Bad marriage advice

0:00This is the Wellness Puzzle Podcast with Andrew Jobling, author, speaker, educator, entrepreneur and AFL player. Join Andrew as he continues his lifelong journey as a student of human behavior. This podcast will help you live your passion, explore your potential, step into your power and embrace your possibilities. Andrew Jobling, welcome to the Wellness Puzzle Podcast for another wonderful episode with Monica Tanner. Monica is a relationship and couples coach, author and speaker and she's written a book called Bad Marriage Advice. Now, why would you write a book called Bad Marriage Advice? Because there's a lot of it out there. You don't really need to read a book to get bad marriage advice. She's really highlighting some things that are given as advice to young couples that often cause all kinds of problems. So this is a wonderful conversation about how to build a strong, loving, happy, joyful,

1:01intimate relationship, which we all want for sure and what are some of the mistakes lots of people make and what's a better way to do it. I think you're going to get a lot out of it. So please sit back, relax and enjoy this wonderful conversation with Monica Tanner. Monica, how are you today? Hello, I'm doing so good. That's good. Wonderful to have you on this podcast. What's been going on today? I know it's the far end of your days, not your 6 pm at 10. I am. Interesting isn't I love this anymore on different days, different parts of the world, different seasons. Here we are. So interesting, but hopefully we're talking about the same topic. So hopefully we're on the same page. That's the main thing isn't it? What have you been doing today? Yes. Tell us a bit about your day. Yeah, I've had a great day. I've worked with several clients. So I work with couples. I help high achieving couples love their marriage. So I work with a lot of high achieving couples who are not always seeing eye to eye in their marriage. So they're highly successful in their work or in their careers, but they struggle sometimes

2:03in their marriage. So I work with a lot of couples and I've also been creating content. So that's been my day. That's an awesome day. I would imagine high achieving couples would definitely clash. Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of times the same skills that make people really, really successful in business and capable of earning a lot of money will usually make a mess of their interpersonal relationships. And so yes, it's often a matter of how do we translate the skills that make us successful in the world into our home? Yeah, it's absolutely true. This perception in business that it's dog a dog and bush bush drives drive that kind of thing. Which is interesting because as you're talking, I'm actually thinking if you applied the same principles to having a happy marriage, you'd probably have a successful career as well and that's about building strong trusting relationships. Yes, it's true. And it looks a little bit different at home versus at work.

3:06Of course does this more emotion attached in the home, isn't it? Yeah, but here's one that a lot of successful people don't understand often until it's too late. The skills that you use to solve problems that make you really successful and oftentimes able to make a lot of money are actually really problematic at home because your family, your loved ones are not problems to be solved. There's not a lot we can do. It's more about just being present with what is. And so yes, some of those skills translate really well, like understanding what the problem is. However, out in the workplace, you get rewarded for solving the problem. And at home, you often get punished for solving the problem. Typically at home, there's not a lot of problems to solve. It's about being present. It's about being witness. It's about being patient. It's about understanding and encouraging your family to kind of solve their own problems

4:11or figure out their own things. And so yeah, that gets a lot of really successful people into trouble. No, I can imagine for someone who is a very driven person and there it is about being proactive and if there's a problem fix it and if there's something we need to get, go after it and here's my opinion. And this is what I think and this is what we should do. But then at home, you've got to bite your tongue really, don't you? You've got to watch it evolve around you when you know the answer. You know what should be done. Yeah. But you've got to resist the urge of giving someone else your opinion or your solution. That can be hard. I certainly know that from my own experience as well. Now you've got a book, Monica, tell us the title of your book. It's called Bad Marriage Advice. Myths that will make you miserable and what to do instead. Bad Marriage Advice. I said to you before we start recording, this is right up my alley. I've got lots of bad marriage advice. Married three times the voice three times you collect some good advice about how to have a bad marriage. Right. I would love to hear what you think was the most problematic.

