30 Years of Marriage: 3 Things About Relationships I Wish Someone Told Me Sooner

The Mel Robbins Podcast

Mel Robbins and her husband Christopher reflect on their 30-year marriage, sharing hard-earned lessons about love, resilience, and relations

Key takeaways

• The true test of a relationship is how it holds up during hardship, not during good times.
• When life becomes difficult, people often take their stress out on their partners—this is a common but damaging mistake.

Main topics

• Long-term marriage challenges
• Emotional resilience in relationships

Notable quotes

You're my favorite person.

When life got hard, I became very hard on you.

Conclusion

Through decades of struggle and growth, Mel and Christopher affirm that lasting love is

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Speaker 1 (0:08) I am so excited to talk to you today because today we're doing something super cool. My husband, Christopher Robbins, is here. Hi, Chris. In Speaker 4 (0:19) the Speaker 1 (0:19) house. In the house. And we are reflecting on 30 years of marriage. I can't believe we've been together for over 30 years. And it feels like this giant whoosh of... Growing up, getting jobs, getting fired from jobs, raising kids, paying bills, getting into debt, getting out of debt, moving, fighting, struggling, making up, fighting with each other, growing apart, finding our way back to each other, trying to figure out how to love ourselves. Well, we're going to unpack this because through all the resentment, the struggles, the ups, the downs, you and I over the course of 30 years, oh, here we go, we're already crying. Speaker 4 (1:03) That's a first that you're crying before me. Speaker 1 (1:07) We've always found our way back to each other. And so today you, oh God, he's crying too. Okay. I guess we're going to have to go to commercials quickly. Today, you and I are going to talk about the three lessons that we've learned the hard way. Lessons we wish somebody would have taught us decades ago. Speaker 1 (1:28) that truly make your relationship meaningful and lasting. And so since I'm starting to cry, I think we better take a beat and then we'll start the episode. How do you feel? Speaker 4 (1:40) Feeling great. Thanks for having me on. I Speaker 1 (1:43) can't imagine who else I'd do my 30th wedding anniversary episode with. I guess our couples therapist. Speaker 4 (1:51) Thank God for him. Speaker 1 (2:03) Hey, it's your friend Mel and my husband, Christopher Robbins. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am absolutely thrilled that you're here for a once-in-a-lifetime conversation because today, my husband and I are talking and reflecting on our 30th wedding anniversary, and this is only going to happen once. Not because we're breaking up, but because like you only have your 30th wedding anniversary once. And it's such an honor to be together with you, to spend this time with you if you're new here. Or if maybe somebody you're in a relationship with sent you this episode or they've trapped you in a car with them right now and you're listening and this is their form of therapy or a date. Welcome. I've done that to my husband too. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. You are going to love this conversation because today my husband Chris and I are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary with you. And we're going to share three lessons that we have learned over the last three decades. These are lessons that I wish somebody had just, boom, summed up for us when we got married 30 years ago. We learned this stuff the hard way. It explains so much about the years of our life, Chris, where we were really struggling. It also explains the roadmap for how you find your way back to the person that you fell in love with. And so I'm super excited about this. Welcome to the podcast, Chris. Speaker 4 (3:36) Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. And I'm looking forward to these little lessons because they do help crystallize. All that we did go through. Speaker 1 (3:45) Yeah. Yeah. Boy, we went through a lot. Speaker 4 (3:48) Yes, we have. Speaker 1 (3:49) It's impossible to be in a long-term relationship and not experience so many ups and downs. And what does 30 years feel like for you? Like when you really think about 30 years going by, and if you're brand new to the show, you know, I should just say that we also have three kids. They're 27, 26, and 21 years old. And we have been through so many ups and downs and been in and out of financial crisis. And we've both been fired from jobs and struggled and had moments where we feel lost. We've had kids that have struggled. We've navigated your father dying. Like just 30 years of your life, you navigate a lot. When you think about the fact that we've been married for 30 years, what comes to mind for you, Chris? Speaker 4 (4:39) Honestly, the visual of like a flip book where you flip it through and it's like, and all of those. scenes that in the moment feel so acute, so profound, either whether you're elated or we're feeling on top or feeling at the bottom, they all are meaningful. And the speed at which they have passed is quite remarkable, honestly, to think that it's been 30 years is a bit jaw-dropping. You Speaker 1 (5:11) know, when you first fall in love, you have this assumption because of all the fabulous love chemicals, that's a technical term I just made up, that are flooding through your body and the attraction that you kind of gaslight yourself into thinking, oh, it's always going to be like this. And if there's one thing that we've learned the hard way and everybody learns in life is that things are always changing and that the true test of your relationship is not how you are together when things are good. I mean, you could be with a not great person in a not great relationship, but if things are going really well, you don't really have to lean on the relationship. The true test is what happens when things fall apart. When you lose the job, when a parent dies, when a child is sick, when the pressure hits, when the bank account is bouncing, when life makes you hard. And life does that. I'm already crying. I don't know. Because I'm just thinking about like how many freaking hard periods of our life we've had. And one of the things that I really struggled with in our relationship is how often when life hardened me, I brought that edge into our relationship. And if you're going to go the distance with somebody, it's really because you have picked somebody that you can do the difficult things with. that you can struggle with, that you can lean on. And when I look back, one of the biggest lessons that I've learned, and I'm going to explain it first in my words, and then I'm going to share the way one of the incredible relationship experts summed it up, is when life got hard, I became very hard on you. When life really... Speaker 1 (7:09) started to beat me up, I started to take it out on you. And I think that's an extremely common mistake that people make. And if you stop and reflect and think about your own relationship, how often you've blamed stress of the day, in fact, I just did this last night, on how emotional or how volatile or how just mean you might be to the person that you love. And the first lesson that I really learned that is both the reason why relationships end and it's also the simple. lesson