No couple gets married looking forward to being unhappy in their marriage. But no couple avoids times in marriage where one or both spouses feel unsatisfied, restless, lonely, or just plain unhappy. Does that mean they have fallen out of love? Should they doubt their commitment? What should an unhappy couple do about their unhappiness?

If you come from a background of family brokenness, I would like to offer encouragement as you look ahead to your wedding day. Brides and grooms—choose wedding customs and traditions that are meaningful to you. You have the freedom to make the choices that express who you are and what you hope for your future marriage and how you want to remember or to celebrate your past.

The Catechism says that “divorce brings grave harm . . . to children traumatized by the separation of their parents and often torn between them” (2385). Traumatized is not a word to employ lightly, and its usage indicates the Church’s acknowledgment that divorce has deep and long-lasting effects on children that deserve attention and healing.

One common ACOD challenge is that typical sibling-to-sibling relationship “issues” can be impacted by the family upheaval, and relationships between step-siblings bring fresh challenges, which sometimes can make a bad thing (divorce) worse and can cause even further alienation and discouragement between existing and new family members.

May God, for Whom nothing is impossible, help you to navigate all of the relationships in your life so that you may be fully alive as a person, in your relationships with others, and in your relationship with Him.

Let us keep in mind as we examine these things that the intention of Christ is always health, always unity, always love, and always truth. When we name our dysfunction for what it is and speak the truth in love, we honor the self that God gave us and in turn, the Creator of our self is delighted.

The inner critic is a very demanding, uninvited voice in your head that chastises you for being inept, bad, or deficient. It undermines your self-confidence and increases your self-doubt. ... So what can we do about our internal critic?

For adult children of divorce or separation, we often struggle with the extremes of boundaries: when our person becomes overly entangled with other persons in our family, this is unhealthy; it can be equally unhealthy to completely cut everyone out of our lives because we think this is the only way of preserving ourselves.

The year we got married, Dan’s parents completed their divorce proceedings, which had begun more than a decade earlier when they separated while he was in middle school. It felt ironic and deeply sad that we were beginning our life together as his parents were definitively ending theirs. And it caused some anxiety in us: Could we make it work? Would we last?