Ep 137: Marriage Myths We Need To Let Go Of In 2026

In 2026 the divorce rate is still hovering around 60% — but it’s not because of one big blow-up. It’s because of six common marriage myths that sound logical but quietly destroy connection. In this deep-dive episode of Married and Connected, marriage coach Kameran dismantles each myth with the truth in the same breath, pulling from The Gottman Institute, Brené Brown, Dr. Andrea Vitz, Vanessa Marin, and Julie Menanno of The Secure Relationship.

You’ll hear:
• Why “kids come first” is quietly sabotaging marriages (and what actually helps kids most)
• The real problem with treating love languages like a magic fix
• Why individual self-help isn’t enough — you need couple practice
• Why active listening during conflict often fails — and what builds real communication
• The danger of expecting your partner to “complete” you
• Why staying and doing the work is often better for kids than divorce

Rooted in real-life parenting, eight years coaching hundreds of couples (93% success rate), and faith-based wisdom, this episode gives you immediate, practical ways to drop the myths and build the marriage you actually want.

If you’re tired of roommate syndrome and ready for real connection again, this is your turning point.

Book your FREE 30-minute consultation today — no pressure, just honest guidance on 1:1 coaching, couples coaching, or my Skool community.

In the Skool community, men learn healthy, strong masculinity at home and women learn soft, feminine strength as a Proverbs 31 wife.

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👉 Join the Skool community/Register for the Bringing Back Desire Workshop

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Stay married and connected.

Keywords / Tags:
marriage myths 2026, divorce rate myths, kids come first marriage myth, love languages myth, individual self-help marriage, Gottman Institute marriage myths, Brené Brown marriage myths, secure attachment marriage, emotional sobriety marriage, Christian marriage advice, marriage myths debunked 2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let's take a quick pause. I want to ask you a serious question. What are you feeding your mind right now? If it's social media, are you tired of doom scrolling through the angry comment sections and political rants yet? What if you use that time to actually fix your marriage? Welcome to the free married and connected school community. It's like social media, but without the ads, without the judgment, and without the noise. Just real self-paced tools that get you out of that roommate phase starting today. Inside, you get an exact blueprint for a weekly State of the Union meeting with your spouse. We're cutting mental load, we're stopping miscommunications, and we're breaking that exhausting loop of doom argument once and for all. Plus, you get instant access to workshops on overcoming resentment and bringing the actual fun back into your marriage. We have a dedicated space just for guys jumping into forging fortitude. It's a 10-week intensive to help you step into your masculine leadership and become the husband and man that God called you to be. And for ladies joining Edifying Eden, we're stepping out of that controlling, nagging era into our soft, nurturing feminine era, even if your husband hasn't taken the reins yet. Either way, you can take responsibility for your side of the street. Stop scrolling the internet and start investing in your home. The community is 100% free with options to purchase certain courses. Click the link in the show notes and join the Married and Connected school community today. I'll see you inside. Marriage isn't supposed to feel like roommates, but it doesn't have to feel like a war either. Hi, I'm Cameron Alaricki, certified marriage coach and a relationship expert. Every week on Married and Connected, I bring you real talk, hard truths, and practical tools you can start using right away. Whether you've been married two years or 42, this is where you'll find hope, encouragement, and steps that actually work. So let's make your marriage feel good again, starting right now. Hey friend, welcome back to another episode of the Married and Connected Podcast. I'm Cameron Alaricki, your host. Before we get started today, I am wanting to give you an announcement. Sunday, April 12th at 6 p.m. Central Time, I am going to be hosting a monthly workshop on bringing the desire back in your marriage. This is going to be different and more in-depth than what the podcast was a couple of weeks ago. But after posting the podcast, I got a lot of feedback from listeners, from my school members, things like that, saying that yes, this is something that we need. This is something that we need to go over and that we would really like to have. So ask and you shall receive. This is going to be an interactive workshop between you and your partner. And of course, they will be non-sexual activities, but they're still going to help. They're going to help rekindle that connection as well as give you a deeper dive into your intimate life and what is keeping that stuck or how to move that forward. So if you are wanting to sign up for that workshop, it'll be about an hour long. The link is in the show notes. So definitely jump on that. If you are listening to this podcast after April 12th, 2026, no worries. That workshop has been recorded and it is