Why Setbacks Feel Like Failure (And What They’re Really Telling You)
You’ve been doing everything right.
You’ve been showing up differently. You’ve been working on yourself. You’ve been patient, intentional, thoughtful. You’ve been implementing everything you’ve learned about saving your marriage.
And then it happens.
A terrible conversation that seems to erase weeks of progress. A withdrawal from your spouse that feels like rejection. A moment where old patterns resurface and you realize: nothing has actually changed.
The disappointment crashes in like a wave. And right behind it comes the question you’ve been trying not to ask: Is this even working? Can this marriage actually be saved?
Here’s what I need you to understand: Setbacks are not evidence that your marriage cannot improve. Setbacks are inevitable. They’re part of the landscape of any meaningful effort. They’re part of the path.
But they feel like failure. And that feeling, that crushing sense of disappointment and discouragement, often has less to do with what actually happened and more to do with what you expected would happen.
The Hidden Script You’re Running
We are all narrative builders.
When you’re trying to save your marriage, you create stories in your mind about how things will unfold. You imagine scenarios. You script dialogues. You create a whole movie about the arc of reconnection.
“If I show up this way, they’ll respond that way. If I’m consistent for this long, they’ll start to soften. If I can just explain myself clearly, they’ll finally understand.”
You have a timeline in your head. A method. A sequence of events that feels logical, reasonable, even inevitable.
And here’s the problem: your spouse is running their own script. They have their own narrative playing out… one you’re not privy to. They might be writing a story about protecting themselves. Or testing whether your changes are real. Or building toward an exit you don’t see coming.
You’re both trying to make a movie together, but you’re reading from completely different scripts.
So when your spouse doesn’t say their “lines,” when they don’t respond the way you envisioned, when the scene doesn’t play out as you imagined, the disappointment isn’t just about what happened. It’s about the collision between your internal narrative and reality.
And that collision happens again and again, because your expectations were never actually agreed upon.
The Expectations You Don’t Even Realize You’re Carrying
Most expectations aren’t conscious. They live just beneath the surface, shaping how you interpret every interaction, every response, every week that passes.
You expect a timeline. Maybe it’s arbitrary. Say, three months, six months, by your anniversary. You think, “Surely by then, things should be better.” But where did that timeline come from? Who agreed to it? Your spouse didn’t. Life didn’t. Healing doesn’t work on a schedule.
You expect cause and effect. “If I do X, they’ll respond with Y.” You treat your marriage like an equation where the right inputs should produce predictable outputs. But people aren’t formulas. You can show up differently every day for months, and your spouse might still be afraid to trust it. Or not ready. Or processing their own pain in ways that have nothing to do with you.
You expect linear progress. You think: “We should be moving forward. Each week should be better than the last.” But growth doesn’t work that way. Real progress is messy. It’s two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes it’s one step forward, three steps back. Sometimes you’re not even sure which direction is forward anymore.
You expect reciprocity. This is the big one. “I’m doing all this work on myself. I’m showing up differently. Where’s their effort? Why aren’t they meeting me halfway?” And maybe they should. Maybe in a healthy relationship, there would be reciprocity. But wanting it and expecting it are different things. One creates space for possibility. The other breeds resentment when it doesn’t materialize.
These expectations feel reasonable. They feel like basic standards or natural consequences of your effort. But they’re not. They’re assumptions about things you fundamentally cannot control: your spouse’s timeline for healing, their internal process, their readiness to engage, their capacity to change.
When Expectations Collide With Reality
Here’s what happens when an expectation fails:
First comes disappointment. That sinking, deflating feeling. “This didn’t go the way I thought it would.”
But disappointment doesn’t stay isolated. If you don’t catch it and examine it, it quickly moves to hurt. “They don’t care about this. I’m not important to them. My effort doesn’t matter.”
Hurt triggers a sense of threat. “This relationship isn’t safe. I’m vulnerable here and they’re not protecting that. I need to defend myself.”
Threat leads to frustration. “Why is this so hard? Why can’t they just see what I’m doing? Why won’t they respond the way a reasonable person would respond?”
Frustration, when it sits, hardens into anger. “This is unacceptable. They should be doing better. I shouldn’t have to work this hard for basic decency.”
And anger, when it festers and is unresolved, becomes resentment. Resentment is one of the most toxic things you can carry in a relationship because it colors everything. It makes you interpret every action (or inaction) through a lens of “they don’t care” or “they’re not trying.”
This entire cascade, from disappointment to resentment, often starts not with what your spouse actually did or didn’t do, but with the gap between what you expected and what actually happened.
And the most painful part? Your spouse doesn’t even know they “failed” your expectation because they never agreed to it in the first place. They can legitimately say, “I didn’t know that’s what you wanted. I didn’t sign up for that timeline. I never promised that would happen.”
And they’d be right.
The Brittleness of Optimism Without Discipline
There’s a concept from Admiral James Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for over seven years, that’s become known as the Stockdale Paradox.
When asked who didn’t make it out of the prison camps, Stockdale said: “The optimists.”
The optimists were the ones who said, “We’ll be out by Christmas.” And when Christmas came and went, they’d say, “We’ll be out by Easter.” And when Easter came and went, they’d say, “Thanksgiving, for sure.”
And they died of a broken heart.
Stockdale then explained the paradox: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
When you’re trying to save your marriage, optimism without discipline looks like this: “We’ll be better by our anniversary. We’ll turn a corner after therapy. We’ll reconnect once they see how much I’ve changed.”
