The Complication Trap
Why Simple Beats Complex in Marriage Recovery
I was listening to a pickleball podcast recently, and the performance coach said something that stopped me in my tracks.
He was talking about how players sabotage themselves by overcomplicating their technique. A particular shot might require 3 or 4 essential elements to execute well. But players don’t stop there. They think they’re adding “secret sauce” — some special ingredient that will make them unbeatable. Instead, they’re ruining the recipe with mismatched spices. Now that shot has 6 or 8 elements, which means more places for inconsistency, more opportunities to miss, and ultimately less effectiveness.
Then he talked about strategy. He described a pro player who consistently dominates opponents through one simple approach: he takes the game to the kitchen line and out-dinks everyone. That’s it. No complex tactical variations. No secret plays. Just relentless, effective dinking until the opportunity comes to attack.
Here’s the kicker: every opponent knows this strategy. They walk onto the court fully aware of what’s coming. And yet, none of them can beat him.
Why? Because he’s so effective at the fundamentals that complexity can’t compete with his consistency.
They Complicated Themselves Right Out of the Answer
This reminded me of something from my teenage years when I performed magic. I’d do a simple sleight-of-hand move — something I’d practiced until it was smooth and natural — and watch people’s faces as they tried to figure it out.
What amazed me wasn’t that they couldn’t figure out the trick. It was HOW they couldn’t figure it out.
I once did a straightforward trick with a wand that involved one clean sleight-of-hand move. Afterward, people would tell me their theories: elaborate mechanical engineering inside the wand, special materials, complex timing mechanisms, multiple secret compartments.
They’d constructed these incredibly sophisticated explanations for something that was actually quite simple. They literally complicated themselves right out of discovering the truth. The answer was right in front of them, but they walked past it looking for something more elaborate.
The Marriage Version: Complicated Diagnosis
Now, let me bring this home to where you’re living right now.
I work with people trying to save their marriages, and I see this exact pattern play out constantly. When I ask them to explain how their marriage got into trouble, I hear incredibly complex origin stories.
They’ll trace timelines back years or even decades. They’ll identify multiple contributing factors: communication styles from childhood, attachment patterns, that argument in 2015, the stress from the job change in 2019, different parenting philosophies, the incident at their in-laws’ house, unresolved conflicts about money, that vacation that went wrong, personality differences they should have addressed earlier...
And look, I’m not saying none of those things matter. But here’s what I observe: underneath all that complexity, there’s usually a simple truth.
They paused their connection. They hit the Pause Button!
They stopped doing the simple things that kept them connected. The daily check-ins. The genuine interest in each other’s lives. The small acts of kindness and consideration. The physical affection. The time together without distraction.
They paused. The connection weakened. And then all those other factors had room to create damage that connected couples could have navigated.
But a simple explanation doesn’t feel adequate, does it? It doesn’t match the drama of the crisis. It doesn’t feel sophisticated enough for the pain you’re experiencing. And frankly, a simple explanation can feel like it diminishes what you’re going through.
So we construct elaborate diagnostic frameworks. We create complex psychological explanations. We build sophisticated theories about what went wrong.
We’re doing exactly what those people watching my magic trick did… walking right past the simple truth while searching for something more complicated.
The Marriage Version: Complicated Solutions
And then — here’s where it gets really problematic — we create recovery plans that match our complicated diagnoses.
I’ve seen lists of 12 things to change simultaneously. Elaborate communication protocols with multiple steps and verification processes. Complicated scheduling systems to track connection time. Sophisticated tracking mechanisms for various relationship metrics.
People think they’re adding secret sauce to their recovery plan. Actually, they’re ruining the recipe again with mismatched spices.
Here’s the reality: you’re trying to execute these complex strategies while emotionally hijacked. Your cognitive capacity is compromised. Your stress response is activated. Your ability to think clearly and make good decisions is significantly reduced.
And you’re trying to remember and implement a recovery plan with 8 or 10 or 12 elements?
You are adding complexity to a technique that just needs 3 or 4 solid elements executed well.
The Simple Framework
Here’s what actually works, distilled down to three clear directions:
Connect with your spouse. Change yourself. Create a new path for your marriage.
That’s it. Not 12 steps. Not a complex system requiring flowcharts and tracking spreadsheets. Three clear directions.
Let me briefly unpack what each means:
Connect means re-establishing and maintaining genuine connection with your spouse. Not grand gestures. Not elaborate date night plans. Simple, consistent connection. Daily check-ins. Genuine interest. Small acts of kindness. Being present. Listening. Showing up.
Change means working on yourself — your reactions, your patterns, your contribution to the relationship dynamics. Becoming who you’ve needed to be! Not trying to change your spouse. Not waiting for them to change first. You. Getting your own house in order. Responding from your values instead of reacting from your emotions. Becoming the person who can be in a healthy relationship.
