Can AI Save a Marriage - Episode 333

Welcome And Why Wellness Includes Love Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Cruz. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Why Long Marriages Matter For Longevity Sandy Kruse 1:31 Hi, everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I'm going to talk about can AI Save a Marriage?

This is going to be a super fun, fun podcast. Well, maybe not fun, but informative and a little bit fun. And I am going to ask you to go back to episode 324. I recorded about protecting a long marriage after 50.

The reason I record a lot about relationships is because our relationships are critically important to our longevity. And I talk a lot about how to age better, but I speak about it from outside of the box and the context of what you see on repeat in all of the podcast shows with a coupon code or a discount or referral to a therapist after. Much of what I speak about comes from the heart, comes from wisdom, comes from experience. I am a registered holistic nutritionist.

I have done training and mindset. I have numerous certifications. And my my actual credibility is that it's a diploma as an RHN, which is in holistic health, W H O L E. And it is not a certification.

It is an actual diploma. It's a two-year college diploma. A lot of people will call themselves holistic nutritionists, nutritionists, whatever it is, terminology, but they don't have the credentials. I've been in this space for a very long time, nine years talking about health and wellness and nutrition.

And over six years of my podcast, I come at you without bias. The only bias you're going to hear is what my opinion is. Okay. But I'm not going to be trying to sell you something and taking you down a funnel for you to buy a supplement or do this.

And sure, I might do a course one day because damn, I've got so much knowledge in this brain of mine. But really, I come to you always passion over profit. So go back to that episode because I speak about marriages from a perspective of those of us who have been married for a very long time now, over 25 years, over 30 years, whatever it is. My parents just, I think they're hitting 62 or 63 years in September.

And I believe that our relationship with our spouse is clearly one of the most important ones. And here's something that I actually just heard today that I'm going to talk, just leave you with Loyalty Self Work And Knowing When To Leave Sandy Kruse 4:22 this to think about. Because a lot of times people without having any major problems, and I am going to talk about gray divorce here, I'm going to, which is over 50. And people will be like, I don't know.

I just, I just don't feel it anymore. I'm not in love anymore. Kids have left the house. And here's something super interesting that I heard.

If you're not sure whether, and this is not advice, by the way, and I'm not giving you marriage advice or therapy advice, these are breadcrumbs for you to take to your own practitioner as always, never health advice. However, this is what I heard. If that person doesn't encourage you to grow, to be a better version of you, to keep living and fulfilling your passion, and it's got to be both ways, and you do the same for them, then maybe that's a moment where you have to reconsider. So I am probably one of the most loyal people you'll ever meet.

I have friendships with some girlfriends from age five, some teenage years, but I also have trouble leaving relationships because I a hundred percent have a very soft heart and I make excuses for people and I make excuses for people's behavior. However, I've learned a lot through a lot of internal work. So this is when you always have to turn inward first in order to get the answer that serves your greatest, highest good. And I do, and I have done, I've always been a very big, you know, thinker, but I've done so much deep self-reflection where in the last year and a half or so, I've really grown.

And I'm not acting out of fear anymore. And I'm acting in what's best for my greatest and highest good. So I have no problem leaving relationships or friendships if it's damaging to me. And now I know it's not coming from a victim consciousness.

I know when something is actually hurting me. So that's the first thing I will say. Go and listen to that episode because you might be surprised by what you hear, because I bring in unbiased research that probably isn't as sexy as what this therapist is saying with a million followers, or that therapist is saying on TikTok. So I really come at it from an honest point of view and from a point of view of wisdom.

And then I always bring in the science, so the research and the soul into everything I do. So with that, I am gonna ask you to hit subscribe and follow wherever you see Sandy K Nutrition. Because I I almost feel like I'm a lot of times alone on this island of wellness because I'm I'm not giving you information to make a buck. And that's a really big difference uh between me and a lot of other podcasters and a lot of other people in this space of health and wellness.

Like, listen, we gotta live, we gotta earn money somehow. And you know, some do it with more integrity than others, but I'm gonna ask you to follow me because that's how you support me. Because I am one of the very few independent independent podcasters out there. I'm not saying that I wouldn't align with a podcast group.