now in the school community under workshops. So you can go ahead and check that out. This week's topic has been inspired by the 97 Hills that I was going to die on in last week and the week before's episodes. We are talking about myths, myths that we have basically swallowed whole and are refusing to give up. Headlines and studies are showing that the divorce rate is hovering right around 60% at this point, as of April of 2026, when you count first and subsequent marriages, 60%. Six years ago during COVID, when people started realizing, okay, we are at home with our partner, and I don't really like my partner that much. Even then it wasn't at 60%. What we're seeing is that that is trending in the wrong direction. And being that it is my mission to fix that, that is what we're doing today. So what no one is talking about out loud is the huge portion of those marriages that are ending that are not caused by one specific betrayal. What people don't realize, and I'm actually interviewing a divorce attorney in a couple of weeks for this reason right here. What people don't realize is that cheating isn't even the number one reason why people are getting divorced these days. Is it happening more and more? Absolutely. But when you get divorced and you go ahead and file, they don't even ask if your partner has cheated or not. At least they didn't in Texas. And a lot of other states, they're called no fault states. So when you get a divorce, you just get a divorce. It doesn't matter whether it's the husband that wants it, the wife that wants it, the husband that cheated, the wife that cheated, the husband that stole money, whatever the case may be. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares anymore. It's just, oh, you want to get a divorce? Cool, let's do that. What's happening is death by a thousand paper cuts. They are caused by myths that we have all just absorbed, and they sound logical. Social media is a really big proponent of this. Self-help books and even some myths that therapists keep repeating, but that quietly sabotage the foundation of a thriving marriage. And today I am calling them out. For each myth, I am going to give you the myth and the truth in the same breath. Peruge, I am not going to willy wonka this. It is going to be straightforward, and here is what it is. Of course, we're going to go deep into each one, the science behind it, the emotional sobriety behind it, real life examples, etc. But by the end, my hope is that you will have a brand new lens for your own relationship, one that feels hopeful, practical, and even doable if you have kids, jobs, the house, et cetera. So here we go. Let's start building on some truth. The first myth that is quietly fueling that 60% divorce rate is that the kids come first. As long as the children are happy and taken care of, the marriage is going to naturally be fine. Basically, this comes down to priorities. It's not necessarily this myth that the kids are going to be fine or that the marriage is going to be fine if the kids are fine. The truth is that we don't prioritize the right things. If you look at your calendar, you can sit here all day long, and I've had this conversation multiple times this week, oddly enough, that as human beings, we want to believe that we're doing better than what we really are. But if you truly look at your calendar, you will see what your priorities are. You will see if it's sports, if it's work, if it's chores, if it's travel, if it's family, like outside family, you will see if it's your partner and like you've got date nights scheduled, you've got quality time on there, you've got your weekly marriage business meeting scheduled, things like that. You can tell exactly what your priorities are by looking at your calendar. The Gottman Institute's long-term research and Julie Minano's secure attachment work both show that kids actually thrive when they see their parents modeling a strong connected marriage. A lot of times we think that we have to take care of the kids. Take it from me, I cannot keep a plant alive, but I've raised two children. And kids are very self-sufficient when you teach them to be self-sufficient. Now, granted, if you've got littles that are like under the age of three, I get it, you're in the thick of things. But when you have older kids and they're able to get their own milk, get their own water, get their own snack, and you give them scaffolding around that, that not only makes your life easier, it also makes their life easier. That being said, look at your priorities. If you're constantly interrupting your husband or your wife to answer the child that's pulling at your shirt, saying, I need, I want, help me, help me, help me, then you're prioritizing the child over your spouse. You're also not teaching your child that interrupting is rude, that they need to wait. That is one thing that absolutely irks the crap out of me, especially as a teacher, but also as a mom. I'm sorry, if I am on the phone or if I am talking to your father, your mouth is closed. You may put your hand on my arm, you may put your hand on my side to let me know that you are there, but otherwise, I'm gonna need you to wait. Their brains are already pretty egocentric until they're about 10. So we're just kind of fueling that fire if we don't teach them, hey, someone else is talking right now, and what they have to say matters too. In 2026, we have