Why Everything You're Trying Isn't Working
The Constraint in Your Marriage
When I was a kid, I couldn’t read.
My teachers watched me struggle with letters that seemed to swim across the page, and they drew what seemed like the obvious conclusion: I had limited intelligence. They told my parents not to expect much from me academically. The constraint, as they saw it, was my cognitive capacity. There wasn’t much to be done about that.
But my mother saw something different. She didn’t accept “limited intelligence” as the diagnosis. She kept looking until she found the real constraint: dyslexia. Suddenly, everything changed. The problem wasn’t that I was broken or limited. It was that my brain processed written symbols differently, and I needed different strategies to read.
Once the actual constraint was identified, it became addressable. I went on to earn a Ph.D., write seven books (and another in progress), and build a career that involves writing and teaching every single day.
Same kid. Different diagnosis. Entirely different outcome.
I see this same pattern constantly in my work helping people save their marriages.
You’re Working on the Wrong Problem
Someone comes to me desperate to save their marriage. They’ve tried everything: reading books about love languages, scheduling date nights, going to couples therapy, learning communication techniques. They’re exhausted and confused because despite all this effort, nothing is actually moving. The marriage isn’t getting better. In fact, it might be getting worse.
Here’s what I’ve learned: they’re not failing because they’re not trying hard enough. They’re failing because they’re optimizing the wrong part of the system.
In manufacturing and business, there’s a concept called Theory of Constraints. The core insight is simple but profound: every system has one bottleneck, one constraint that limits the throughput of the entire system. You don’t improve the system by making non-constraints more efficient. You improve it by identifying and addressing THE constraint.
A factory can have the most efficient packaging station in the world, but if the bottleneck is in production, optimizing packaging does nothing. The constraint determines what the whole system can produce.
In marriage transformation, here’s the hard truth: you are the constraint in your own system.
Not your spouse. Not your circumstances. Not your history. You. Specifically, something about how you operate is the bottleneck preventing everything else from working.
And until that constraint is identified and addressed, all your other efforts — no matter how sincere, no matter how exhausting — won’t create the breakthrough you’re looking for.
The Invisible Bottleneck
The tricky part? Your constraint is almost always invisible to you.
Just like my teachers couldn’t see that dyslexia was the real issue, you probably can’t see what’s actually bottlenecking your marriage transformation. You might think the constraint is your spouse’s unwillingness to change, or your communication problems, or your financial stress, or your different parenting styles.
But those are rarely the actual constraint. Those are symptoms. The real constraint is something deeper, something in how YOU operate that prevents you from responding effectively to any of those challenges.
I’ve identified five underlying constraints that show up again and again in my work with clients. One of these is almost certainly operating as your bottleneck.
1. Fear (You’re “Fear-Jacked”)
Your intentions are good. You know what you want to do. But when the moment comes, fear hijacks your capacity to act on those intentions.
You want to be vulnerable with your spouse, but fear of rejection shuts you down. You want to stop pursuing, but fear of losing them drives you to keep pushing. You want to apologize, but fear of being wrong paralyzes you.
Fear activates your constraint even when your intentions are the opposite. It doesn’t matter how many communication techniques you’ve learned if fear prevents you from using them in the moment that matters.
2. Knowledge (You Have No Map)
You genuinely don’t know what to do differently. This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about having a blind spot in your understanding or experience base.
Maybe you grew up in a home where conflict was handled through silence, so you literally don’t have a template for healthy disagreement. Maybe no one ever showed you what emotional intimacy actually looks like in practice. Maybe you understand the concept of “responding from values instead of reacting from emotion,” but you have no concrete picture of what that means in Tuesday morning’s argument about the dishes.
You can’t address what you can’t see. Without a map, you keep driving the same roads and wondering why you end up in the same place.
3. Capacity (You Have a Map But No Vehicle)
You know something isn’t working. You might even know what you should do instead. But you lack the actual capacity to do it.
You know you should stay calm during conflict, but you don’t have the emotional regulation skills to manage your nervous system when your spouse criticizes you. You know you should be more vulnerable, but you’ve never developed the capacity to identify and articulate your actual feelings. You know you should listen better, but you lack the skill to quiet your defensive reactions long enough to actually hear what’s being said.
Knowledge without capacity is like having a map to a destination with no car to get there.