It’s setting specific milestones for progress, expecting a particular path, a particular timeline, without confronting what’s actually happening in front of you right now.
And when those milestones don’t materialize, when the path doesn’t unfold as expected, it doesn’t just feel disappointing. It feels like proof that nothing will ever change. It crushes hope rather than sustaining it.
Because expectations aren’t hope. They’re brittle. They’re rigid. They require reality to bend to your script.
Hope is something different entirely. But we’ll come back to that.
The Risk You Don’t See
Here’s something that might surprise you: Carrying unspoken expectations is actually riskier than explicitly asking for what you want.
When you hold an expectation:
Your spouse doesn’t know about it,
They haven’t agreed to it,
There’s no shared understanding of what success looks like,
When it fails, you have nowhere to go except into hurt and resentment.
There’s no ownership on their part because they were never invited into the conversation. You are essentially holding them accountable to a contract they never signed.
And when you try to express your disappointment — “I thought you would...” or “I expected us to…”— they can legitimately push back. “When did I agree to that? When did I say that’s what I would do?”
It creates a wedge. One more instance of disconnection. One more layer of resentment.
Meanwhile, asking for what you want (making it explicit, seeking actual agreement) feels risky because they might say no. And rejection is painful.
But here’s the thing: if they say no, you have clarity. You know where you stand. You’re not operating on assumptions. You can make decisions based on reality rather than your imagination of what might be possible.
Silent expectations are actually more dangerous because they give you the illusion of hope while setting you up for inevitable disappointment.
What Disappointment Is Really Telling You
When you feel that familiar sinking feeling after a setback — that disappointment, that sense of “here we go again” — it’s not just about what happened.
Disappointment is a warning light. It’s your internal system alerting you: You had an expectation that didn’t match reality.
It’s the earliest signal in the emotional cascade I described earlier. And it’s the moment where you have the most choice about what happens next.
You can investigate it: “What was I expecting here? Where did that expectation come from? Was it based on something we actually agreed on, or something I assumed?”
Or you can ignore it and let it spiral into hurt, threat, frustration, anger, and eventually resentment.
Most people don’t pause at disappointment. They’re not even aware that’s what they’re feeling. They just know they feel deflated or discouraged, and they interpret that as evidence that their marriage is doomed.
But disappointment isn’t telling you your marriage is doomed. It’s telling you that reality diverged from your script. That’s information. That’s data you can work with.
A setback reveals where your expectations and reality don’t align. It shows you which narratives you’re running that aren’t serving you. It exposes the assumptions you’re making that may not be true.
But only if you’re willing to look at it honestly rather than treating it as confirmation of your worst fears.
The Movies We Make Instead of the Marriages We Have
The hardest part of navigating setbacks isn’t the setback itself. It’s letting go of the story you’ve been telling yourself about how this was supposed to go.
You had a vision. Maybe it was vague, like just a sense that “things would get better.” Or maybe it was detailed, like specific milestones, conversations you’d have, moments of reconnection.
And now reality is showing you something different. Maybe slower. Maybe messier. Maybe not happening at all in the way you imagined.
The question is: Can you release your grip on the script? Can you confront the brutal facts of your current reality while still maintaining faith that you’ll prevail in the end, whatever that looks like?
Because here’s what I’ve learned through my own experience and working with hundreds of people in your situation: You cannot control the outcome. You can only control your participation.
You cannot make your spouse heal on your timeline. You cannot force them to respond the way you think they should respond. You cannot shortcut the process or script the resolution.
What you can do is decide who you want to be through this. How you want to show up, regardless of how they respond. What integrity looks like for you in this moment.
That’s a very different goal than “save the marriage in the way I’ve imagined it being saved.”
And it’s the only goal that won’t crush you when reality refuses to follow your script.
Where Do You Go From Here?
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in these patterns — if you’re seeing the expectations you’ve been carrying, the narratives you’ve been running, the disappointments that keep compounding — you are not alone.
This is what everyone does. We all write scripts. We all expect things to unfold in ways that make sense to us. We all struggle when reality refuses to cooperate.
The work isn’t to never have expectations. That’s probably impossible. The work is to:
Notice them. Catch yourself in the narrative. See the script you’re running.
Question them. Where did this expectation come from? Is it based on something real or something I’m imagining?
Hold them lightly. Can I want something without requiring it to happen in a specific way on a specific timeline?
Seek clarity. What do I actually need to ask for rather than assume?
And most importantly: Can I show up with integrity and create the best possible conditions for reconnection while accepting that I cannot control the outcome?
That’s the shift from expectation to hope. From rigid scripts to flexible pathways. From “it must happen this way” to “I’m committed to who I’m becoming and where I’m going, however long and messy the journey.”
Your next setback is coming. That’s not pessimism. It’s reality. The question is: Will you let it crush you, or will you let it teach you?
Will you interpret it as proof of failure, or as information about where you need to adjust?
Will you hold tighter to your script, or will you hold tighter to your true north (who you want to be, how you want to show up) regardless of how your spouse responds?
The path forward isn’t about avoiding setbacks. It’s about learning to navigate them without losing yourself in the process.
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Dr. Lee H. Baucom is a marriage coach with over 30 years of experience helping couples save and restore their relationships. He is the creator of the Save The Marriage System and author of How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps.