In this episode, Amberly sits down with Monica Tanner, who is a marriage coach, podcast host, and author of the new book Bad Marriage Advice. Together, they unpack some of the most common phrases couples hear, like “never go to bed angry” or “happy couples never fight,” and explore why these well-meaning sayings can sometimes do more harm than good.
Monica shares her inspiration for writing the book and how she reframes 15 popular pieces of marriage advice to be more realistic, research-backed, and truly helpful. Amberly and Monica also reflect on their own marriages, sharing honest stories, practical takeaways, and skills couples can use in every stage, from newlyweds to empty nesters.
This episode offers a sneak peek into the insightful and relatable chapters of Monica’s book, and will leave you rethinking the relationship advice you’ve always accepted as truth.
Amberly: Earlier this year, I chatted with my friend Monica Tanner about her new book, Bad Marriage Advice. The book launched a couple of weeks ago, and I’m going to link it in the show notes. This is the conversation we had about her book and a few of the pieces of bad marriage advice that she debunks and reframes for couples, whether they are just getting married or have been married for years. I am really excited for you to listen to this, and like I said, I will link the book in the show notes over on aprioritizedmarriage.com. Because while this conversation is amazing and has some great nuggets of wisdom, the book is even more amazing.
Welcome everyone! This is my friend Monica Tanner. Monica and we’ve been friends for a while. I remember we met in person at the Gottman date night in Salt Lake, and that was 2019.
Monica: Yeah. That was a long time ago.
Amberly: Have we seen each other in person since? I don’t think so.
Monica: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. We’ve tried to plan some workshops together. We’ll get there. We’ll get there.
Amberly: I’m very excited for Monica to share what she has with you today. But let me introduce you a little bit more to Monica. Monica is an RLT-trained Relationship Coach and the host of The Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. She transforms marriages with simple communication, connection, conflict resolution, and commitment strategies. Monica’s mission is to lower the divorce rate and improve marital satisfaction. Through her engaging podcast, her new book, Bad Marriage Advice, her vibrant social media community, and couples’ coaching practice, Monica’s expert guidance has impacted thousands of couples by helping them ditch resentment and roommate syndrome and get back to living happily ever after love story. And, I can attest to all of that. I’ve listened to Monica’s podcast. I’ve been on Monica’s podcast. I haven’t read the new book yet, but I am excited to. I’ve been part of her social media community. Monica, what else would you like us to know about you?
Monica: We have been married 23 years this May. And, cool, fun fact, my oldest son is getting married on our 23rd wedding anniversary, so that’s really exciting. We met in Texas a long, long time ago. My husband was doing pest control sales where I had just graduated from college. We met in the university ward there, just at church. And, he basically sold me the forever contract. He’s a really good salesman.
And we’ve had four kids together. Our oldest is about to get married, our second oldest is about to graduate from high school, and then I have one left who will be a junior in high school and an eighth grader. I’m still busy with my kids and their activities, but also really, really enjoying the time and freedom that I have to work as a marriage coach and write this new book.
Amberly: Yay! Monica walks the walk, she talks the talk, and I’m really excited because she has written a book, called Bad Marriage Advice, and as soon as Monica told me the name of this, Monica, I was so excited. Because I remember at my wedding luncheon, we had people share their best marriage advice and you’d get things like, “never go to bed angry” and, “when you fight, fight naked” And I really love this idea for the book because these are things that I already am like, yeah, this is terrible marriage advice, and here’s why. Here’s the better option. There’s a spirit behind it, right?
Monica: Yeah, well-intentioned. Very well-intentioned.
Amberly: But the reality is, here’s why that might not be the best option. Because who really wants to stay up fighting all night, right? Sometimes we just need to sleep on it. And I know that’s one of your talking points, we’ll get to that. But will you quickly just introduce bad marriage advice? What is this book about? What inspired it? And then we’ll dive in.
