In America, about every 13 seconds a couple divorces.
That’s over 46,000 divorces a week. That’s a tidy sum of legal billing hours for the attorneys involved. Adding to the financial pain is the emotional trauma of the couple and children going through the process, as well as the impact on extended family and friends. It can be a brutally difficult and stressful time.
Here’s what you need to know:
Most marriages can be saved and worst case, improved.
How do I know? I have been working with couples to resolve relationship challenges for seven years, and so far have not had one couple divorce. While every situation is unique, in my experience, people simply don’t know what to do to sustain love and passion in their relationships. Who taught you how to deepen the connection in your marriage? Who demonstrated to you how to quickly resolve conflicts with your partner? Who told you the things to avoid doing? Who gave you your understanding of the best ways to sustain and rekindle passion?
Growing up, most of us had role models for happy marriages that were less than ideal. And role models matter because we know that children of divorce have much higher rates of divorce when they ultimately marry. How many of us wanted the day to day happiness of our parents’ marriage? Did you want to experience the level of joy that your parents felt when they were together?
What are your children learning from you? Whether we like it or not, our children are influenced by our relationship strategies just as we have been influenced by our parents. Will your impact as a role model increase or decrease the chances of your children’s marriage happiness?
Many in the media say marriage is the problem. Is it true?
As you know, most divorce statistics indicate that at least 50% of all marriages fail. According to the Annual Review of Sociology, for couples who choose to live together without marrying, within five years 45% have gone their separate ways. By seven years, about 60% are no longer together.
The problem isn’t marriage itself. It’s bigger than that. How do you take two people who at one time might have been in love, and ask them to sustain that love, and keep that passion alive for the next 50+ years. Add in a heaping amount of stress from a variety of life challenges, and it’s no easy task. Very few people really understand what it takes to make love last so it’s no great surprise that marriages often end badly.
In my opinion divorce happens often because people make simple mistakes unknowingly that devastate the relationship. It’s the little things that we fail to do that hurt the relationship and sever the connection to our partner.
When it comes to getting help, the traditional thoughts around communication conflicts don’t get to the core issues that are truly impacting the relationship. In my experience, communication conflicts are simply a symptom of a larger issue troubling the relationship. They are a smokescreen and a distraction. People can waste a lot of time and money trying to resolve communication challenges and never address why the relationship is really falling apart.
We all know someone who is struggling in an unhappy marriage. Getting input from family and friends is usually a recipe for disaster unless these people have done it successfully themselves.
In my new book, The 90-Minute Marriage Miracle, The Only Guide You Will Ever Need to Making Love Last, I write about 7 Breakthrough Strategies that work immediately to resolve conflicts and to improve the relationship, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem. My view is that most anything is possible when people know what to do and are committed.
Getting the right information about what specifically works and what doesn’t work is certainly important. But shifting a troubled marriage won’t ever happen from having an intellectual understanding about what to do. Inevitably, people must DO something differently, or nothing will ever change. There has to be a high level of willingness to actually DO the things that work in order to create a different result.
A great relationship between any two people will gradually decline over time if some effort isn’t put into sustaining it. It takes energy simply to sustain something worthwhile. If you are trying to turn a relationship around, it requires more energy. That energy could appear as simply taking two minutes to do something every day that is beneficial to the relationship.
A great deal of time is not required. A large amount of commitment is. When you decide to be consistent with your commitment, complete relationship transformations are possible.
Here’s a quick summary of the breakthrough marriage success strategies from my book.
1. Can you handle the truth? What are you doing today that is not supportive to the relationship? It’s essential to evaluate what you are contributing to any relationship unhappiness. You have a role in any relationship struggles. Admit your part in what isn’t working.
While people often tell me that their partners are entirely to blame for their unhappiness, I find that two people always exist in a marriage. What each person does and fails to do always contributes to the success and happiness of the relationship.
Now that you have evaluated your performance, stop doing anything you might have done that hurt the relationship. A little honesty goes a long ways here. We have all done things from time to time that have not been helpful to sustaining love and passion. Tell yourself the truth.
Owning your mistakes and shortcomings requires courage. Self evaluation isn’t particularly easy. It can be uncomfortable to be in the spotlight of self assessment, but it’s very effective in creating change and it goes a long ways towards stabilizing the relationship.
When people stop doing the things that are not beneficial to sustaining love and passion things can change surprisingly quickly.
2. Check Your Vision. What do you want this marriage to ultimately look like? What do you want your day to day interaction to be like? How do you want to feel when you are around your partner? What would your idea of a perfect marriage be like? This is the beginning of a Vision.
You need to know what you want, not what you don’t want. This is a common mistake that I see when I ask people what they want. They usually tell me that they don’t want to fight and argue, and they don’t want the stress, and they are tired of the unhappiness, and they don’t want to live like this anymore. This isn’t a Vision.
What do you want your shared life to be about? Decide what you really want in your relationship as if it were ultimately how you want it to be. Most people simply wing it day by day, without any idea of what they are working towards together. No thought of anything larger than schedules and routines. As a result, they get caught up in the stressors of the moment, instead of the pursuing a Vision of what they want their intimate lives to really be like.
3. Correct the Polarity. People change over time and it impacts the relationship. The masculine and feminine balance gets impacted by stress and connections are lost. It takes a masculine and feminine presence to create the sparks of attraction for any couple. That’s the sexual chemistry.
