How to Fail a Marriage

Your marriage isn't dying from one big explosion. It's bleeding out from a thousand daily cuts. You've read the advice columns. You've tried "communicating better." You've white-knuckled your way through another tense dinner, another silent car ride, another night sleeping on opposite edges of the same bed. Maybe you're managing a blended family that feels more like a war zone than a home. Maybe you're parenting neurodivergent children while your partnership slowly dissolves under the weight of logistics, grief, and exhaustion. You've searched for marriage counseling advice, tried to work through marriage communication problems, and wondered why nothing seems to change. You don't need another pastel-covered book telling you to "love harder." You need someone to show you exactly what's going wrong and why. In How to Fail a Marriage, dual-licensed clinician Corey Matthew LaRue flips the entire relationship playbook on its head. Through a sharp, satirical "Manual for Failure," he maps the precise mechanical blueprints of relational collapse: weaponized silence, eroded boundaries, destructive relationship dynamics, and the slow starvation of trust. Then he pairs each blueprint with rigorous, evidence-based alternatives drawn from family systems theory and over a decade of clinical practice. By examining how communication breakdowns, unhealthy patterns, and family dynamics contribute to marital conflict, LaRue offers practical approaches to conflict resolution, rebuilding trust, and establishing healthy boundaries. The result is a field manual that treats your marriage like what it actually is: a high-stakes team sport where daily choices compound into either connection or catastrophe. Inside these pages, you will discover: How couples unknowingly engineer divorce through stonewalling, scorekeeping, and the erosion of autonomy Operational frameworks for rebuilding trust, improving communication, establishing healthy boundaries, and strengthening interdependence under real-world structural pressures How family systems and dysfunctional relationship patterns influence marital stability, and how to recognize the warning signs before they escalate Practical approaches to conflict resolution that help couples interrupt destructive cycles and rebuild meaningful connection Reflection tools and clinical assessments designed to identify and interrupt destructive patterns before they become irreversible This is not gentle advice. This is the blueprint. Learn how to fail a marriage so you never have to.