4. Endurance (You’re Out of Gas)
You’re exhausted. You’ve been trying for months or years. You know what to do, you have the capacity to do it, but you’re running on empty.
So even though you’ve committed to responding differently, when you’re depleted, you slip back into the constraint. You revert to old patterns because you simply don’t have the energy to maintain the new ones. You’re out of gas, and no amount of having the right map or vehicle matters if you can’t sustain the journey.
5. Identity (That’s Just Who I Am)
This one is particularly insidious because it masquerades as self-awareness.
“I’m just not an emotional person.” “I’m the responsible one… someone has to be.” “In my family, we handle things ourselves.” “I can’t help it. That’s just who I am.”
These identity statements function as get-out-of-jail-free cards. They’re the blame-reversal card for your behavior. They allow you to refuse responsibility while appearing to be honest about yourself.
But here’s the truth: “That’s just who I am” actually means “That’s who I am when I’m operating under this constraint.” It’s not a fixed truth about you. It’s a description of your current bottleneck.
Why This Matters
Here’s what makes constraint thinking so powerful: it explains why smart, committed, sincere people stay stuck.
You’re not stuck because you’re broken. You’re not stuck because you don’t care enough. You’re not stuck because your marriage is uniquely difficult.
You’re stuck because you’re working on non-constraints while your actual bottleneck remains unaddressed.
Someone with a fear constraint can learn every communication technique in the world, but when fear hijacks them in the moment, none of those techniques will be accessible. Someone with an identity constraint (“I’m just not good at this emotional stuff”) can have all the knowledge and capacity in the world, but they’ll refuse to use it because it contradicts who they believe they are.
The constraint determines what the whole system can produce.
And here’s the even more important insight: once you correctly identify the constraint, it becomes addressable. Not easy, necessarily. But addressable. Specific. Workable.
Just like dyslexia. Once my mother identified the real constraint, we didn’t have to fix my entire intelligence or redesign my whole brain. We addressed the specific bottleneck with targeted strategies, and suddenly reading became possible.
Your marriage constraint works the same way. It’s not global (”I’m just bad at relationships”). It’s specific (”Fear hijacks me when I try to be vulnerable,” or “I lack the capacity to stay regulated during conflict,” or “My identity won’t let me ask for help”).
What Happens When the Constraint Breaks Your Plan
I teach my clients to operate from five key commitments - I call them the 5 C’s: Calm, Constant, Consistent, Courageous, and Clear. These are how you carry out your plan to transform your marriage.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: your constraint will break one or more of these commitments. That’s how you know it’s operating.
The fear constraint breaks Calm and Courageous. You get hijacked into emotional reaction and you can’t take values-based action despite the fear.
The knowledge constraint breaks Clear and Consistent. You can’t articulate your path or stay on it because you don’t actually know what the path should be.
The capacity constraint breaks Calm and Courageous. You lack the skills to regulate yourself or act despite discomfort.
The endurance constraint breaks Constant and Consistent. You can’t maintain the regularity or stay the path because you’re running on empty.
The identity constraint breaks all of them, because “this isn’t who I am” becomes the excuse to abandon the entire plan.
When you fall out of your commitments, it’s not because you lack willpower or dedication. It’s because your constraint is operating, and until you address it, your commitments will keep breaking in the same predictable ways.
The Path Forward
This article is about awareness, not prescription. I’m pointing to something you may not have seen before: that you have a constraint, that it’s specific and identifiable, and that it’s preventing everything else you’re trying from working.
The next steps, like actually diagnosing which constraint is operating in your specific situation, distinguishing between your real constraint and what you think is constraining you, and developing targeted strategies to break your particular bottleneck… that’s deeper work.
But start here: stop assuming you’re broken or that your marriage is uniquely impossible. Stop exhausting yourself optimizing non-constraints.
Instead, ask yourself: What’s my bottleneck? Which of these five constraints is limiting my capacity to show up the way I want to in my marriage?
You’re not limited by intelligence or character or fate. You’re bottlenecked by something specific. And specific constraints, once identified, can be addressed.
Just like dyslexia. Just like any other constraint that stops masquerading as an unfixable limitation and reveals itself as an addressable bottleneck.
The question isn’t whether you can save your marriage. The question is: are you willing to identify and address the actual constraint that’s been keeping you stuck?
Need help with your map, and how to follow it? Check out my Save The Marriage System and break free from the constraint. GO HERE.