5:12Oh, okay. Now you put me in one of the spotlight. What was the worst advice you got? I'm not sure if I acted on advice that I got or didn't get. I think I just didn't think if I'm being perfectly honest, I didn't think that I needed to really do anything different. I'm a driven person too. And thinking that well, if I'm successful, I make the marriage successful and I can provide into all this kind of stuff, but forget about the communication bit. Do we all go, I don't want to talk, I don't want to share my feelings. You know that I'm scared or insecure or any of that kind of stuff. So I'll just work, work, work, work, work and it does not work. So you try to work yourself out of being vulnerable? There you go. That's some good bad advice. And the other bad advice that I'll give people is fearing that you'll be judged if you are vulnerable, fearing that when you tell your partner how you really feel about a certain thing, about what they've done or about how you feel about yourself, that you'll be judged, that maybe that'll be the end of the relationship. My fear was, wow, she really knew how I felt and what I'm really like.

6:14She'd leave. She'd be out the door. So better not share that instead. I'll put on this mask of confidence and bravado and all that kind of stuff. I did learn once reading a great book that they said, when you wear a mask, it's the mask that gets a love not you, which should be up. Very wise. Very wise. So I have learned a lot of these stuff. So I think the advice I would now give to people married would be very different to the advice I tried to apply in my marriages. Anyway, enough about my sad stories. We get to hear about your sad story to read it. That's why I do a podcast. So I don't have to share my sad story. I can listen to someone else's. That's always the benefit of a podcast. When was the book published? Monica? Last October. So October of 2025. And how's it going? It's going great. I actually wrote the book for my oldest son who got married last May. Congratulations. So he told me that he wanted to get married and he is really young and so was his beautiful fiance. And so I thought as somebody who has been married for 23, they got married on our 23rd

7:15wedding anniversary. So as somebody who has a couple of decades of marriage under my belt and the experience of working with lots and lots and lots of married couples, I felt like there was a few things I really, really wanted him to know. And so I sat down and I was kind of writing him this love note of here's what I would want you to know about marriage. And it turned into just me thinking about all of the things that people were going to actually tell him the advice he was going to get and how I would change it or the advice that I thought would keep him stuck. And so that's kind of how that book just evolved. It just became my advice to my son. And I figured if it's good advice for him, it's probably good advice for more people. Anyone. Well, here's the question Mark had did he read it? He did. You know, he and his cute little wife, they drive a lot. They go on a lot of road trips. They're young and they're in college. And so what they do is when they travel, they read it to each other. And so it's been really fun for them to, you know, kind of reach out and be like, oh,

8:16this is really good and kind of give me feedback. And so far so good. They're very happy. They're still in the honeymoon phase. That's awesome. Good on you. Well, I know we're going to dive into your book because I want to hear about all the bad advice. People will listen to this bad advice and go, what's wrong with that? And we're going to talk about why it's bad advice and how you can maybe flip that and make it good advice or certainly good ideas for your relationships. And what imagine these principles applied not just to romantic relationships, but friendships and other kind of relationships as well. But Monica, before we go to our first break, what's your mission? If I was to ask you, what is the thing that gets you bouncing out a bit and this passion you have? What's the message you want people to know right now? My absolute purpose is to lower the divorce rate and increase marital satisfaction, meaning we don't just want to have good marriages. We want to have joyful, fulfilled, passionate, intimate, incredible marriages because if it's not fun, what are we doing? Right?

9:17We definitely want couples to understand that happily ever after is possible, it won't happen by accident. Just like anything else that's worth doing in this life, it requires some intentional effort. Awesome. Okay, if you listen to this, that's what you're up for. We're going to learn how to have a joyful, happy, loving communication filled, intimate, beautiful relationship marriage, whatever you want to call it. We're going to break Monica. Come back. First, I want to get into your story. So I want to be here about your experiences because I'm sure that hashaped who you are today, what you do today and certainly what you've written in your book so we'll have a break and be back. How do you rate the most important things in your life? For many of us, long life and joy are high on the list. Important elements we can't buy, but the secret to attaining them is elusive and out of reach for many. Andrew Jobling has tackled these important questions in his book, The Wellness Puzzle, living a life of joyful longevity.

