Create the Marriage You Want in the New Year: Choosing a Direction

Before the New Year Starts, Ask Yourself This

Let me ask you a question, and I don't want you to answer it quickly. I want you to take a moment when you look back at this past year as a husband, not just the highlights or the moments you handled well, but the full picture, what grade would you give yourself, and I don't want you to base it on how hard you worked, how much you provided, or how stressful life was, but on how you actually showed up in your marriage.

How you listen when things were uncomfortable, how you handled conflict, when it would've been easier to shut down or push back, how present you were emotionally, mentally, when your wife needed you, and how often you chose connection instead of distance. How often you led with clarity instead of reacting in the moment.

And then here's the harder part of that question. If your wife were grading the exact same year, what do you think she'd say? Now, most men don't slow down long enough to ask that. We just roll forward. We tell ourselves we'll do better next year, that things will calm down, that we'll have more time, more energy, more patience later.

And before we know it, another year has passed and the marriage looks mostly the same. Not worse, but definitely not meaningfully different either. So here's the real question I want you sitting with. As we head into a new year, have you actually decided what kind of husband you wanna be next year or are you just hoping it'll work out ?

In this episode, I wanna help you pause and get intentional. I'm going to walk you through eight questions that can help you create a clear vision for your marriage in the year ahead. Four for you to answer on your own, and four for you and your wife to answer together. And these questions aren't abstract questions.

They're practical, they're grounded, and they're the same ones my wife and I used at the beginning of this past year and was our year perfect. No, it definitely wasn't. Did I still struggle at times? I absolutely did. But our marriage is more connected, more honest, and more aligned than it was a year ago, and that didn't happen by accident.

By the end of this episode, you'll have a simple, concrete way to look at where you are, where you want to go, and how to start moving in that direction without overwhelm and without pressure. Stick around. You don't wanna miss this one.

What Last Year Taught Me About Vision in Marriage

Welcome to Better Husband, the podcast that helps you answer the question, how can I be a better husband? I'm Angelo Santiago, a men's marriage and relationship coach, and every week I bring you practical insights to help you strengthen your marriage and become the best husband you can be.

Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you might remember that about a year ago I did an episode very similar to this one. It was an end of the year episode where I invited men to slow down and actually think about the marriage they wanted to create in the year ahead. In that episode, I share a story.

From a trip with my wife, my son, and I took to Belize in the summer of 2024. On paper it should have been perfect, a beautiful place, warm weather, no real schedule, the kind of vacation you expect to feel relaxing and connecting just by being there. And yet, somewhere in the middle of that trip, we found ourselves arguing more than either of us expected.

It was that familiar tension that creeps in when things have been building quietly for a while. Old frustrations, missed expectations, the type of conversations that don't feel urgent day to day, but suddenly show up when life finally slows down. And one night we sat down and we talked about it. And instead of circling the same arguments, we asked a different kind of question.

What do we actually want this marriage to look like? How do we want it to feel? What are we missing right now? What needs to change? And that conversation did something really important. It gave us direction for the rest of that year. And at the beginning of 2025, we didn't just hope things would continue to improve.

We didn't assume connection would magically happen because we cared about each other. We actually took time to vision our marriage together and to get honest about how each of us needed to show up. Now, here we are. At the end of 2025, and I wanna be really clear about something, this year was not perfect.

Just like you, I still struggled. Just like you, I still had moments where I got reactive, where I pulled away, where I didn't show up the way I wanted to, but our marriage is better than it was a year ago, and not because we learned some new secret trick, but because we were intentional about the direction we were moving in.

We were more connected. We were clear about what mattered, and we were on the same team. And that's why I wanted to come back to this conversation again. Because even if you answered these questions last year, you are not the same man you were then. Your wife isn't the same woman. Your marriage has shifted, grown, been tested, and shaped by another year of life.