Monica: Yeah, it’s so interesting because my son came home from his mission to Chile and super quickly fell very hard for this beautiful girl. And we love her, she’s fantastic. But when he announced that, he’s like, “I think I wanna marry her”, of course, my mama brain went, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much you need to know. You’re so young. How can I give you 23 years’ worth of my experience and also all of the experts that I’ve been interviewing for the last decade, and all of the things that I feel like are so important?” And it just popped into my brain.
The first thing that’s gonna happen when young people decide to get married is they get all of the advice. And I’m not saying that this advice wasn’t effective at some point because maybe, you know, an earlier, like kind of the earlier version of marriage, maybe some of these things might have been slightly helpful, but modern marriage is not that cut and dry. I compiled about 15 pieces of, in my opinion, the worst marriage advice that is given so readily, so commonly by very well-intentioned adults.
And I know for me, when I was getting married, I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. So any advice from happily married couples, I will gladly suck up. And I remember just the kind of the pain and the angst it caused early in my marriage. Especially that don’t go to bed angry, I was following it to a tee. I was like, “no, we cannot go to sleep.” And my husband’s rolling over and starting to snore, and I’m like, this can’t happen. We have to figure this out. I’ve seen it in the couples that I’ve worked with. I’ve experienced it in my own marriage.
And so what I wanted to do with the book is give you a much better way. So the well-intentioned advice, you’re gonna hear it, you’re gonna get it, but here’s what I want you to know that’s gonna really help you in your marriage. And so I wrote the book for my son and his new bride. And I hope that it will help, whether you’ve been married for days or decades, really flesh out a better way to navigate some of these very common misconceptions.
Amberly: Mm, I love it. So your book is coming from a place of what you’ve heard, what you know as a relationship coach, and all of the studying and effort you’ve put into learning about what makes a marriage work. But also from a place of this is what I want my own little humans that I love so much to know as they head into this next chapter of their life.
Monica: I kind of describe it as a getting-started guide meets cautionary tale. Be careful of this, but here are really good skills and things to think about as you’re getting started on this crazy ride that we call marriage.
Amberly: I love it. And I am going to guess that it can work for newlyweds, it can work for couples who have been married for any amount of time.
Monica: Oh yeah. Most of the couples I see in coaching have been married 20 to 30 years. And they’re still stumbling on these old pieces of advice or marital wisdom that’s misguided. And so a lot of the work I do with couples is unwinding these ideas. Divorce is not an option. Happy wife, happy life. If they loved me, they’d just know. Most couples who come into counseling at any point will describe problems in communication.
And what’s so interesting about these 15 pieces of bad marriage advice is that they all stunt communication. Fighting when you’re tired, that’s not good communication. Happy wife, happy life. Don’t sweat the small stuff. All of those are ways to sidestep good communication.
Amberly: One hundred percent. I agree. So you’ve got 15 pieces of marriage advice that you should we say you debunk? You dive deeper into them and say, “This is the reality and what will actually work. This marriage advice sounds fun, but..”
I love this first one, the myth that happy couples never fight. Could you share with me about that?
Monica: Oh, yes. A lot of times, I feel like there’s this idea that we don’t raise our voice at each other. We compromise. Do anything we can to avoid this conflict. We don’t want there to be contention. But the reality is, you’re two different people. And I love this because my husband and I couldn’t be more different. We literally come from different ends of the country. We come from different spectrums of religiosity. We disagree about most things. But we’ve learned over time how to disagree. And so Dr. John Gottman talks about it’s not whether or not a couple fights, it’s how they fight that really, really matters.
You’re never gonna agree all the time with somebody who’s so different from you. But if you can learn how to communicate, if you can learn how to talk about these things. You don’t have to have these knockdown dragouts; you don’t have to be yelling at each other. That if you learn how to make requests skillfully and talk about the things that you disagree about, it actually leads to more connection rather than contention. So, I do talk a lot in the book about how to communicate well, how to make requests, how to bring up grievances, and things like tha,t so that it’s not causing contention, but actually resulting in more connection.
Amberly: I love that. As you were saying that, I was thinking if we reworded that, that piece of marriage advice, I don’t know if you do this in your book, but we’re gonna do this right now. We’re gonna reword it. If it could be like happy couples aren’t afraid to discuss their disagreements.