People often forget that something special about them had attracted their partner in the beginning and that their particular behavior had captivated the other’s heart. If they were to go back to interacting with their partners as a masculine and feminine presence just like they had in the beginning of the relationship, the connection can be restored and deepened.
Who were you as a masculine or feminine presence in the relationship early on? What was it about you back then that was so appealing to your partner? Were you decisive and strong, or open and intuitive? Were you direct and to the point, or more flowing in communication? Were you protective or nurturing? Contrast your masculine or feminine presence in the relationship today with how it was at the beginning.
4. Attention and Appreciation. While everyone wants to be appreciated, there are subtle differences between men and women. The largest complaint that I get from men is that their wives don’t appreciate them. This lack of appreciation grinds men down over time. So women, find ways to appreciate and thank your man for what he does and what he brings to the relationship.
For women, the desired appreciation tends to more closely resemble the need for attention and reassurance. When a man isn’t willing to be fully present with his wife in the moment when she needs him, she will begin to lose trust. Loss of respect is soon to follow. Men, give your woman the attention that she needs and be fully present with her in the moment she needs it. That means stopping whatever you are doing and looking directly at her and listening intently to what she is saying to you. This is the attention that she needs from you. It is not your suggestions about how to fix what you perceive to be are her problems.
Both men and women can easily drop all the subtle and not so subtle hints about their unhappiness with their partner. You will never change them. But you can influence them more effectively.
5. Button Pushing Push Back. No one can push our buttons like our partners. When couples push each other’s buttons, arguments tend to escalate quickly. One person says something and the other responds with a tone. Then the first person escalates because of the tone and now the other escalates because of the escalation and it usually evolves into something unpleasant.
The fastest way out is to remember that Vision that I wrote about earlier. Why do you love this person, why are you with them, what do you want to share together? This will bring you out of your head and into your heart where all of your solutions are so much more effective. When you soften up, and bring more playfulness, fun, silliness, and surprise back into the interaction with your partner any escalation can evaporate. Relationship success is found in your heart, not your head.
6. Tropical Storms. The feminine has a larger emotional range than the masculine and from time to time, bottled up emotions will come out. And they will be directed at the masculine presence in the relationship. Lucky me, lucky you! I got tired of getting this wrong.
This is where masculine presence is required. Not arguing back or defending what you did or didn’t do. Owning mistakes with an “I’m sorry” is sufficient. Can you have heartfelt understanding for whatever your partner is going through? Can you remember to completely focus on them, because in this moment that is what they truly need from you? Can you tune into what’s really going on without taking it as a personal attack… because it is not?
These pent up emotions and stressors need to be released and the masculine role is to be the rock…this safe, unshakeable place to let them all out. When done correctly, not only will the storm end fast, sunshine and rainbows are likely to appear. You’ll like it much better this way.
These tropical storms become less frequent when the women is tending to her own needs and taking time for herself. She needs to do the little things that make her feel good, instead of putting herself last and trying to take care of everyone else first. Neglecting yourself is a good way to feel empty and unhappy.
7. Me First or Maybe Not. Many partners are silently waiting for the other person to do something first to fix their situation. Who is going to initiate the repair or improvement of your relationship? Are you waiting for the other person to give to you because they owe you?
If someone doesn’t step forward first and initiate giving to meet their partner’s needs, then things will never change. Some people keep score of how often who did what, and it stops them from doing anything more. They stubbornly refuse to give because it’s their partner’s turn.
Nothing ever changes that way. Will you take 100% responsibility for the relationship by giving to your partner first? The needs of the relationship have to be at least as important as your individual needs if the relationship is going to thrive.
The seven strategies you have just read are proven to work. They have been well tested with the most difficult relationship challenges you can imagine. I personally use them in my marriage and they have been effective every time clients have tested them.
But don’t take my word for it. Judge them for yourself. I urge you to try them out if you want to improve your relationship. Reading about them won’t change anything. Marriage success and happiness doesn’t happen by chance. Having a great marriage is a choice. You can choose to try these ideas out for yourself or choose not to.
We each get to decide how we will interact with our partner despite past events and circumstances, despite past hurts and disappointments. Misunderstandings can become opportunities to deepen the connection. Disagreements can become opportunities to rekindle passion. Any moment can become a new opportunity to completely shift the dynamics between you and your partner. What will you choose to do differently in any of those moments?
This isn’t about right and wrong, or good and bad. I view relationship strategies through a simple lens; is what I’m doing right now beneficial, helpful, or supportive to sustaining love and passion in my marriage? If the answer is no, then why am I doing it?
You too can choose to do something else… or not. Your marriage happiness will reflect your choice either way. Choose wisely.
Jeff Forte, Executive and Peak Performance Coach, author of the new book “The 90-Minute Marriage Miracle” and “The Million Dollar Mindset” audio program is a key talent turnaround expert, and specialist in team and relationship dynamics. He holds Certifications in Strategic Intervention and Marriage Education. His clients include Fortune 500 executives, Entrepreneurs, Attorneys, Surgeons, Teams, Professional Athletes and Couples. For inquiries or to schedule a complimentary consultation email jeff@peakresultscoaching.com or visit www.peakresultscoaching.com