10:18Andrew solves the problem by teaching the seven pieces to optimal well-being. This is a must read. Find out more about The Wellness Puzzle and Andrew's other books at androjobling.com.au Monica, when did you start this journey of working with relationships and couples? How long into your professional life? It's been a long, long journey. I would say it probably started when I was 12 years old. My parents decided they were getting into worse and I thought, wait a second, that is not the happy ending that you see in all the fairy tales and movies. And so at a very young age, I recognized the importance of marriage and intentionally working on your marriage and I started observing all the couples around me and learning about what makes marriages lasting, what makes them happy, what makes them really exceptional. And I went to school to study that and then I married my prince charming right after

11:19I graduated from college and after we had four children, I went back to school to learn more about marriage and family counseling and eventually started this practice of working with couples. So it has been a long time you've been on this mission since 12. So let me go back to the 12 year old Monica. What do you think your parents divorced? What do you feel like the reason for their divorce was? Yeah, I am sure there's a whole lot. I don't understand at that age. However, I do feel like my parents, they knew each other for a very long time. They met when they were 16 years old. They dated all through college. I think they were genuinely good friends and I think that they just didn't know how to really work on the things in their marriage that they struggled with. I think they weren't really intentional and they just kind of let themselves drift apart. Yeah. And how did that affect you as a 12 year old? Yeah, I mean it rocked my world.

12:20I never remember my parents fighting about anything. I just remember a few days going to the park and then being kind of sad and then sitting us down and telling us that they were going to get a divorce. So, you know, my mom moved away, my dad remarried and, you know, I had to change schools and I had all of a sudden got two stepsisters and so my life changed drastically. I would say that I'm grateful for every moment because it made me who I am today. Certainly not how I would have written the story. No, for sure. And at any point, just curious, did you feel any responsibility for their divorce? Did you, as a young person without really any understanding of what was going on? Well, maybe it's my fault, what did I do wrong? Yeah, you know, I don't remember having feelings like that, but I'm sure as a child, you know, like you said, is a very common thought. I don't have a big recollection of feeling like it was my fault. I just felt sad. Yeah, absolutely. And you met your, you referred to him as your prince charming in college?

13:23I had just graduated. It was the summer I graduated from college. So yes, I was pretty young. Let's see, 21. Okay, so question, what advice, if any, did your parents give you as you are going into this relationship and a life with another human? Did they give you any advice? You know, I'll lean more heavily on my dad's advice because he was very against the whole thing. We needed to be older, more established. My husband was still in college when we met and, you know, my dad was very concerned like, how could we make such a big decision so young without having money in the bank and a plan and all of those things? I think my dad was very concerned about those things. And what's interesting is, you know, my husband and I knew each other for 11 months from the day we met to the day we got married. So it wasn't even a year. And we've been married for 24 years, very happy done the work. And my parents met when they were 15, 16 years old, waited about eight years to get married

14:27and their story ending was very different. So I don't know that it matters very much how long you know each other. It's definitely not a length of time thing. So your dad was concerned you're getting married to a young who were prepared financial and have things in place. So what did he actually suggest for you? And when you decided and told him that you were actually going to get married, did he have any advice or did he just sort of accept that? Well, that's kind of the running family joke. He didn't give any advice because he did not give his permission for us to get married. My husband asked my dad if he could marry me two times before we finally just told him that we were getting married. My dad said no. Wow. And has he come to terms with that now? 24 years of marriage? Oh, yeah. Oh, good. Yeah. I get on well now. So you're getting married definitely definitely has grown on him. Well, that's a good thing. You would hope so. So tell us a bit about your journey and your married young. There must have been some challenges. Tell us about some of the challenges you had to negotiate and navigate as you built this really strong, beautiful marriage.