Monica: Right. And you know what’s interesting is that I think when couples go for years without fighting or without bringing up their grievances or talking about the things that are uncomfortable. What happens is they both start to withdraw. And so I’ll get couples in my office that are on the verge of divorce, and they never fight about anything, but it’s because neither of them care enough. They’ve both operated under the guise that it’s not that important. You just sweep things under the rug. And it’s much easier to help couples learn how to fight fair when they both still have their opinions and wanna talk it out verses having a couple that they’re like, “No, we just disengage. We just don’t talk to each other. We don’t get riled up about anything. We just go to our separate corners.” Those couples are much harder to teach because they’ve both withdrawn so much.
Amberly: So happy couples fight. They fight for their marriage,
Monica: But they fight fair. They fight nicely, skillfully. That’s the yes, they fight skillfully.
Amberly: Happy couples fight skillfully. I like that. Okay. Number two is probably my very favorite. Hmm. Or we call it my least favorite piece of marriage advice. My very favorite bad marriage advice to discuss. Don’t ever go to bed angry with each other.
Monica: I don’t know if it’s like beating a dead horse, but they have this HALTS Principle that I love. Don’t try to make big decisions, or don’t try to discuss hard topics when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or stressed. So we say HALTS, like don’t do it. And all of those things come to play late at night. It’s so funny to me, even now, of course, when we’re tired and it’s getting close to bed and we’re exhausted from dealing with the kids and we’ve had a hard day at work and things haven’t gone our way. Of course, we’re gonna be a little bit more on edge and like nitpicky with each other, right?
So for me, early in our marriage, what was really hard for me was that I felt really rejected and abandoned when my husband felt like he could just roll over and go to sleep, and I was still upset. And so it would kind of freak me out. I was like, it’s gonna get worse overnight, or in the morning, he’s gonna wake up and realize he doesn’t wanna be with me anymore. He is gonna pack his bags. And so it would create all kinds of chaos in my brain when he could just go to sleep, and I felt like, no, we need to stay up and work this out. So eventually we learned how to talk about that, and we came up with this really simple way for him to say, “I love you, but I’m really tired and I think we could discuss this in the morning”, or “I love you, I’m just really grumpy right now. I just need some sleep.: And then I could just be like, ‘Oh, okay, the marriage is not over.’ He’s not gonna wake up more upset. And the thing that happened was, we would go to sleep, and almost every single time, he would wake up, roll over, snuggle me, and apologize for whatever it was that happened. Or he would say something like, “I have no idea why I was so grumpy last night. I’m so sorry.” And I was like, I didn’t even have to do anything, and I got to sleep.
Amberly: Win, win, win.
Monica: Yes. So the reality is, if it’s hard for you to sleep or shut down your brain when something’s going on between you and your husband, if you can come up with an agreement with your spouse, like, “Hey, you know, it really, it’s scary for me when I feel like you’re upset, but you can just sleep and I’m still upset and I haven’t told you why I am upset and all of those things.” If you can come up with some simple phrasing like, “I love you, but I don’t think we’re gonna be able to figure this out tonight. Let’s get some sleep.” Or, “I’ll always love you, but I’ll love you more in the morning.” Something, anything. And be able to sleep. You will, I promise, think more clearly, have more perspective, you know, be able to be more rational after a good night’s rest.
Amberly: 100 percent. And going back to that HALTS; when you’re hungry, when you’re really emotionally charged on something, when you’re tired… For me, it’s when I’m hormonal. ICan’t even think straight. And my brain knows it can’t think straight, and I still…
Monica: Yeah, the H. The H should be hungry or hormonal, yes. For sure.
Amberly: Hungry or hormonal. But I think I’ve seen a meme, or a reel, or something on social media that it’s like when you’re really mad at each other, but you still want to fall asleep cuddling. And they reach out and touch one finger or their toes towards each other. Like just one finger staying connected. And so I like that point you made about, I love you, and sleep on it. Let’s go get tacos, and then we’ll talk. That’s what I was thinking. If I’m hungry, if my husband was like, let’s go to get tacos, or I’ll go get you a burger and fries and a shake. And I’ll be like, okay, immediately, I’m probably not mad at him because he bought me my favorite, you know?