And if you haven't answered these questions before, then I'm excited to share them with you. So as we stand on the edge of a new year, I wanna invite you to slow down. Not to judge yourself, not to beat yourself up, but to get clear. For the rest of this episode, I'm going to walk you through eight questions, four for you to answer on your own, to create a personal vision as a husband, and four for you and your wife to answer together to create a shared vision for your marriage.

These are the same questions my wife and I used, and I've seen them help countless men move from drifting into the new year to stepping in with intention. Let's get into it first by breaking down why these questions matter so much.

Why Marriages Stay the Same When You Live on Autopilot

Now most men don't intentionally coast in their marriage. What usually happens is much simpler than that.

Life gets busy, work takes more out of you than you expected. Family responsibilities pile up and before you know it, your marriage starts getting treated the same way you treat your inbox, you respond to whatever's in front of you, and you move on to the next thing. So if something feels off between you and your wife, you address it in the moment.

If there's tension, you try to smooth it over. If there's an argument, you patch it up and get back to the day to day, and that becomes your normal day to day life. The problem is that a marriage can't really grow on that kind of rhythm If the only time you look at the relationship is when something isn't working then you're always reacting, and over time you end up living inside the same patterns, even if you're both good people with good intentions.

Most of the men I work with aren't in a full blown crisis. They're still together. They still care. They're building a life side by side, but there's this feeling that something's missing and it's hard to explain because nothing looks obviously broken.

What's usually missing isn't love. It's direction, and this is the part that matters. Most of us have some form of direction in other areas of our life. If you want to get in shape, you don't just hope it happens. You change what you eat, how you train, how you recover. And if you wanna make more money, you don't just wait for to show up, you make a plan.

You make decisions, you take steps. But in marriage, a lot of couples do the opposite. They simply assume the relationship will somehow stay strong without ever getting clear about what they want it to become. That's why visioning matters. It's a way of stepping out of reaction mode. It forces you to slow down long enough to ask things like, what are we actually building here and how do I want my wife to feel when she's with me?

When you take the time to reflect like this, you also start seeing yourself more clearly. You notice where you've been showing up well, and you notice where you've been on autopilot. You recognize the habits that have been repeating, and you realize you've been living them so long, they feel normal. And once you have that clarity, you get to make a decision on what to do next.

You also have that clarity as an anchor to return to when life speeds up again. Especially when stress hits, especially when you feel yourself slipping into old patterns, a clear vision becomes a reference point. It's a reminder of who you want to be, and the marriage you want to build, even on the weeks where you're tired and stretched thin.

Now there's an important distinction here and it's what sets up the rest of this episode. There's your personal direction, the kind of husband you wanna be, and there's the shared direction, what the two of you want your marriage to look and feel like together. You need both and you don't need to solve everything that feels challenging in one conversation to start moving into a new direction.

Personal Growth Isn’t Enough Without Shared Direction

Let me take one quick moment to talk about why a shared vision is just as important as your own vision for the husband you want to become. Getting clear on your own is necessary, but if it never turns into something shared, it usually falls apart. When men start thinking about vision in their marriage, they tend to drift into one of two traps.

The first is relying on a conversation to do the work. You sit down together, you talk about what you want. You feel hopeful in the moment, and then. Nothing really changes because there's no personal ownership underneath it. The second is doing all the work. Internally. You decide you're going to grow. You listen to podcasts, you reflect, you try to show up better, but you never turn that growth into something you and your wife are building together.

Neither one works on its own. If you only focus on the shared conversation, it's easy to leave that talk feeling motivated, and then quietly fall back into the same habits a week later. You can end up with a shared vision on paper, but no real ownership in daily life.

And if you only focus on your personal growth, you can do a lot of internal work and still feel disconnected because the relationship itself never gets a chance to become something the two of you are intentionally doing together. This is why I want you to think about this in two layers.

The first layer is personal ownership. Before you sit down with your wife, you need to know what you are taking responsibility for, not what you wish she would do, not what you want her to understand, what you are actually willing to change in yourself, and how you want to show up differently over time.

That kind of clarity changes the tone of the conversation. You're not walking in with a hidden agenda. You're not trying to get her to agree with your plan. You're showing up with a steadier sense of yourself, and that matters more than most men realize.