15:28Yeah. Just like everybody else, I think we had to overcome a lot of uncertainty. We had to overcome a lot of naivety just being young and not knowing what we were really getting ourselves into. And we didn't have a lot of money to start off with. We kind of just love in a dream and we made it work. So definitely be done. Okay. You're making it sound very easy. Will there any times in your marriage where you are okay? Okay. Well, just do it and get on with it and be happy. And I wish it was that easy. Will there any periods in your marriage where you doubted or there was some real conflict or that you had to really work hard together to resolve something? Because I think it would be just good to hear. Because I know this people listening to this inner relationship and they're struggling and they'd love to know what do I do to get through this? How do I move past this? How do we come back together? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love your question because I'm making falling in love and getting married sound easy because I think that is easy.

16:30Staying married and creating a very healthy thriving marriage. Definitely definitely not easy. There have been multiple, multiple, multiple times where I thought maybe this isn't going to work. I think we should have done this. Maybe I don't deserve this type of happiness. We went straight from marriage to he was in school and I was working and then we got pregnant really quickly. We had four children pretty quickly started a business really soon after that. Thought a house had a mortgage from the outside looking in. It looked great. You know what could be wrong, but there were lots of challenges. One of which is that my husband and I came from very different backgrounds. We were raised in different parts of the country. We were raised with different religions. We were raised in different family constellations. And so we have typically very different opinions on most things. And so that is the type of thing that would break a lot of marriages. We had to learn how to really understand each other's positions and instead of resent

17:33the differences, we learned to respect. And love and honor each other's differences. And so now I would say after many, many, many years of lots of hard work, there are differences create the passion in our marriage and navigating those differences has really created a lot of intimacy in our marriage. I love that. But it's a skill set. Yeah, I understand. Probably not something that just happens. I mean, sprinkle some magic food, food dust in. All of a sudden everyone's happy and loving and laughter. Okay. Initially, those differences caused some conflict as they would and resentment. I can imagine when you guys decided we need to deal with this, what practically did you do to start to accept each other's differences and use them as you say, build this beautifully intimate marriage? Yeah. Well, I can't speak a lot for him, but for me, it required a lot of personal healing. I had to really face a lot of my own childhood wounding, a lot of my own defense mechanism

18:35and adaptations. I had to really do a lot of study and reflection and self confrontation and really a lot of healing in order to be able to access the part of me that could really not only love myself, love another human and these little humans that we signed up to care for our children. So, you know, for me, it wasn't linear. It was a lot of learning, a lot of growth. I went home after I had three babies to live with my mom for a little while. You know, she's a PhD therapist and so we did some work together on some of the, you know, kind of difficult things that I had to grow up with and I am grateful for that. And many of the people who supported me as I was kind of growing up and healing my own wounding so that hopefully I don't pass that down to my own children. I love that. And so, what you're saying is to work on your marriage, the even more important relationship was with yourself without dealing without self love without that real feeling that I

19:40am worthy and I am good enough. No relationship is ever going to be satisfying because if you bring that lack into a relationship and again, me going back into my experiences, I was taking lack into marriage. Thinking the marriage would be the thing that would fix me. What's that movie with Tom Cruise? You complete me, Renee Zilliger. That's in my book. You complete me. You complete me. I think if you're hoping someone to complete you, you're in trouble because no one can complete you. You're already complete and you've just got to understand that. I think you did that work and I think, well, that's powerful stuff, Monica, that the key here is before you can have any kind of joyful intimate relationship with any other human. It's got to be first with yourself. That's awesome. So thank you for sharing that. We're going to do Monica's have another quick break. Come back and we're going to dive into bad advice for marriages and give people some idea of what's really bad advice so they can make sure they don't take it and they take the advice that is going to help them build the relationship of their dreams. So we'll be back. Hi, I'm Kate from Pentecostia Care.