But I thought about this one thing. Whenever I talk about the don’t ever go to bed angry thing, it’s taking a timeout. And this is something that I learned when I became a facilitator for Prep 2.0. That’s one of the things they talk about is having a timeout, and that it’s not just walking away from each other, kind of like you talked about with the first one of never arguing, just shutting down and walking away. It’s saying, I love you. I value this relationship. I’m not able to discuss this rationally right now because I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m hormonal, I’m angry. Come back in five business days. No, I’m just kidding. But let’s do this and then revisit it. That gives everyone time to simmer, calm down and think rationally, and disconnect that emotional piece. But also when you sleep on it, things don’t seem quite as bad.
I’m not hormonal anymore, things aren’t quite as bad. When I’ve eaten a cheeseburger, the world is a much happier place. It gives you that time, that space, and what your body actually needs to get out of that survival mode to do that.
Monica: And I’ll give you one piece of advice that I think ties together the first one and the second one. To keep those commitments when you do take a break. Including sleeping on it or eating something. Make sure that you keep that commitment to come back to that, even if it’s, I can’t remember why we were fighting last night, I must have just been tired. But address it, right? Because that will read a lot of trust in your relationship. My spouse knows that these things are important to me. They’re not just gonna let them fester, be the elephant in the room. We can talk about these things.
Amberly: Mm. I love that because yeah, not addressing it almost comes back to that, We just removed ourselves from the situation, and we’re now gonna move forward and pretend it never happened. Still saying, ‘Hey, we said we loved each other. We went and ate a hamburger, or we took a nap, or we went to sleep for the night, and I still love you, and this still bothered me.’ Or, “This is why it was bothering me and why I realized it doesn’t matter, and we’re repairing.” So it is coming back and repairing.
Monica: Yeah. That word is the key, repair. Good couples understand that relationships are a series of harmony, disharmony, and repair. And when there’s been disharmony, they know how to repair. That’s the skill that can be learned. You’re not just born with it. You’re not toast if you don’t have it. But if you learn to repair, then you can really get through so much. And it builds so much connection, trust, and intimacy when you get really good at repairing.
Amberly: I love it. Hmm. I’m sure there are so many great pieces of bad marriage advice in your book, but I think this one will always be my favorite, and I’m excited to read your whole chapter on it because my favorite. My favorite. Don’t fight hungry. Don’t fight tired.
Okay. I’m curious about this one. I want you to explain this one a little bit, a little bit more to me. The myth of compromise.
Monica: Hmm. This is a good one because I feel like that word just gets tossed around, and it makes me like *cringe*. Oh, I hate it when people say, “If you wanna be happy in your marriage, you’ve gotta learn to compromise.” And what do you think of when you hear the word compromise? I think of like, I have to give up my position. I have to give a little, and he gives a little, and then we just end up both of us with something less than what we really wanted. Right? But I’ve learned through working through my own marriage, but also working with couples, that there’s something so powerful about having two different perspectives, opinions, experiences, and preferences. You bring a married couple together, and they’re so different. And they come from such different backgrounds, and they have different ideas about how things should be done.
And you’re like, well, that’s frustrating. Why do we disagree so often? Because there’s so much power in having two different positions. And so instead of compromising, instead of giving up a little, and, really, that leads to a lot of scorekeeping. “Oh, but I compromised last time. Last time we went out to eat, I gave up Chinese food so that you could have Mexican food” or whatever. It leads to scorekeeping, it leads to feeling like you’ve given in a certain number of times
The difference, and this is the skill that I LOVE to teach, is collaboration. Because when you have two different perspectives and two different ideas and opinions, you can put them together and come up with something better than either of you ever could have come up with on your own. It’s a skillset, and you do learn how to do this. You learn how to talk about and understand what is so important about each other’s stance, and so that’s a really huge communication piece. In order for us to collaborate, we need to get really curious about each other. Why is that so important to you? What part of this is most important to you? And then you start to learn about each other, and then you can come up with a solution that encompasses the most important parts of both people’s positions. So that’s a collaboration. Not a compromise.