The second layer is shared direction. Marriage isn't something you do alone. Even if you become a better listener, even if you stay calmer in conflict, even if you put in real effort, there still needs to be a place where the two of you talk about what you want the marriage to feel like and what you're actually working toward together.

Because when there's no shared direction, it's easy for both people to assume they're on the same page until one of you realizes you've been carrying a completely different set of expectations. That's where resentment starts showing up, not because either person is wrong, but because things were never spoken clearly and agreed on.

A shared vision doesn't mean you agree on everything. It means you're willing to talk honestly about what matters and create something you can both point to when life gets busy again. And that's what this episode is built to help you do.

In the next part, I'm going to walk you through the four questions to answer on your own, and I want you to take your time with them, write down real answers. Let them show you where you are and where you want to grow.

And after that we'll talk about the four questions for you and your wife to answer together. When the timing feels right, this will be your chance to bring more direction and more teamwork into the year ahead. So let's start with the questions for you

Four Questions to Clarify the Husband You Want to Be

If you're listening to this while driving or working out, or anything that doesn't allow you to write down notes, I don't want you to feel like you need to memorize anything. All eight questions we're talking about today are written out in one place. You can go to betterhusbandquestions.com, download the PDF and come back to this when you're ready to actually sit with it.

That's how this works best. When you give it your attention, instead of trying to do it in your head, these first four questions are for you to answer on your own. And that's not because you're supposed to have everything figured out before you talk to your wife. It's just about clarity. When you've taken the time to reflect on where you are and where you want to grow, the conversation that follows tends to be steadier and less reactive.

So the first question is simple. What do I want my marriage to look and feel like in 2026? This is all about imagining the experience of the relationship you want to be living inside of. How conversations feel, how connected you are during ordinary days, how conflict shows up and how it moves through instead of lingering. When men answer this honestly, they often realize they've never actually articulated this to themselves before. So do that and get really clear on what the year ahead looks like in your marriage.

The second question brings the focus closer to home. What behaviors or habits do I need to stop, start, or improve to contribute to a stronger marriage? Now, this isn't an exercise in self-criticism. It's an exercise in awareness. Where do you tend to get stuck? Where do you pull back when things get uncomfortable? Where are you inconsistent in ways that slowly wear things down, even if that's not your intention. Don't try to solve for everything here. You just need to be honest with where you are right now.

Now, the third question shifts your attention towards how your efforts actually land. How can I be more intentional about showing love and appreciation to my wife? Most men care deeply about their marriage. The gap usually isn't effort, it's attunement. This question invites you to look at what makes your wife feel truly valued and loved, not just what makes sense in your head. It's about being thoughtful and consistent.

And the fourth question asks you to step outside your own perspective and envision your marriage through hers. If I imagine my wife's ideal version of our marriage, what would it include and how can I align with her vision? This one is all about practicing empathy and stepping into her shoes for a moment. Letting yourself consider her experience without immediately defending yours. When men take this question seriously, it often softens how they listen later on when answering questions together because they've already spent time considering her side before the conversation even starts.

Now, these four questions aren't meant to overwhelm you. They're meant to ground you. They help you get clear about who you want to be and how you want to show up before you invite your wife into the process. Once you've spent time with them, the next step isn't to present your answers as conclusions. It's to move into a shared conversation with more awareness and less tension. That's what the next four questions are for.

Four Questions to Create a Shared Vision Together

Once you've spent time with your own answers, the next step isn't to convince your wife of anything, it's to invite her into a conversation. These next four questions are meant to be answered together, but that doesn't mean they need to happen all at once or in a perfectly planned setting.

What matters more than timing is tone. Yes, you can plan a nice date where you each enjoy each other's company and dive into these, or you can do them on a couch after the kids have gone to bed. The important thing is you actually make space for them. Don't rush through them and make sure to write down your answers, because you'll want to go back to these throughout the year ahead.