20:41We're a nonprofit charity that seek to help families struggling, the homeless and the marginalized in all communities. We're doing it by running community dinners but also providing food and clothes to people who need it. So if anybody feels that they could contribute in any way with your own time, with some finances, with food, with clothing, with any of your actual toiletries, we would welcome them and they would go to use and treasured very much so. So come to our Facebook page Pentecostia Care. Monica, awesome. Thank you so much for what you're sharing. This is wonderful. I love it. I love it. Thank you. I'm very happy to see you when we first met. I've done quite a few podcasts about marriage and relationships and obviously there's always some differences. The one common theme is always what we spoke about right at the end of that last section which is self love, the relationship with yourself. If you don't spend the time doing the work to heal, to build, to grow in self love, no

21:42other strategy or technique or advice to have a happy marriage will work. Yes, I think you have to do your own work. You have to have the self awareness and the emotional maturity to be responsible for your own growth and healing. However, I will add this one caveat is that you can't do it on your own. And so I think common misconception is that people think, oh, I can just completely heal and be like this great person to prepare for marriage, which is partially true. Yes. And there is healing that can only happen in a relationship. So we were wounded in relationship and we need relationships to heal. Yeah. You're saying you wounded in previous relationships? Is that what you're talking about? Right. So all of our childhood wounding happened in our original relationships with our primary caregivers. And so the wounding, we can heal a lot of that on our own, but not all of it because

22:43there are relational wounds that have to be healed in a relationship. So you're saying you've got to go back and have those conversations like you do with your mum. That's one way to do it. Yes. Some people don't have that luxury that they can go back and talk to their original caregivers. However, the wounding that was original to that relationship can only be healed in another relationship. Okay. Very interesting. So Monica, let's talk about some bad advice. Where do you want to start? What would be the first bit of bad advice most people would give to a newly married couple and was it bad and what's a better piece of advice? Well, this one I hear all the time and that is, yes, I hear a lot. You have to learn to compromise. Yeah. That sounds like a good advice. You're saying it's bad advice. Sounds like a good advice, doesn't it? But when you think of compromise, Andrew, what do you think of? What means you've got to give up something that maybe you like to do or a way you behave

23:44so that you can keep the relationship smooth or happy each of you need to change in a way to create a more mutually beneficial situation, something like that. That's what I'd say. Yeah. So when I think of compromise, I think you give a little, I give a little, we meet in the middle. It doesn't require a lot of communication just in as much as you give up some things and I give up some things and both of us are mutually disappointed. There's a lot of scorekeeping involved, meaning did I give up more than you gave up like if I the one who gave in last time. So to me, compromise is a very lazy way to get along with another person. The better way or what I would teach couples to do is to collaborate. Now collaboration requires both curiosity and vulnerability, which you've already told me in the course of this podcast are difficult for you. Well, not at all. Good. I'm happy to hear that. So yeah, it requires us to get really curious about our own position on something.

24:47What is it that we really value and really want and why do we feel strongly about this certain thing? It requires that we get curious about our partner. What do they really value? What do they really want and why is that important to them? What are their reservations about our values and what are our reservations about theirs? And then once you've talked about all of those things, then you can work together and get creative about solutions that are often better than either one of you could have ever come up with on your own. So it's not a matter of willy-milly giving up things. It's a matter of what do I hold really dear and how can we respect each other in order to come up with solutions where we both get exactly what we want? And most probably get more than what you want because on thinking compromise is giving up whereas collaboration is actually building on. So you get what you want but you also go, wow, when you find out what's important to them, you realize, well, that's actually important to me too.

25:48And if we do this, then not only are we building on what we love and what's important to us, but again, as you said, that's going to bring us closer together. Love it. Lully, it is more work though. It requires more effort and more skill. Yeah, but it's fun when you're collaborating. That's fun. I think marriage is the funnest work you'll ever do, but it's not easy, but it's also the most rewarding fun or that you'll have. Nothing that's important is easy and I think we've got to get rid of the word easy. The only thing that's easy is sitting on a couch watching TV, but that's not going to get you what you want in life. So if you want change, if you want great things, go ahead and let's just money be healthy, blah, blah, blah, blah, just cancel easy out of your vocabulary. Worth it for sure. Exilering you bet. Challenging for sure. The best thing you'll ever do, 100%. So I think if we get rid of easy, then we don't need to go back to the word easy ever again. Monika, because we know that building a great, even for a lazy TV is going to take attention,

