The statistics are staggering, yet most people entering their second marriage believe they’ll beat the odds. After all, they’ve learned from their mistakes, chosen better this time, and are more mature than they were in their twenties. But the numbers tell a different story: 67% of second marriages end in divorce. Third marriages fare even worse at 73%. The question isn’t whether people are choosing the wrong partners—it’s whether they’re equipped with the skills that love actually requires.
Michelle Hays knows this reality intimately. As a relationship thought leader, speaker, columnist, founder and host of the Monarch for Love Podcast, founder of the Love Literacy™ movement and creator of the 3D Emotional Reset framework, she has a weekly podcast with over 220 episodes across four seasons. She has dedicated her work to addressing what she calls Love Literacy™—the relationship skills we were never taught. Her mission stems from personal experience: after experiencing her own divorces—relationships where she loved deeply and desperately wanted to keep her family intact—she realized a painful truth: she had previously walked away because she felt unloved and unseen. Those experiences became a powerful catalyst for growth, launching her on a journey to understand why loving someone isn’t enough to keep a marriage together—and what’s actually required to build a relationship that lasts.
The Romantic Illusion That’s Breaking Hearts
We’ve been trained to chase a feeling. From movies to social media, the message is clear: love should feel a certain way—passionate, effortless, consistently euphoric. When that feeling fades, as it inevitably does under the weight of bills, children, work stress, and life’s daily grind, people assume the love has died. They believe if they’re not feeling loved, they’re not loved. This fundamental misunderstanding destroys relationships that could have thrived.
“Just because you don’t feel loved does not mean you are not loved,” Hays emphasizes. This distinction matters because feelings are not instructions. They’re signals, often rooted in childhood wounds, unmet expectations, or simple miscommunication. When couples mistake their feelings for facts, they create narratives about their partners that simply aren’t true. She shut down, so he must not care. He’s distracted, so he must be angry with me. These stories become self-fulfilling prophecies, eroding the very love both partners desperately want to preserve.
Hays realized through intense internal work that her past partners had loved her deeply. She knows that now. But in the moment, living in those experiences, she couldn’t feel it. The love was there. The skills to express it and receive it were missing. Without those skills, love becomes a lonely experience—two people who care about each other living in separate emotional worlds.
The Common Denominator You Can’t Escape
After two failed marriages, and years of feeling unloved, unseen, and disconnected in relationships she genuinely wanted to work, she found herself asking a difficult question: Why did this pain keep showing up?
The men she had loved were good men, yet the same feelings of disconnection continued to surface. Then came a difficult truth she could no longer ignore: she was the common denominator. That realization shifted her focus from what was wrong with her partners to what was missing from our understanding of relationships. Instead of looking outward for answers, she began asking a different question: What skills had she never been taught?
This moment of radical honesty transformed her approach to relationships. Instead of blaming her partners, she asked what skills she was lacking. The answer became her life’s work. She discovered that the problem wasn’t about finding the right person—it was about having the right tools to build and maintain love with any good partner.
Most people enter second and third marriages carrying the same emotional baggage and using the same ineffective strategies that doomed their previous relationships. They haven’t learned how to create emotional safety, have vulnerable conversations without attacking, or understand their partner’s perspective without feeling threatened. They simply hope that changing the person will change the outcome. It doesn’t. You take yourself into every relationship, complete with your communication patterns, triggers, assumptions, and defensive mechanisms.
The Invisible Scripts of Childhood
Long before Michelle and her husband, Brian, met, they were both learning lessons about relationships. They weren’t reading books or taking classes; they were observing the homes they grew up in. Every couple brings a history into their marriage—what they witnessed, what hurt them, and the coping strategies that helped them survive early experiences. We assume our spouse sees conflict, interprets situations, and attaches the same meaning to events that we do, but they don’t. They see the relationship through the lens of their own experiences.
Michelle’s parents fought passionately, with raised voices, slammed doors, and high emotions. For much of her life, she believed that was simply what conflict looked like. Before marrying Brian, she could be fiery when upset, raising her voice and reacting in ways she isn’t proud of today. However, after her own divorces, she learned that yelling, name-calling, slammed doors, and emotional outbursts damage connection rather than creating it. She became determined not to repeat those patterns, working hard to become more intentional and “tame her dragon.”
Brian’s experience was completely different. He grew up in a home where he rarely saw his parents argue. There were no shouting matches, no slamming doors, and very little visible friction. Yet when he was twelve years old, his parents quietly sat him down and announced their divorce. Because his parents’ marriage ended despite the total absence of visible conflict, arguments felt inherently threatening to him. On a subconscious level, disagreements became associated with the immediate possibility of loss and abandonment.
The Trap of Shared Silence
Neither realized how much those childhood experiences would influence their partnership. Although they came from completely different backgrounds, they both arrived at the exact same defensive strategy: silence. Michelle became quiet because she didn’t want to lash out and unleash old, unhealthy patterns. Brian became quiet because his history taught him that silence was the only safe way to protect the relationship from collapsing. He would stop speaking to her for five days or more after conflicts, replicating the silence of his childhood home.