that brings you back to the person you fell in love with. And it's this, you're my favorite person. That is the best relationship advice I have ever heard. Four words, you're my favorite person. And so the first takeaway for me is if you're in a relationship, can you say that about the person that you're with? Because if you fundamentally have never felt like this is your favorite person, then you're in the wrong relationship. And if you're going through a very rough time, what I love about these four words, you're my favorite person, is this is the lifeline. It's like a tow rope that you can grab onto to pull you back to what is still true. Because even when life is hard, that person that you fell in love with is still in there. And I also love this question because you not only ask yourself, you're my favorite person. Is Chris my favorite person? Of course. I just hate my life right now. But he's still my favorite person. And then you ask yourself the second layer, which is, am I treating him like my favorite person? No. Speaker 4 (9:02) That's kind of where the rubber meets the road, I think, for me. Because when I think about when we first met, absolutely, you were my favorite. All the way up until... In fact, after we got married, which was a couple years later. But in that time frame, you were my favorite every moment of every day because, to some extent, we really hadn't hit anything hard. We had no concept of how we might harden or how we might behave in those tough times, which I think... is what makes relationships challenging because in the early days it is a honeymoon period, as they call it. Speaker 4 (9:49) everybody's everybody's favorite until it hits the fan. Speaker 1 (9:52) I know the moment that the you-know-what hit fan. And you started going from my favorite person to not my favorite person to somebody that I was mad at. And it was when we were in our 20s and we had met in New York City and we were early in our careers and you decided to make a career change and then you didn't like that. And then you decided to launch a business and it didn't do well. And then you decided to scramble and get a job. And there was a point where we were so struggling with paying our bills. I was a public defender working for legal aid. You had not had a job for a while. Do you remember this? We were talking about moving in with your parents. Speaker 1 (10:39) As a new married couple, and we were going to have to move into, like, the basement walkout part of their, like, retirement house. Speaker 4 (10:48) I don't actually remember that, but it's funny that you bring this up because when you asked me to think about a moment in time, that's about the same time frame that I thought about myself, both in the context of me also beginning to hate on myself. But also recognizing that that's when I stopped listening to you. Because, no, no, no, it had nothing to do with you. I was so focused on me and what I thought I should be achieving or producing that you barely even existed. And so I really wasn't listening. to you or your needs or your interests. And so anyway, when I was thinking about that incident, that was really where things started to unwind a little bit when I said, hey, you know what? I want to go get my MBA and I want to do it in Boston and I want to move out of New York City. And you said, are you kidding me? Like, I love my job. This is great. Why are we leaving? And you were miserable when we moved up there. And honestly, in the moment, I was so blind to what I thought I should have been doing for you that I was oblivious to the fact that you were even unhappy with the idea. Speaker 1 (12:14) Wow. You've never even brought this up in therapy before. Speaker 4 (12:18) No, but you prompted me to think about this. You know Speaker 1 (12:21) what's crazy about this, Chris, is that I always called you stoic. I called you a thinker. I called you a slow processor when I was really annoyed with you. I just sort of... put your sequestering into a box that was about you. And I had no idea that you tuned me out. And what happens when that starts to happen is for somebody like me, I just get louder because then I feel alone and unsafe. And for somebody like you, you just sequester more into your head. Like, I think that there was like, what, a full decade where we were like this. Speaker 4 (13:01) Yeah. Do you think Speaker 2 (13:03) it Speaker 4 (13:03) was longer? No, that sounds about right. Anyway, 10 years, but that's enough to cause enough damage. I mean, and it did. Speaker 1 (13:10) And, you know, the thing that's important about this is. This is, I think, a period of our marriage that you would describe as we were just roommates. We would say that we do logistics really well. So we can get the kids where they need to go. We can get the dogs fed. We can get the groceries on the table. We can show up at the holiday celebration. We can check the boxes. I don't think Speaker 4 (13:34) the roommate phase set in that early because we were beginning to have kids. And so we were learning a new... challenge of being parents to newborns. And so the roommate thing didn't quite settle in until I think once all three or at least two had arrived and then it was and then the sequestering began for sure. Speaker 1 (13:56) Well, I think I'm kind of using a word maybe that doesn't resonate. It felt like logistics and life took over and our connection. These four words, you're my favorite person. stopped being the central organizing principle of our marriage. And I truly believe that these four words as a lesson and a philosophy that you can anchor yourself to immediately reveals whether or not the connection is frayed. Because if you don't feel that way about your partner and you once did, That's a sign that life has hardened you and you're in this phase where you've pulled apart. And being able to then go, how do I start treating this person like my favorite person again, even if things have gone down, even if there are still a lot of struggles, even if we are fighting about money, which we did for decades, absolute decades. But I want to play this moment from the Mel Robbins podcast when a world-renowned divorce attorney, James Sexton, said those four words on the show. Speaker 3 (15:18) Like at its core? Marriage should boil down to four words that I think are potentially the most beautiful words you could say to someone and mean, or have someone say to you and know they're true. And that is, you're my favorite person. Like, what could be more beautiful than being told and knowing, like, that when this person says it, they mean it. You're my favorite person. And to say to someone back, yeah, you're my favorite person. Like, What would be better in the world than having that, you know? And so I like to think about kind of the end of things and then reverse engineer. And to me, like at the end of your life, if you could look at another person and say, you helped me become the most authentic version Speaker 4 (16:09) of myself and you're still my favorite person. Speaker 3 (16:14) That's the greatest wedding toast you could ever have. Like, that's the greatest blessing you could have in your life, and I think it'd be the greatest asset you could have in your life. Speaker 1 (16:25) Do you want to react to that? Speaker 4 (16:26) I think he just said, that's the greatest wedding toast you could have. And that's