26:49deliberate focus for sure. So what's another piece of bad advice? Is the compromised one bad advice? What else? Hmm. Another really common one is don't sweat the small stuff and I argue where do you think the big stuff comes from? And I get it. People are like, oh, you don't want to be naggy and you don't want to like fight about every little thing and I would disagree. I would say you should deal skillfully with things when they're small so you don't have to deal with them when they get bigger. I love that. So basically saying don't sweat the small stuff is just sweeping it under the rug. Forget about it. It's not a big deal. It is a big deal for someone. It may not be a big deal for one part, but it is for another part. Well, it'll eventually decades of something that's no big deal is going to become a really big deal. So I think you should always be fighting for what you want in the relationship because otherwise you're going to have a lot of resentment, which makes any little thing a big thing. That's awesome. I love it. This is so good. I think Monika, let's go with one more piece of it.

27:49It's a bad voice because I don't want to give it all away because we want people to buy your book. So what would be one more piece of bad voice that you would recommend? Well people say this all the time where I'm from. So you tell me if you have a version of it where you're from, but this happy wife, happy life. Same here. Yeah, all the time. Yeah, horrible advice. You want to create a relationship where only one person gets what they want. That sounds miserable to me. Whenever that's used here, I know it's used tongue in cheek. I don't know if people are really serious. Maybe they are. I don't know. You joke about happy wife, happy life. Ha, ha, ha. It is always sort of said in a joking context. I don't think I've ever heard it spaking seriously. Well, listen, son, happy wife, happy life or else you're going to be miserable. I grew with you. If it's a happy wife, happy life for her, I'm going to be miserable. But then she's going to be miserable too. So it's a dumb bed of advice. It really is. Agreed. And I think there are versions. Lots of them handed down from father to son or father and law to son that like maybe tongue

28:50in cheek. But I think there's this like general idea in our culture that like if you make your wife happy, you're going to be happy, which I think is horrible advice. You can go one out to happy spouse, happy house. Now you're both trying to make each other happy, which is a good idea until you realize that happiness is an inside job. And you stop trying to make your partner happy at all because you're just going to be disappointed. The reality is is that I'm the only one that can make myself happy. And my husband is the only one that can make him happy. Now we can support each other and we can be kind to each other and we can serve each other and we can do all of those good things. But we're not doing those things because we need the other person to be happy. We're doing those things because doing loving things for each other makes us happy. And therein lies the real advice, which is when I'm doing what makes me happy, that makes my partner happy.

29:51Love it. Such simple, profound words. I'm not going to say advice because I don't think we can give other people advice. I think they have to hear it, process it and then own it and then do something with it. So we're just offering ideas right now. No advice. If you want to have a beautiful, happy, loving, intimate relationship, then some things may need to change. And I know your book would help lots of people. Monica, so how do people buy it if they want to buy it or how do they reach out to you if they want to speak to you? Yeah, thank you so much for asking. You can just go to my website, which is monicatanner.com. And there you can find links to all of my free content, which is my podcast, my social media's. I hang out on Instagram all the time, Monty talks marriage. You can get my book on Amazon or you can go to badmarriageadvice.com. Love it. Monica, thank you so much. It's been an awesome conversation and I've learned a lot. I am now in a very loving, beautiful relationship and I know this is the one because I'm now

30:53taking all the bad advice from my previous ones and I've learned and I've learned even more today speaking with you. So thank you so much because I know I'll definitely apply what I've heard today. I know lots of people will also say, thank you so much. That was awesome. I love that conversation. I love chatting about relationships and all my interesting experiences that have helped me become who I am today and certainly learn a lot of the bad marriage advice and offer some better ideas to people. So it was really powerful conversation and I hope you got a lot out of it and I hope you can apply one or more of those things into your own relationship to help it be the best it can be. If you would like to reach out to Monica by her book or find out all the other cool stuff she's doing go to her website, monikertano.com and you can find her there. Thank you for joining me in this one of all podcasts. Please share it with every couple that you know and then please join me for my next one. My name is Andrew Jobling. This is the Wellness Puzzle Podcast.