I would if we align. Um, and I would with sponsors if we align and if it's with integrity. That's my big thing. So, and then the other thing, I'd like to hear from more of you because I'm so grateful for all of you who come to me and listen to me every single week.

Some of you for over six years, you've been around. Some of you have been following me on Instagram for nine years. So I am gonna say thank you. I am also gonna say I would love to hear from you.

Drop a comment wherever you're listening, watching, follow me on Instagram. It's at Sandy Knutrition everywhere, TikTok. I've kind of been slow with YouTube lately just because it's a lot of work. I do a lot of this on Using AI Without Losing Your Mind Sandy Kruse 8:48 my own.

Now, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an opinion on AI because I heard this Italian physicist, and I can't remember his name, but he invented the microprocessor and he said this, and I'm gonna give him creds for saying this because I was like, wow, he's so right. AI can either make a person dumber or it can make a person who's already extremely smart, even smarter. So I I actually I'm pretty proud of you know five years of post-secondary education, numerous certifications. I've created this platform all on my own.

I didn't have anybody to teach me. I use AI, but the way and I'm also a writer, I'm also an English literature graduate. So I've got a lot of the, I guess, the the foundation there to use AI in a way in which it's just going to make me better. Not to rely on it, not to make it only like, oh my God, I know nothing about this.

I gotta put something out about it because I'm copying everybody else's content. And I'm sure we see a lot of that. So it's more about, you know, how can we utilize AI to help our lives versus how can we rely on AI so that we don't have to do anything anymore? So that's kind of where I'm coming at.

I am not anti-AI, I believe it's an important tool. And I also believe that the person behind it, meaning you, you who's guiding it, your answers are only gonna be as good as your own knowledge is. So, with that, I'm gonna get started on this. The Real Question Is Communication Sandy Kruse 10:43 So the title, can an AI save a marriage?

It's a little bit of a trick because everybody wants to ask, you know, that simple question. By the end of this podcast, I think you're gonna agree with me that no, it can't. A machine cannot save a marriage. So I'm giving you the answer right off the bat, right at the beginning.

So you don't say, oh, Sandy, that's just clickbait. So the question was never really can I AI save a marriage? Because the more I sat with this question, the more I realized that the whole thing hinges on something else entirely. And it's not about the marriage, it's always about the communication.

And then once I really dug deep into that, you know, I had to keep going. So this episode is not for newlyweds. It's not, it's for the Gen Xers, the ones who've been married a long time, 20 years, 30 years, the ones who maybe don't even fight anymore and quietly wonder if that's worse. Because there's a new presence showing up in long marriages right now.

It doesn't sleep, it never gets tired of you. And people who've been married for decades are starting to confide in it more and more than they confide in the person lying right next to them. I'm gonna look at that honestly today. So that's the AI, science and soul, like always.

The Rise Of Gray Divorce Sandy Kruse 12:12 So let me start with what's actually happening to long marriages, because not many people talk about this. While the overall divorce rate in North America seems to have been falling down by roughly a third since 1980, one group is going in the opposite direction. Sociologists Susan Brown and I Fen Lin at Bowling Green State University coined the term for it. It's called the Gray Divorce Revolution.

I did talk about it on my other podcast that I mentioned. So, in age 50 and older, roughly this doubled between 1990 and 2010. By 2019, more than a third of everyone getting divorced, about 36%, was 50 or older. And the share of adults 65 and up who are divorced has tripled since 1990.

It's the only age group whose divorce rate is still climbing. And here in Canada, Statistics Canada has tracked the very same rise among couples 55 and older. Now, we have to take into effect that the younger people are getting married later or not getting married at all. So take that into effect.

This is why research is always, you know, you can you can sway it somehow. So now here's the part that matters for this episode. Researcher Jocelyn Crowley interviewed people who had gone through these late life divorces and asked them why. And the answers weren't affairs, and they weren't, you know, some dramatic betrayal.

Over and over, it was this. We grew apart after the kids left. It started to feel emotionally empty. We stopped really talking decades of slow distance about it.