The story I tell in the book, it is one of my favorite stories ever, is that I came from Texas, and my family ate a lot of seafood. And so when my husband and I travel, especially to a coastal location, I want good seafood. I want to sit on the water, and I wanna crack my crab legs, and I wanna just enjoy an expensive seafood meal. Now my husband, on the other hand, didn’t grow up eating any seafood. He hates it. He’s like, give me a burger and fries, right. And I don’t wanna spend a lot of money on this meal. So on our seventh anniversary, we took a trip to downtown San Francisco, and my only request was that we go eat at a nice seafood restaurant on the wharf overlooking the water. We get to watch the sunset, and I’m cracking crap legs. That’s all I wanted. And to my husband, that whole thing sounded like, “blech”, like he didn’t want any part of that. He just wanted a cheap burger, and he would be happy.
So we could have compromised and gone to a restaurant that serves both seafood and hamburgers, and both of us would’ve been fine. It would’ve been a compromise. But what we decided to do is I picked the restaurant that would make me super happy. It was right on the wharf. We got to watch the sunset over the water. And he walked across the street, I kid you not, to In-N-Out Burger. And he got an In-N-Out burger and french fries, and a milkshake. And he walked into this really high-end restaurant. And I still remember the waitress was like, “You can’t bring that in here.” And he was like, “But this is what I want for my meal.” And so she’s like, “Let me help you.” And so she brought a plate and one of those really nice milkshake glasses from the bar. She poured his milkshake into it, and she took the garbage, and it looked like he’d ordered a really nice burger and a shake from this nice restaurant, and I got to eat crab legs. And we sat there together, and we enjoyed the expensive ambiance. And he helped me crack crab legs. He’s like, “This is a lot more work than it’s worth.: And I’m like, “It’s okay. I love it.” But we enjoyed it and we had fun.
And even though I was kind of mortified at the beginning, it’s such a great story and such a great example of collaboration. Because I got the things that were most important to me, and he got the things that were most important to him. Everybody wins. It’s not like I had to give anything up, and he didn’t have to give anything up.
Amberly: I love that. One of my favorite stories from our marriage, we had those measuring spoons, and they came on a little ring. And we had the matching measuring cups that come on a ring. I would always get so frustrated when he’d empty the dishwasher and put stuff away. Everything would be stacked and then I’d pull the ring out to grab my stuff, and half of it would all fall to the floor and be dirty because they didn’t get put on the ring. And, he’s like, “I stacked them nicely.” And I’m like, “Put them on the dang ring.” And I came to a conclusion one day. I was like, I’m just gonna throw a stupid ring away because then I’m not expecting that they’re all on the ring. He’s happy to stack them. They look nice in my drawer. They’re all there. And it was my own collaboration without him.
And he didn’t say anything to me about it. I just let it happen. And a month later, I was like, “Did you notice that the rings are gone?” He’s like, “Yeah, but I didn’t dare say anything.” Because it was a point of contention for a long time that I was like, now my dishes are dirty, and I needed that one. Why can’t you just put it on the stupid ring? And he was like, because it’s so annoying to have to put it around and then put this one on and then put it back so they all stack nicely. I’ll just stack them for you, but they’re not on the ring. And so I just got rid of the ring.
Monica: You know what’s so funny too, is that as you’re telling me this story, I’m like, there are so many solutions to this that just immediately come to mind that are a great collaboration. The possibilities are endless when you start to think, “Okay, how can we make this so that both of us are really happy with this solution?”
Amberly: Okay. I love this one. I love it. It’s a good one. Okay. I don’t want you to give your whole book away. But I know you said happy wife, happy life is another one. Will you tease two more? What’s the bad piece of advice so people know, ‘Oh yes, that’s one I want to hear debunked.’ They can go read it in your book.
