other things in the past that said they would, but they didn't. And you're dejected, you're desperate, you're unsure who to even trust at this point, kind of like I was with that steroid pack. But here was what ended up happening. Finally, I said, you know what? What do I actually have to lose? And the answer was nothing. And I took the first pill and then the second, and within a day, I could breathe again. And guess what? It didn't come back. It actually worked. But I had to get to the point where the pain of what I was experiencing in the moment was greater than the fear I had about what to do next. And ultimately, I think that's where several of you are as well. Maybe you are in the point and the place right now where you're saying, I'm just still scared. Like my fear is greater than my desire for my life to be different. And nothing's gonna change as long as you stay in that fear. As long as you stay still, and as long as you stop doing anything and don't do anything, things aren't gonna get better. Things wouldn't have gotten better for me until I started to do something about it. And the same is true for you as well. So you may be surprised that I didn't say if your spouse is still in an affair, or if you're separated, or if your spouse has filed for divorce, or if you haven't had intimacy with each other for the past five years. None of those things I said because I have seen situations that other people, other counseling therapy options, other companies would have said, there is no hope for you. I've seen those marriages saved. So I believe there's nothing beyond hope. I believe there's nothing beyond repair and that any marriage can be saved. But honestly, honestly, the number one thing that has to happen for any marriage to be saved, including yours, is you have to start doing something different. So what is that? Do you know what you need to do next? You probably don't. Otherwise, you would have already done it and you wouldn't be in this situation right now. Again, that same person that I was talking to just yesterday who said, We just don't have the ability right now. We're trying to move. He said, I know what I need to do. I just need to be consistent. So I said, consistent in what? And he said, honestly, consistent in just answering my wife's questions about the affair that I had every single day. And I was able to say, listen, that's the wrong thing to be consistent in. You're causing more damage, doing the things that you think you should be doing, and it's making your recovery process even worse. You're not doing the right things, and so you're not going to get the right results. Maybe you should let professionals like what we do at Marriage Helper help guide you through the right things to do so that you don't cause more pain, so that you don't cause more turmoil, and so that you can actually see your marriage be saved and better than ever before. We work with 100 clients a month and we would love for you to be one of them. We have an application process because we want to make sure that what we do is the best fit for you and that you are a great fit for us. If you are actually ready to start doing something different, submit your application. You'll see the link in the show notes below. We would love to see if we could possibly work with you and help make your marriage better than it's ever been, no matter what has happened. As long as you are willing, we have a beginning place for you where you can start and you can begin to see real results. When you submit that application, you're going to answer some questions. And then it's going to ask you to schedule a time to speak with someone on our team so that they can listen to you, hear you out, and help you see how we can help for you to see if it's a good fit for you. But here's what I know if you don't do anything, nothing will change. So be sure to submit that application if you're ready and watch the next video on the five mindset shifts that you need to save your marriage.