Sit with that. The thing that ends most long marriages, most isn't a catastrophe, it's communication breakdown so gradual that you don't notice that you're strangers until the house goes quiet. And I want to prove to you just how much the communication is the marriage, because there's a study that recognized how I think about every argument I've ever had. The Three Minute Start That Predicts Divorce Sandy Kruse 14:44 Sybil Carreri, I think that's how you pronounce it, and John Gottman at the University of Washington published it in the Journal of Family Process in 1999.

They brought couples in and recorded them having a 15-minute conversation about a real conflict. And they found that they could predict over a six-year period who would end up divorced, using only the first three minutes, just the opening. Now let that land. So it's not even the topic of the fight, not how big the problem was, it's how you start the hard conversation, predicts how it ends, and it often predicts the marriage.

Three minutes. So it was never really about the dishes or the money or the in-laws, it was about the first three minutes. It was about the words. Now, now that I've got you hooked, before I get into AI, I have to tell you the truth about the thing that we usually send these couples towards because it's more sobering than anyone admits.

I'm Couples Therapy Outcomes And The Six Year Delay Sandy Kruse 16:17 not anti-therapy, so note that good therapists can change lives. But I read the actual outcome research going back to the people who built the field. Okay. Neil Jacobson, one of the founders of behavioral couples therapy, concluded with Andrew Christensen back in 1996 that roughly 50% success rate is characteristic of marital therapy in general.

Not one weak method, the whole field. They were helping about half the couples who walked in the door. And of the couples who do improve, research by Christensen Jacobson and Babcock found that 30 to 50 percent relapse within one to two years. Snyder Wills and Grady Fletcher tracked couples four years out and found 38% had divorced.

Okay, I'm gonna pause here. So you got that. And you'll hear 70 to 75% thrown around for emotion, it's called emotionally focused therapy. But those aren't efficacy trials, hand-picked couples and expert therapists in ideal conditions.

That's not the exhausted couple driving to a Tuesday night office after 25 years of marriage, right? And the reason this kind of breaks my heart a little is this the average couple waits about six years from the time serious problems begin before they seek any help at all. As one clinician put it, they don't call the fire department until the flames are already coming through the roof. But here's what I want you to notice strip couples therapy down to its engine.

And what is it mostly teaching? Communication, right? How to say the hard thing without that hard or harsh setup. How to be heard, and part of why the gains don't hold is brutally simple.

You cannot practice a therapist at two in the morning when a fight is actually happening, which is actually where this little AI miracle machine walks AI As A Translator For Better Words Sandy Kruse 18:48 in. Because it turns out AI uh AI is actually a poor therapist, but genuinely a good translator. And the distinction is this entire episode. Okay.

So a 2025 study by Collins and colleagues in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that the single thing AI does best is wording something hard, helping you say the difficult thing when you're too flooded to find the words yourself. And here's the other thing I'm gonna say. And this is, you know, just as an aside, maybe, maybe, just maybe, this is why it's good to take a step back before you react as well. Okay, I find it fairly objective to use AI, and yes, sometimes it does lean a little bit to my side, but leaning to my side isn't the whole story because what it actually does when I bring it a sentence dripping with 15 years of grievance is hand it back to me softened.

They soften everything. It takes you never listened to me and turns it into I feel unheard. And I need you to hear this one. Same truth, completely different door.

One will start a war, one hopefully will start a conversation. Now let's go back to those three minutes in that study. If the way you open up a hard conversation can predict your divorce, then a tool that helps you soften your setup on demand at two in the morning, the patient, as many times as you need, is not doing therapy at all. It's not fixing your childhood, it's just handing you better words at the exact moment the research says where those words matter most.

So that is the crux. It's not about the depth of the therapy, it's about the words you use to communicate. AI can't go into your wounds, but it can change the door that you walk through. And in a long marriage where so many fights are just the same true feeling delivered through the wrong door again and again and again for decades, a better translator might change more than you could ever think.

And I think it works for a reason the research can actually name. In January 2025, there were some researchers at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, published a study in communications psychology. Across four experiments, people rated AI's responses as about 16% more compassionate than human ones, and preferred them roughly 68% of the time. Against trained crisis responders, even when they knew a machine who wrote it.