to stop treating the marriage like it's on autopilot while the kids get all the oxygen, and we have to start protecting the relationship that actually holds the family together. Studies have been shown that when you have a happy, healthy marriage, your kids learn more in school, which as a former teacher I can tell you is absolutely true. I could tell exactly, without looking at any of these kids' files, which children were from divorced homes and which children weren't. Looking at that, your kids thrive in life when they see their parents respecting each other, loving each other well, connected, and healthy. The second myth that keeps marriages on the rocks is love languages are the magic key. If your partner learns to speak your love language perfectly, then all your problems are just gonna disappear. The truth of that is that your love language is created from your emotional insobriety. It comes from these self-beliefs that you created as a child that then create a filter that you filter your entire world through for your entire entire life. That that filter of I'm not enough, bad things happen to me, I'm gonna get in trouble, there's not enough money. Money is hard to make, I don't have a voice, I don't have a choice. All of that creates the love language that you need or that you have. The truth of that is it's your emotional insobriety. And if your partner doesn't fulfill that, then you have a certain feeling about that, a certain emotion about that, and then you lash out. You get defensive, self-centered, childish, jealous, dishonest, you have a secondary addiction. All of that happens. So those love languages are a byproduct of your emotional in sobriety. When you become completely emotionally sober, you don't have a love language. And you truly learn to speak all of the love languages. The five love languages that Dr. Gary Chapman created served a purpose for a while, but that's like a preschool concept, just like learning that an apology is I'm sorry. It's not enough. You need adult level education at this point. The adult level education, the standard, preschool concepts are not the standard anymore. The standard is adult level education. Emotional sobriety is that adult level education. Love languages can be a very helpful awareness tool. Turning towards each other's bids for connection is far more predictive of lasting satisfaction than matching love languages. You only have a matching love language 5% of the time with your spouse. In the hundreds of couples that I have worked with over the last eight years, only one couple that I have had has had matching love languages. One. Well, the others are just treading water. They're like a duck, calm, cool, and collected on the top, and below the water, their feet are just a spinning, trying to figure out how to love their partner better. Now, think about this. If you already have a filter of the effort that I put in is never gonna be enough for you, how is not being able to speak your partner's love language just fueling that filter? It's almost like repeated trauma, little tea trauma, over and over and over. Every time your spouse comes to you and says, I don't feel loved by you. Well, sis, you're never gonna feel loved by me because I don't know how to love you. Whereas, when you are emotionally sober, they need less from you. You truly become less needy. Like, I can't stress that enough. When you become emotionally sober, I used to be one of the most emotionally needy people on the face of the planet. Truly. Truly the most needy person ever. And now, probably the one of the least. When you become less emotionally needy, you are others focused. You're focused more on loving them. When they get up in the morning, they're more focused on loving you. And how you guys show up together and how that meshes is just how it meshes. And you're okay with it. Not because you've settled for less, but just because you don't need as much emotionally. You've worked through the trauma that you're projecting onto your partner, so they have less of an expectation put on them to fulfill the needs that you had that are actually coming from your childhood. When we treat love languages like a checklist instead of a starting point, we miss the deeper work of emotional safety and repair, which is what emotional sobriety is all about. The third myth, driving couples apart in 2026, is that if you are good with boundaries outside of your marriage, then you must be good with them inside of marriage. Not true. I'll give you an example. You could be absolutely phenomenal at saying no if someone comes and says, Hey, can you help me with this? Hey, can you do that? Nope, I can't. I'm so sorry. Instead, why don't you check out with this person? Why don't you have that person help you? Here's this person's number. You could be great at that. But inside of your home, you've got one kid that you're doing three things for, another kid that comes in and asks for a snack, and then your husband or your wife comes in and says, Hey, can you check this over for me? Can you can you read this email real quick and proofread it so that I can send it? Um, no, I cannot. Do you see the circus at my feet right now? And it happens with everybody. You're trying to work, you've got 87 tabs open on your computer, your spouse comes in to ask you something, and now your brain takes 17 minutes just to get back to whatever it was you