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My name is Paul Friedman. Until 2001, I was a divorce mediator helping couples end their marriages without the nonsense and expense of court. Back then, I believed divorce was the only civilized option when things fell apart. If the experts said a marriage was over, I believed them.
Not anymore.
Traditional marriage experts—though well-meaning—are rarely equipped to tell you whether your marriage can truly be saved. While industry groups like the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy report high initial satisfaction, clinical research shows that the positive impacts fade for about half of all couples over long-term follow-up, with roughly 40% still ending up divorced within four years.
Too often, when standard therapy fails, counselors declare a marriage “hopeless” simply to protect their own success rates and avoid blame. It’s a tragic loss. Looking back twenty-five years, with what I know today, I cannot think of even one couple I divorced whose marriage I couldn’t have turned around.
In 2001, one of the most reputable marriage counselors in San Diego sent a couple to me for mediation. But they really didn’t want to divorce. They begged me, a communication expert, to help them fix their marriage instead. I wasn’t a marriage counselor—I was a divorce mediator. I was divorced at the time myself and believed that if top-tier counseling couldn’t save a marriage, it couldn’t be saved. By every standard metric, their marriage was over. Yet they hoped and cajoled me. It moved me, so I agreed to try.
I respected the counselor who sent them. I knew they were good at their job. But, approaching my “marriage counseling” couple’s request from absolute scratch, I chose to start by asking six fundamental questions:
1. What is marriage?
Defining marriage in a material way—as “a legal contract” and so forth—completely misses the point. Your marriage is precious, and deep down, you know it.
2. What do any of us actually want from marriage?
Almost nobody has the universal yet simple answer at the tip of their tongue: happiness. It is achievable, even now.
3. What makes a marriage fail?
Although I identify the top three marriage killers in our courses and books so you can avoid them, the fundamental cause comes down to a simple lack of knowledge. You don’t become a swimmer just by diving into the pool.
4. What makes a marriage work?
The depth and breadth of the answer—all of it—falls under one heading: learn to love unconditionally.
5. What were traditional marriage experts missing?
The power of simplicity. Marriage recovery starts with targeted inner work, but it is all simple, practical work.
6. How do you get a failed—not just failing—marriage back on track?
This is the art of the process I created—bolstered by precise techniques, structured methods, compassionate counselor backup, and the fact that I truly care about your success.
In doing my research, I found that marriage counseling failures were nearly universal. Traditional therapy may claim high success rates for marriages that were never in full crisis to begin with, but for couples on the brink, it fails.
I was adamant about giving this couple what they were asking for: a practical, orderly roadmap to achieve clearly defined goals. So, setting aside Western psychology—the flawed foundation of modern marriage counseling—I went to work finding, and sometimes creating, the nuts and bolts. My work began with searching for scientific, truthful, and simple answers. Believing that God created marriage, I was, and remain, convinced He kept it simple enough for us to understand and fulfill. The therapists, thinking that love is merely an “abstract thought,” never address how to infuse our marriages with love – crazy!
I had an inkling, but never thought about marriage in purely spiritual terms before—and now I see that spirituality permeates all of marriage. But until then, nobody had ever asked me to save one. I had to rethink and reimagine marriage differently, and I realized that each of us has three primary temples in which we can connect with our Heavenly Father:
When I began my research, prayer, and live work with the most desperate cases—I wasn’t building a counseling practice; I was creating comprehensive marriage teachings, so I intentionally took on the worst cases to test principles-based ideas—deep, accurate concepts fell into place. I collected, organized, and prioritized what came to be our online 12-week course for women. (Yes, there is one for men, too. But 90% of the time, only one spouse takes the course, and there is no problem with that. The phrase “it takes two to tango” is not at all applicable to your marriage’s resurrection—thank God!)
What began with that first couple flowered and persisted for over twenty-five years as a nonprofit, The Marriage Foundation.
I’m not questioning you, but choosing the right guidance for your situation ensures your marriage will improve faster—without wasting time, money, or emotional energy.
Up until now, I have addressed your marriage as if it were at the brink of divorce, but perhaps it isn’t. Even when I spoke at divorce support groups like Second Saturday, I found that some women believed their marriage was at the absolute end when it was actually just deeply strained. I want you to get exactly what you need—nothing more, and nothing less.
| Your Current Situation | What It Requires |
|---|---|
| A misunderstanding | A simple hug, kiss, and sincere communication—usually the best remedy. |
| A rough patch | Read one of my books. These patches can easily be avoided with the practical marital education we all should have received growing up. |
| Things are strained and frustrating | Practical informational tools, provided exquisitely in our books. |
| Close to separation or in active crisis | Our online solo programs—the ultimate system for saving a marriage. |
It can and will be. Let us help you turn the confusion and anguish tormenting you today into deliberate, precise actions that will restore your marriage—and then some.