I also want you to know that it's not about fixing your marriage in one conversation. It's about creating space to talk about it with more honesty and less pressure.

So the first question is intentionally simple. What are three things we're grateful for in our marriage right now, and how can we build on those in the year ahead?

This matters more than most people realize. Starting with gratitude changes the energy of the conversation. It reminds both of you that there's something worth protecting here. It shifts the focus away from what's wrong and towards to what's already working, even if it feels small.

The second question looks forward. What shared goals or dreams do we wanna pursue together? And this one isn't about agreeing on everything. It's about letting each other see what you're hoping for. Sometimes that's something big. Sometimes it's something very ordinary. What matters is that it's spoken out loud instead of assumed. You also get to discuss what it looks like to work together towards those shared goals or dreams.

And third question takes a bit more care. How can we improve how we handle conflict and communicate better? This is where many couples get stuck, so I wanna be very clear about something. This is not the place to tell each other what the other person needs to do. The moment it turns into instruction, blame or correction, the conversation usually shuts down.

This question works best when each of you stays on your own side, talking about what you struggle with, what you need. What's been hard for you to say. That kind of honesty creates far more movement than pointing out flaws ever will listen openly. Listen to understand. Don't listen to defend yourself.

The fourth question brings it all together. What areas of our marriage need the most attention right now, and how will we work as a team to address them? For this one, it's not about making a long list, it's about identifying what matters most right now. What is the priority? What, if tended to, would make the biggest impact on how your marriage feels day to day? Once you identify it, how do you wanna focus on it together? What are the next right steps and when can you both start moving forward in that direction?

As you go through these questions, know that sometimes these conversations stay contained within the questions, and sometimes they open the door to something deeper.

That's a good thing. If something important comes up that isn't captured here. Let it take up the space. Don't confine yourself to just these four questions. Ask your wife, is there anything else that she wants for the two of you to talk about or envision together and consider for yourself, do you have anything you want to talk about or envision together?

That's often where the real work begins and the real opportunity for connection.

Action Steps: Your Next Steps From Here

Before we wrap up this episode, I want to give you a simple way to put this into practice. The first step is go to betterhusbandquestions.com and download the printable PDF. The link is also in the show notes of this episode. Print them out or save them somewhere you can actually sit with them. This isn't something you wanna rush through or answer in your head while you're distracted.

The second step is once you have them take time to answer the first four questions on your own. Give yourself space to think and write honestly. Don't aim for the right answers. Aim for the real ones. The clarity you get here comes from being truthful with yourself, not from trying to sound a certain way.

Third, invite your wife into the process. When the timing feels right. Don't feel like you need to make it a big conversation or turn it into a serious meeting. You can simply let her know that you've been reflecting on the year and you'd like to answer a few questions together about your marriage. Keep it relaxed and pressure free.

And finally, fourth, make room for whatever comes up next. These questions are meant to start a conversation, not contain it. If something important opens up that isn't covered here, stay with it. Ask your wife if there's anything she wants the two of you to talk through or envision together as you look ahead.

Now, you don't have to do all of this at once. What matters is that you begin and that you approach it with intention. But whatever you do, don't let this opportunity slip away.

A Final Thought as You Head Into the New Year

As you head into a new year, I wanna leave you with this. Your marriage doesn't change just because time passes and things are good enough. It changes when you slow down long enough to decide how you want to show up and what you want to build together.

You don't need to have everything figured out because nobody does, not even me. And you definitely don't need to be perfect. You just need to be willing to look honestly at where you are and take the next steps towards where you want to be. These questions aren't about judging the past or putting pressure on the future. They're about giving yourself and your marriage a direction.

If you're listening to this, it means you care about your marriage and about the man you're becoming inside of it. That already matters more than you might realize. Take the time, have the conversations, stay present with the process.

I truly hope that you and your wife and your family have an amazing New Year's, and let this be the beginning of the new chapter in your life and in your marriage. I'm Angela Santiago. You're listening to Better Husband, and I'll see you on the next episode.