were doing before. If setting those boundaries, and I I don't love the word boundaries because it's all preferences, but learning to say no, learning to say, I don't have the mental capacity for that, I don't have the emotional capacity for that, I don't have the financial capacity for that. I don't have the time constraints to do that today. You're gonna need to do that for yourself. This is also how we slip into those roles of being a parental figure to our spouse. And it happens just as much with men as it does with women that men treat their wives like daughters instead of partners, and women treat their spouse like a son. I mean, even the reels that come out on it. I saw one the other day. What did it say? Um, I've always heard you don't want to have three kids because that's an odd number. And then it flashes to a picture of the husband and it's like, my fourth kid. No. No. That that kind of stuff right there is fueling the toxicity, just like clicking on the clickbait that you have on the internet that that basically rewards toxic behavior. All of the stuff that came out not too long ago on Taylor Frankie Paul, on The Bachelorette, where she got canceled. But hello, the NFL. Does anybody watch the NFL every single Sunday? How many of them have gotten into abuse cases and they still play? If you're gonna set the standard, it's gotta be the standard all across the board. Otherwise, you're just rewarding the bad behavior for some and taking it away on others. The truth is that we've got to set boundaries. You've got to set boundaries for screen time, for yourself, not just for your kids, for what you're going to allow, what you're not. And we have to start choosing who we want to live like. We have to start choosing who we want to be. As an adult, you get that choice. You don't have to do things just because your parents did them. You don't have to do it the way that your parents did it. You don't have to do it like the society says it. And this is the thing is that we a lot of times, even religion, why do you follow the religion that you follow? If you don't have a religion, why not? Are these choices that you've truly made for yourself, or are you just going with the crowd? It doesn't seem like those things would affect your marriage, but it absolutely does. If you don't have boundaries for yourself, if you don't have preferences and standards and morals and values for yourself and for what goes on inside the four walls of your home, it's still sucking the energy dry from you. It's not giving you life, it's taking it away. The fourth myth, driving couples apart, is that good communication means we should never have conflict, or we just need to practice active listening and everything's gonna be fine. Kind of, not really. The Gottman Institute's decades of data actually prove that active listening during conflict doesn't work for most couples. It can even make things worse because we're too flooded to listen well. But here's what happens your partner gets too flooded, they don't have the words to express that. You also have emotional insobriety. So now you're too self-centered at that point to stop and ask them or to notice their body language. And so you just keep talking, they can't respond, and now we're in the loop of doom. The truth is that great communication is all about repair. It does not matter how many times you argue in a week, as long as you repair them, your marriage will thrive. Turning towards each other at least 86% of the time, handling the almost 70% of problems that are perpetual, the ones that are rooted in personality differences that are never going to fully go away unless you get emotional sobriety training. Julie Manano from The Secure Relationship adds that secure attachment grows when we validate feelings first instead of jumping to solutions or defensiveness. Letting go of the perfect communication myth frees us to have real, messy, repair-filled conversations that actually bring us closer. Myth number five that's feeding the divorce rate is my partner should complete me and make me happy. And if they don't, something's wrong with my marriage and I should get a divorce. Happiness is an inside job. And these sound like such elementary concepts. I was on a different podcast earlier this week, Millionaire by Morning, and the host there commented on some of the things that I was saying, and he was like, Man, this seems like common sense. Like it seems like these concepts that you're teaching are so simple. Absolutely. Relationships are simple. We make them complex because we project things like our happiness onto our partner. We make it complex because we have expectations. We have really high expectations that our partner can't fulfill. Brene Brown and attachment experts are very blunt about this. No human being can be your everything. And expecting your spouse to fill every single emotional gap sets both of you up for resentment and disconnection. I see this all the time. This is more so wives than husbands. But wives will come to me and they will say, he doesn't listen. He doesn't respond the way that I want him to. Yeah, sis. Men are logical. Women are emotional. You're expecting him to respond the same way that your best friend would. Oh my god, girl, you do not deserve that. Ugh, you should just dump him. My gosh, I can't believe that. Ugh, you were so right in that men are men are rarely going to respond