And a Harvard Business study in the Journal of Consumer Research found the mechanism was almost heartbreakingly simple. It was the feeling of being heard. Who doesn't want to be heard and seen and loved, right? So for the women 30 years into a marriage who stopped feeling heard around year 12, of course, this feels like water in a desert.

And I won't shame that for one second. If a screen is the first thing in years that made you feel understood, that's not a flaw in you. That's information about your marriage, but it could also be information about how you've been communicating. The same warmth is a trap if you use it in the wrong way.

You know, I'm wearing my t-shirt. It's all about the balance. You probably can't see it, even it's lower, the saying. But everything in life is about balance.

I made this t-shirt when I started my podcast in 2020, and I still stand by When AI Turns Into The Wedge Sandy Kruse 23:20 it. In March of 2025, the MIT MIT Media Lab and OpenAI ran a four-week trial led by Kathy Fang. 981 people. Higher daily use of AI correlated with more loneliness, more emotional dependence, and less time with real people.

The researchers were careful to say it's correlation, not causation. But in the journal of new media and society, they there was a deeper problem that was named. It was called cruel companionship, a thing engineered to feel like intimacy while never being able to give you a real reciprocal relationship back. So here the here's the line that I want you to hold.

It stops being a translator and it becomes the wedge. Use it to find your words, never to fire them. It has no independent needs, no skin in the game, and it will happily help you win an argument that you actually maybe needed to lose. And here's one more line it cannot cross.

Nervous System Co Regulation A Screen Cannot Replace Sandy Kruse 24:52 And this is my nervous system lens. A long marriage isn't just shared history, it's two nervous systems that have spent decades learning to correlate, co-regulate each other. His footsteps in the hall, dropping your heart rate, a body you've slept beside for 10,000 nights. That's not a sentiment, that's physiology and energy.

A screen can hand you the perfect paragraph. It cannot put a warm hand on your back. It cannot downregulate a nervous system that's been braced for 30 years because it doesn't have one. So let me be clear about this boundary.

AI can write you the bridge, it cannot walk across it for you. Your words are only ever a bridge, and you still have to cross it in your body to his or to hers, whoever's listening. Can AI save a marriage? I'm gonna come back.

You know, words are so so important to me. I am an English literature graduate, so I'm pretty good at this stuff. So what I and I'm also pretty good at self-reflection and and doing the deeper work. No, AI cannot save a marriage, and it never could.

But I don't think that that's really the question here, because marriages aren't usually lost over the problems, as I've explained in this research. They're lost in the first three minutes over and over and over again, in that harsh setup, in the words that came out as an attack when they were only ever this plea to be heard. And communication, that's the only thing that will save this marriage. Not the machine, the communication.

And I'm speaking of regular marriages, I'm not speaking of abuse situations or anything of that respect. And for the Practical Script Help And A Short Email Tip Sandy Kruse 27:04 first time in human history, every one of us has a patient, tireless, endlessly available tutor for the one skill that many of us have never been taught. I've talked about this in my podcast with Gen X Men, by the way. I want you to go and listen to that and maybe send it to your spouse as well.

I will say AI might be a tutor in that communication, but it will not save your marriage. It can teach you the words. You still have to be brave enough to walk into the room and say them to him. So if you've been pouring your heart out into a screen because the person you married stopped listening, let the screen teach you the words and then go back and have the conversation.

Not with the machine, with him or her, little by little, not too much. Because the other thing I did talk about in my other podcast about Gen X men, sometimes just a little trickle is all their nervous system can handle at a time. But I just wanted to bring this to you because I think it's a really important topic. And I think more and more people will turn to it.

But you need to understand really, it all boils down to that communication. I am going to give you one more little tip. If with your partner you keep rolling around the exact, exact same cycle, same fight, same argument, same dispute, same grievance, I'm going to ask you to take a step back and write short, can't be too long, a short email instead, which sometimes, not always, will serve to open up the conversation. And that is where you can maybe use EI AI to soften your words, make sure that you get your point across and you say it in a way that you're not attacking your partner.

Anyway, I just want to thank you guys. I thank you so, so much for being here each and every week. I come here every week for you, science and soul always. So please hit subscribe.

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And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.