At first glance, their quiet home seemed healthy because they weren’t screaming or slamming doors. But the problem was that silence doesn’t always create peace; often, it just creates distance. They had mistaken the absence of arguing for the presence of connection. They had learned how to avoid unhealthy conflict, but they hadn’t yet learned how to engage in healthy conflict.
Many couples use withdrawal as a form of punishment without realizing the long-term damage it causes. When Brian gave Michelle the silent treatment in the early part of their marriage, it felt like punishment for expressing her feelings or needs. One day, she walked into his office and confronted the pattern directly. “I was like, no, no, this is childish. We’re not doing this. This is like, I don’t need to be punished.”
That moment marked a turning point because it named the behavior clearly. Brian wasn’t trying to punish her; he was protecting himself from conflict he didn’t know how to navigate. He was replicating the only model he’d ever seen, where disagreement meant impending disaster. He needed to learn that couples can disagree, even fight, and still love each other deeply.
The 3D Emotional Reset Framework
Love Literacy™ starts with understanding that love is really a choice, it’s a decision supported by the skills that love requires. As a marriage transformation coach, she guides her clients to realize that we are active participants who can choose loving behaviors regardless of our current emotional state. Hays developed what she calls the 3D Emotional Reset framework, a system that helps couples move from emotional reactivity to intentional response so that they can create greater understanding, emotional safety and connection through three specific steps: Define the Feeling, Delay the Reaction, and Decide Your Response.
The first step is to Define the Feeling without blaming. Not “you make me feel ignored,” but identifying the actual emotion: Am I feeling overwhelmed? Discounted? Unseen? This distinction matters because it shifts the focus from attacking your partner to understanding yourself.
The second step is to Delay the Reaction. When we’re triggered, we say things we don’t mean and create damage that requires extensive repair. Taking even a few moments to pause interrupts this destructive pattern. Hays learned this lesson personally when her husband seemed distracted one day. Her mind immediately created a narrative that he must be mad at something she did. She spent hours trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. When she finally asked him directly, his response surprised her: “I was thinking about the boat and what’s happening with the engine.”
The third step involves consciously choosing to Decide Your Response. You can choose to yell, shut down, or leave the room—or you can choose vulnerability and seek understanding. Early in her relationship with her husband, Brian, they were visiting family when he started cooking breakfast. She felt anger rising, triggered by memories of her past partner making messes she always had to clean up. Instead of attacking or silently fuming, she chose vulnerability: “I said, my past partner cooked breakfast and he would make a mess and I would have to clean up everything. And I’m not doing this again.” Brian understood. Now they cook bacon in the oven. A simple solution, but one that required honest communication to discover.
Creating Emotional Safety and Connection
One of the foundational skills Hays teaches is creating emotional safety—the kind of environment where both partners can be vulnerable without fear of judgment, rejection, or punishment. This safety doesn’t happen automatically. It’s built through consistent choices to respond with curiosity instead of defensiveness, to validate instead of dismiss, to remain present even when conversations become uncomfortable.
When emotional safety exists, couples can be vulnerable about the hard, uncomfortable parts of life together. As Hays notes, aging brings challenges many couples feel too ashamed to discuss. When partners can talk openly about bladder leaks, erectile dysfunction, or changing bodies without judgment, they build intimacy that transcends physical attraction. This depth of connection keeps couples together through life’s inevitable changes, while couples without these skills often seek new partners when reality intrudes on their romantic fantasy.
Why the Pattern Will Continue Without Intervention
The epidemic of failed marriages continues because society romanticizes feelings while ignoring the work love requires. People believe great relationships should feel effortless, that the right person will simply “get” them without explanation, that passion should remain constant. These beliefs set up every relationship for disappointment.
Children growing up in these environments learn the same dysfunctional patterns. They watch their parents avoid difficult conversations, let resentment build, blame each other for unhappiness, and ultimately give up. Then they enter their own relationships equipped with the same inadequate tools, perpetuating the cycle. Hays is passionate about breaking this pattern, not just for couples now but for future generations who deserve to see what healthy, resilient love actually looks like.
“We’re either creating love in our relationships or we’re eroding and destroying love,” she explains. “What are you going to choose?” Every interaction is either a deposit or a withdrawal. Yelling, shutting down, keeping score, assuming the worst—these all corrode the foundation. Choosing vulnerability, seeking understanding, extending grace, celebrating small moments—these build something that can weather any storm.
Through her columns, the Monarch for Love Podcast, social media presence, and direct coaching, Hays continues to expand her reach. She writes columns for two Florida publications, produces a weekly podcast with over 220 episodes across four seasons, and shares marriage tips on social media platforms.
For anyone facing disconnection in their relationship, considering divorce, or entering another marriage hoping things will be different this time, Hays offers a challenging truth: the problem isn’t your partner. It’s the absence of skills that turn love from a feeling into a lasting reality. Learn those skills, and everything changes. Ignore them, and you’ll join the 67% who discover that changing partners doesn’t solve the fundamental problem—the lack of Love Literacy™ that every relationship requires to thrive.
Michelle believes the world doesn’t need another conversation about finding love. It needs a conversation about learning it. People marry for love, but too often divorce for lack of skill. Through Love Literacy™, she is working to spark a global conversation about the relationship skills we were never taught.