that way. Men are natural fixers. When you come to them with a problem, even if you don't say, hey, help me with this problem, if you don't set the expectations at the beginning of that conversation of, hey, babe, I just need to get this off my chest. I just need you to listen for 10 minutes. They're naturally going to go into, oh, she's talking about a problem she has. How can I fix this for her? And then you get mad at them for trying to fix it when you didn't set up the expectation clearly, and he's just being who he normally is. You're wanting him to be your best friend. And of course, I do absolutely believe that your spouse should be your best friend, but you can't project the expectation onto him that you want him to be your woman best friend because he's not going to respond the same way that she would. Men. Typically come to me and they say she doesn't support me because you're looking at support as being taken care of like your mom did. You don't want a wife. You want a secretary, you want a maid, and you want a mother. But when she feels like those three, she doesn't want to sleep with you. So that's how that usually plays out. Healthy marriages are two secure people choosing each other every single day while taking responsibility for their own emotional insobriety, which means being able to stay regulated instead of reactive. When we stop demanding that our partner be our savior and start showing up as whole individuals who practice vulnerability, especially humility, self-awareness, and self-application, we create the safety that actually shows deep love and connection to growth. The sixth myth that's quietly killing marriages in 2026 is divorce is better for the kids than staying in an unhappy marriage. I don't really understand this. This is this is wild to me. Why do we think there's only two choices here? Why do we think it's stay in an unhappy marriage or get divorced? You have a third option here, friends. It's called creating a happy marriage. It's called creating a new marriage. The very first thing before clients even sign on with me, when they are doing consultation calls, the one thing that I drive home and beat a dead horse with is if you get to the point where you're like, this isn't working. This is not working. I hate my life. I am miserable in this marriage. Obviously, your experiences, your exposure, and your education to what a healthy, happy marriage is wrong or incomplete. Therefore, what you have been doing in your marriage hasn't worked. Again, kind of a duh concept. However, the third choice there is, oh, we let everything that hasn't been working die, literally die, and we start rebuilding from the ground up. We build a happy marriage that works for both of us. The long-term research from the Gottman Institute on secure attachment, Julie Minano's work on attachment, several other therapists on attachment. Gosh, I could name 50, Jessica Baum, Dr. Amir Levine, all of these therapists and scientists and researchers who have made attachment work their life's work, show that the opposite, when parents are willing to do the work on their marriage, kids thrive when they see their parents modeling repair, modeling emotional sobriety, modeling secure attachment, even through the hard seasons. They learn far more by watching you create a completely new marriage, learning perseverance, learning how love really works, learning to look at things and start being an individual thinker and problem solving together. They learn more life skills and concepts that they are going to need for the rest of their lives, as well as a secure attachment, as well as what healthy relationships look like, so that then they can have a healthy relationship with their own spouse or partners growing up, far more than they do with the instability and modeling of disconnection that follows divorce, inevitably. The truth is that many unhappy marriages, quote unquote, can become thriving ones when couples drop the idea, the myth, that it's either get a divorce because we're unhappy or stay in an unhappy marriage. Instead, choose a daily practice that rebuilds friendship, safety, respect. You stay and you do the work. And by the way, that's not martyrdom. It's one of the most loving, most formative, and most educational things that you can do for not only your children, but yourselves. I've seen it hundreds of times. I have five couples, five graduating this month, which by the way, will leave me with five spots that I need to fill. So if you are this person, if you are in this place where you're like, maybe you haven't even considered divorce, but maybe you're in this spot where you're like, I know that my marriage is not working. I know that the patterns that we're going through here are not healthy, are not what I want my my kids to repeat when they're older, are not what I would like to live with for the next five years. If that's you, please DM me on Instagram at married.andconnected. Please email me coaching at recognizingpotential.com. Please go to my website, book a consultation call. You have a third option. And it's it's absolutely one of the most powerful things that you can do. Reconciliation and redemption are two of my absolute favorite words. And the reason for that is because I've lived it. My first marriage ended in divorce, and I have watched how that has absolutely wrecked Mason's life for the last 16 years. As a