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How to Ruin Your Marriage: What No Marriage Book Will Tell You About How Good Marriages Are Lost
Paperback
Series: The Honest Marriage, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 20 2026
Pages: 182
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Book 1 of The Honest Marriage Series
Most marriages are not destroyed by bad people doing terrible things.
They are lost by ordinary people making ordinary mistakes - over ordinary time, in ordinary ways.
The affair that ended a marriage was usually the tenth year of emotional distance, not the first cause of it. The divorce that shocked everyone had been signalled, quietly and consistently, for half a decade before anyone filed the papers. The couple who seemed fine at Christmas and separated by Easter had not been fine at Christmas. They had simply become very practiced at the performance of fine.
How To Ruin Your Marriage names twenty-two of the techniques that actually end good marriages - with the deadpan precision of an instruction manual and the honesty of someone who has read the research and knows how these stories end.
The techniques include:
- How to be physically present and emotionally absent at the same time
- The fine art of the unfinished argument
- How to win every argument and lose your marriage
- The Calendar Collusion - turning your partnership into a logistics corporation
- The Performance of Fine - smiling so convincingly that no one asks if you mean it
- The Group Chat Husband - deploying all your warmth in the wrong room
- The In-Law Variable - the reliable contribution of extended family to marital entropy
- The Spiritual Bypass - using God, prayer, and letting go to avoid everything that actually requires your attention
- Mastering strategic helplessness
- How to exit without leaving
Written in deadpan comedy with serious intent, this book follows three couples - Brian and Vivian, Collins and Eunice, and Raymond and Priscilla - as they faithfully apply every technique available for quiet marital deterioration. None of them is a villain. All of them are uncomfortably familiar.
Each chapter opens with instruction. Each closes with one honest paragraph that drops the comedy entirely and names what is actually at stake.
At the very end, the Institution of Marriage itself has a word. It has been keeping records. It always does.
This book will make you laugh. It will also make you uncomfortable. That is the point.
How To Ruin Your Marriage is the first book in The Honest Marriage Series by Steven Ssamba. The companion volume, Cut Loose & Hold Tight: A 365-Day Marriage Devotional, maps what a healthy marriage looks like from the inside - one day at a time.
The devotional describes what to build. This book describes what happens when you don't.
For couples who want to laugh their way into an honest conversation. For individuals who suspect their marriage is doing something they haven't named yet. For anyone who picked this up thinking it was about someone else.
Steven Ssamba is the author of more than twenty books on relationships, personal development, and the interior life. He is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
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