Create means building a new pattern together — moving from “you/me” to “WE.” From two individuals living parallel lives to a team moving in the same direction. From reactive to intentional. From disconnected to partnered.
Connect. Change. Create.
Simple doesn’t mean simplistic. These three directions contain everything you need to transform your marriage. (If you want the full framework, I cover this thoroughly in my book, How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps — but even the title tells you what you need to know: it’s simple.)
Why Simple Works (And Why We Resist It)
Let me tell you why simple works, and why we fight against it so hard.
First, cognitive load. When you’re in crisis, your mental bandwidth is severely limited. You don’t have the cognitive resources to execute complex strategies. You need something you can remember and implement even when your thinking is compromised. Connect, Change, Create — you can remember that when you’re upset. You can’t remember a 10-point action plan with sub-steps and conditional protocols.
Second, the action gap. There’s always distance between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Simple frameworks close that gap. Complex ones widen it. Every additional element you add is another opportunity for hesitation, confusion, or abandonment of the plan entirely.
Third, consistency beats sophistication. Remember that pickleball pro? He wins because he executes fundamentals relentlessly. Not because he has the most complex strategy. Not because he surprises people with elaborate plays. Because he does the simple thing so well and so consistently that complexity can’t compete.
But here’s why we resist simple solutions:
They don’t feel impressive enough. They don’t match the perceived complexity of our problem. If your marriage is in crisis — if you’re facing separation, if there’s been an affair, if you feel completely disconnected — a simple three-part framework feels inadequate.
It feels like bringing a pocket knife to a gunfight.
Except it’s not. It’s bringing the right tool that you can actually use effectively, instead of a complicated weapon you don’t know how to operate.
We want our solutions to feel as dramatic as our problems. We want recovery to be as complicated as we believe the decline was. We want to feel like we’re doing something significant, something worthy of the crisis.
And “Connect, Change, Create” feels too simple.
Which is exactly why it works when complex plans fail.
The Real Work Isn’t in the Complexity
Here’s what people miss: simple doesn’t mean easy.
That pickleball pro who out-dinks everyone? That requires tremendous skill, discipline, and mental toughness. Doing the same simple thing for an entire match, maintaining perfect form, staying patient, not getting bored or frustrated or tempted to try something flashier… that’s incredibly difficult.
The work isn’t in having a complex strategy. The work is in executing simple fundamentals consistently under pressure.
Connect, Change, Create requires the same discipline. The challenge isn’t understanding the framework — you get it right now, don’t you?
The challenge is doing these simple things repeatedly, consistently, even when:
You’re angry
You’re hurt
Your spouse isn’t responding
You feel like it’s not working
You’re tempted to do something more dramatic
You’re exhausted
You want to complicate it because simple feels insufficient
The real work is showing up day after day to connect with your spouse when they’re not connecting back. To change yourself when you’d rather focus on what they need to change. To create a new path when the old patterns feel more familiar and easier to slip back into.
That’s hard work. It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
The Wake-Up Call
Let me be direct with you.
Your marriage didn’t fail because you lacked a Ph.D. in relationship psychology. It didn’t fail because you didn’t have a sophisticated enough understanding of attachment theory or communication styles or conflict resolution frameworks.
It struggled because you stopped doing simple things. You paused your connection. You stopped showing up consistently. You let daily disconnection accumulate into a crisis.
And it’s not going to recover through complex strategies you can’t execute.
It’s not going to recover because you found the perfect 8/10/12-step recovery plan with elaborate protocols and sophisticated tracking mechanisms.
It recovers when you return to fundamentals with consistency.
Right now, you’re probably making this too complicated. Both in how you understand what went wrong and in how you’re trying to fix it. You are likely adding mismatched spices to a recipe that just needs a few quality ingredients prepared well.
You are constructing elaborate mechanical explanations for what’s actually a clean, simple truth.
You are trying to out-strategize your opponent when you need to out-dink them.
The question isn’t “What complex strategy do I need?”
The question is: “Can I do these simple things consistently, even when it’s hard? Can I Connect with my spouse daily, even when they’re not responding? Can I Change myself, even when I’d rather focus on their faults? Can I Create a new path, even when the old patterns feel safer?”
Because if you can… if you can execute simple fundamentals with the relentless consistency of that pickleball pro, you’ll be amazed at what shifts.
Not because the framework is sophisticated.
Because it’s simple enough to actually do, even when everything in you wants to complicate it.
Want the full framework? I break down the Connect, Change, Create approach in detail in my book How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps, and it forms the backbone of the Save The Marriage System. Not because I’m trying to complicate things, but because sometimes you need help executing the simple things when you’re in crisis.