teacher, again, I could tell which students came from broken homes versus students that came from parents who had loving relationships. It was like night and day, not only in the data, but also in their personalities, in the way that they showed up, in their emotional regulation, the ability to emotionally regulate or not, the way that they started their day, all of it. It was wildly blatant for myself. I never thought redemption and reconciliation was a possibility for us. And it's probably the best thing either one of us have ever done. We have learned so much about ourselves, so much about each other. I wouldn't, I would not take away that reconciliation for anything in the world. It is absolutely possible for you to create a better marriage if both of you want that. With the hundreds of couples that I have sat with over the last eight years, most of them, if not all, believed at least three of these myths. And I have watched 93% of them turn their marriages around when they finally let the myths go, when they finally let what wasn't working die and started practicing truth instead. When you choose repair over reactivity, insobriety, when you choose vulnerability over armor, friendship over score keeping, when you let go of your resentment, God meets you in that obedience and the connection comes back stronger every single time. So here is my word for you. 2026, we still have several months left in the year. 2026 can absolutely be the year that we stop letting these myths steal another marriage. The research is clear. The tools are simple, and the payoff is that the relationship feels like home instead of a battlefield or a roommate agreement every day. It's not a complete life overhaul. It doesn't have to be, it can be. If this episode stirred something deep and you're thinking, yeah, that's us, we need personalized help to make these shifts stick, I would be honored to walk with you. Go to www.recognizingpotential.com, that link is in the show notes and book your 30-minute consultation. No pressure, just an honest conversation to see if this works for you. Also, if you would like tools and tips and workshops and all the things, my school community is the next right step. In the school community, there are courses for men who are stepping into healthy, strong masculinity as leaders at home, and women who are learning to walk in their soft feminine strength as Proverbs 31 wives. Those courses are something that you can purchase. There are other workshops. I think there's six now. There will be seven at the end of this month, given that I'm going to be doing the Bring Back Your Desire workshop on the 12th. Go ahead and sign up for that. Don't forget, check out that link as well that's in the show notes. And here's the most important thing: you need to know that what you are doing is the most important work that there is. It is, it is the most important earthly relationship that you will have. And by working on that, you are not only creating a ripple effect for those inside your home, you are creating a ripple effect that extends outward to your extended family, to your community, to your friends. You will inspire people that you didn't even know you inspired just because they are watching how you handle the hard stuff with your spouse. And you never know, I know because I've lived this, you never know who is going to come up to you in three years and say, We almost quit, but we wanted a marriage like yours. It's worth doing the work for, I promise. Until next week, stay married and connected. We've all seen it. The messy social media messages, the public tea spilling, and the absolute embarrassment of finding out that your life is a lie through a Facebook post or an Instagram message that your spouse thought was hidden. What if it didn't have to be like that though? What if you could find out before their affair got too deep? Statistics show that over 20% of marriages deal with infidelity. And most affairs last for years because they thrive in the dark. It's time to turn the lights on. Verified.com is the world's first searchable relationship registry. It's not just an app, it's a digital boundary for your marriage. When you register your spouse on Verified, you are claiming your relationship on a global scale, whether you're talking, you're dating, or you're married. If another man or woman is being told your spouse is single or divorced, and they search for your spouse on the registry, they find you instead. Now here's the game changer. No gaslighting from your spouse, no he said she said, no, oh my god, you went through my phone. How could you betray my trust like that? And zero social media drama. Just the truth, person to person, before things go too far. Don't wait for that gut feeling to become a nightmare. Because even if you think your spouse would never, there's an even better chance that you just never know. Register your spouse today using the link in the show notes and lock in your legacy to protect your peace. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional counseling or therapy. Every couple story is unique, so take what's helpful and leave the rest. By listening to this podcast, you acknowledge that neither I, Cameron Thompson, Alaricki, married and connected, or recognizing potential coaching are responsible for any outcomes related to what you apply from this show. Especially if you are not a client of mine.