As a child of divorce, I did everything in my power to maintain a strong, healthy marriage. I accidentally sabotaged it.

Along the way, I latched onto a very specific theme I heard them say in multiple explanations: “We never dealt with the small stuff.” Of course as a young child, I thought that meant they didn’t agree which cereal to buy. But as a young woman, I realized they meant that letting things build up — from small irritations to recurrent fights and incidents that could create resentment — was like poison for a relationship.

So, I set out to get it right. And failed in the other direction.

We put in the work early

My husband Justin and I have been married for 12 years. We have five children and have built the life we dreamed of. In fact, we started out doing weekly premarital counseling with our pastor.

We were on a mission to have a different outcome from not only half of marriages that end in divorce but also all of my parents’ and stepparents’ marriages that did. We were ready to do the work.

And it was, in fact, work. We dug through trauma and doubt, different views of marriage, and how to deal with the looming threat of divorce as an option during the “lows” that would inevitably come in our relationship.

We vowed to air out difficult topics, including those nagging “small” topics that we never wanted to grow too big. We also vowed to go to marriage therapy monthly — as prevention — to ensure we always had a line of communication and a mediator available for when things might get dicey. It was a strong start.

I focused too much on the small things

A few years into our marriage, a different dynamic developed. I was the one always bringing up issues to discuss, and my husband was the one always letting little things go.

At first, we thought this was just our personalities — with me being analytical, data-driven, and a little too obsessed with research. On the other hand, he’s carefree, full of grace, and forgiving to a fault.

Before long, it became a point of contention. “Why are you picking on this small thing?” he’d ask. “Because I care about our marriage and don’t want it to become a big thing!” I’d shoot back.

Over the years, I gained a reputation for being hypercritical and even started to resent what I perceived as his lack of effort to troubleshoot and “solve” small things before they grew.

My strategy backfired

The only small problem that became big was my own attempt to prevent the pain divorce brought as a child. Now, one of the main gripes in my marriage was that I picked too many battles, ultimately creating more conflict as I tried to prevent it.

I was like a detective trying to sleuth out which of our smaller issues would be the “the one” to bring us down. In the process, I was doing more damage than good.

I had to unlearn preventing pain. I had to rethink my strategy before it became the very thing that broke us. What ultimately helped was to zoom out from my parents’ experience — which didn’t have to be my own — and look at what really causes divorce throughout the population. I learned quickly that the top causes of divorce weren’t a build-up of tiny offenses but infidelity, financial problems, violence, domestic abuse, and lack of family support. I also learned one of the main causes was “too much conflict and arguing” — something I’d introduced into our marriage while trying to save it before it was in trouble.

In the end, I learned much more than just marriage skills. I couldn’t prevent pain, separation, or all the things in life that keep us up at night. In fact, in preventing it, I almost caused it. The lasting legacy of divorce was alive and well in my marriage, as hard as I tried to push it out. Luckily, when my own spouse said “for better or worse,” he meant even when I have to work through my divorce trauma to ultimately figure out we aren’t actually broken at all.