Monica: Yes. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Ooh, that’s a big one. Don’t sweat the small stuff because it becomes the big stuff. Happy wife, happy life. That one’s terrible. One person’s happy, who cares about everybody else? No, that’s not good. Happily ever after is for fairytales; that’s the last chapter in the book. It is possible, but here’s the thing about it: it won’t happen by accident. So that’s the myth. People just kind of accept their marriages as they are. But the reality is, is that happily ever after is possible, but it does require work, just like anything worth having.
Amberly: I always think of the movie ‘Enchanted’, where she’s like, I just have to find my prince, and then we can live happily ever after. I love that they put it into the real-life world, that you realize, oh, that’s kind of a naive thought, versus yes, the little Mermaid lost her fins and now she has, you know what I mean? It puts it in that real world that, eh, it’s fun for fairytales, but it doesn’t just work that way.
Monica: Well, here’s another one that’s fun. If they love me, they’ll just know. That’s terrible, because we all think that our Prince Charming is gonna know what will make us happy. But the other one is, if you’ve met the right person, they won’t hurt me. And this one is really interesting because this is a Terry Real concept called the Mysticism of Marriage. And the reality is, is that the spouse that you pick, that you’re most attracted to, is probably perfectly designed to hurt you in all of the ways going back to your childhood. It’s the person who is uniquely designed to prick you in all of those ways to open up those wounds. But also, that has resources that your family of origin didn’t have. And so it’s a really cool way “marriage is the people growing machine”, that’s a David Schnarch quote. But it’s because we’re attracted to those people who are gonna throw us back into that old family soup, but also have resources that that family of origin didn’t have.
So when you’re thinking, ‘Oh, why is this so hard? Why are we having so many challenges?’ It’s because this thing called marriage, and this partner that you chose, is perfectly designed to help you, not heal you, but help you heal.
Amberly: That’s something I hadn’t really thought that deeply about. Ok, Monica has this amazing book. We’ve talked about a lot of it, but there’s more goodness in all of those pieces in the chapters. So Monica, where is your book gonna be available? Where can people go to find it?
Monica: You can go to badmarriageadvice.com to get all the goodies that are associated with the book. And you can find me, my website is just my name, monicatanner.com. And make sure you listen to the podcast Secrets of Happily Ever After as I talk about all the stuff in more depth and ongoing as I learn about things.
Amberly: I love it. I think that’s why we get along so well, because I love that you’re sharing this from personal experience and expertise. It’s not just… how do we put this? Here’s the script, here’s the ideal, and also here’s what it looks like in real life. It’s messy and not perfect, and we’re just using this to grow and, like you said, become better versions of ourselves.
Okay, last question. What one thing are you doing currently in your marriage to make your marriage relationship a priority every day?
Monica: That is such a great question. I love it. My thing that I am really loving that my husband and I do now is we take these walks. So for 20 years we owned a business together, and so we talked to each other and saw each other and spent time together all throughout the day. But recently we sold that business, and so now for 10 hours a day, four days a week, he is away from the house. And I’m here doing my work, you know, with the kids and stuff, and we don’t communicate a ton during the day. And so we go on these walks in the evening, and we just kind of connect, and I love it. So I would say prioritizing connection is so important, but the way that I have found that is just SO enriching to our marriage right now is just walking together.
Sometimes we hold hands, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we walk fast, sometimes we walk slow. But it’s just a way to talk about our inner worlds, how we’re experiencing the day, what I know versus what he knows, and what he’s excited about, and what I’m stressed about, or whatever. And we just connect. And whether we do one lap around the loop or two laps around the loop, we just kind of get to reconnect at the end of a busy day.
Amberly: I love that. And I love how you shared, this is what was working and our, our situation, our stage of life, our season changed, and here’s how we’re still making that happen. Even though you don’t have as many hours to do it, you still make it a priority.
Thank you, Monica, for joining me. I will link her podcast, the book website those things in the show notes so you guys can go check it out. And I’m very excited to read the book, and I will share it as I read it and make sure everyone knows it’s out there.
Monica: Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.
Amberly: It has been fun.