It is not too late. Don’t even think about divorce, and don’t look to traditional marriage counseling. No standard therapy will bring you the peace or stability you need and want. But a practical, scientific approach to stopping the trend toward divorce will work.
“Don’t You Need Our Background Information?”
Your situation feels unique because it is. But with our approach, we don’t waste time trying to solve the unsolvable problems of the past.
Instead, we teach you, as an individual—your husband doesn’t even need to know you are taking our course, unless you want him to—how to become a different kind of wife whose power is enhanced and redirected to strengthen your connection. You will learn to lift yourself from the depths you are currently feeling and start living your marriage in ways that bring both you and your husband genuine happiness.
It isn’t too late for your changes to shift the entire trajectory of your marriage. I think you are right on time.
The course is peerless in its effectiveness. You begin with a 3-day free trial that seamlessly flows into a 30-day guarantee. The video lessons, complemented by concise text, are released in structured steps over 12 weeks. While flexible payment plans are available for the budget-minded, you receive lifetime access to both the course materials and our counselors.
There is zero fluff. The course is designed to bring you back on your feet quickly, leading you to true marriage literacy as fast as humanly possible. The chaos falls away as you rid yourself of anger, nervousness, and anxiety—a critical starting point. Then, you begin to feel love again, overwhelmingly, until you finally experience what marriage is truly meant to be: love and happiness without end.
“But What About…”
Over the eight years following that first success, I developed and honed a step-by-step process designed specifically for individuals. (Working with both spouses together in crisis is actually counterproductive for many reasons.) I met with hundreds of women—and men, too, but separately—in focused, practical sessions. I carefully watched my clients’ every reaction to make sure what I shared was not only sensible to them, but also something they could use effectively in their real marriages.
What good does it do to hear lofty but unusable profundities? I knew they weren’t coming to see me for lectures or inspiration; I’m not a preacher. They wanted to turn their marriages around—so that’s what I focused on delivering. To this day, I take a client’s success very seriously. Whenever a question, challenge, or piece of feedback arises, our TMF marriage counselors are compassionately reachable.
Nearly everyone approaches saving their own marriage with a few—or many—doubts. You’ll become an optimist, but not right away. These are scary times, and human nature drives us to look for hidden complications. It’s normal, reasonable, natural, and expected.
When those questions come up, I call them the “yeah-but birds” because they arrive in flocks:
We will help you reach the other side. We expect doubts. Often, the answer you need is something you once knew—or something you learned in a previous video module but forgot during the turmoil. Other times, it’s a great question that needs contextual clarity. That’s why our program includes direct communication with trained TMF counselors. We have covered every single base, but we don’t encourage dwelling on the broken past. The future is going to be much better.
Traditional “experts” insist you have to “get to the bottom of the issues,” and when their methods fail, they blame the couple. We show you how to become a loving magnet who—through deliberate changes in your thinking, speaking, and acting—redefines the marriage entirely. It is practical, actionable, and it works.
Trendy ideas, like labeling your spouse as a “this” or a “that,” are what make marriage recovery out of reach for most people, especially in counseling. What pushes couples over the edge is the accumulation of things said, thought, and done that shouldn’t have been—combined with the good things that could have been thought, said, and done, but weren’t.
The equation is simple: eliminate the bad and add the good. It is common sense. You cannot erase the past, but you can, absolutely, move into a bright new phase.
As an experiment, for the next 24 hours, simply hold your tongue. That single action alone will immediately calm things down.
Focusing on learning the role of thought, speech, and action—and how to control them—is all-important. Learning how to manage your emotions, eliminate anger, and analyze your actions individually gives you direct control over your inputs into your marriage, replacing helplessness with clear, daily execution. In other words, you can fix and transform your marriage using our solo approach.
I’m here to tell you in no uncertain terms:
Since I began compiling comprehensive marital teachings, I have operated under the belief that well over 90% of marriages are nowhere near their true potential. Still, for most marriages, an all-out emergency effort is far from necessary. What most couples need is simply a little knowledge. With that, a struggling marriage can become incredible.
Although the solo method of marriage improvement is demonstrably superior to a “joint effort”—whether that means working “together” in counseling, which is fraught with all sorts of counter-productive elements, or working separately but simultaneously—there are understandable objections.
Rather than pretend the solo approach doesn’t bring up various fairness issues—“Why should I do all the work?”, “He’s the one who cheated!”, or “He needs to answer for what he’s done”—I will only say that women who put saving their marriage ahead of fairness are seen as wiser in the grand scheme of things. Fairness, after all, is at best a moving target.
I only urge you to ask for inner guidance and follow that advice. Another frail human, such as myself, is not better equipped, despite all my experience, to give you advice than your own higher wisdom. However, I know that God will guide your thinking if you ask Him. I learned this prayer many years ago and share it with you as a friend:
Lord, I will reason, I will will, and I will act.
Guide Thou my reason, will, and activity to the right thing that I should do.
