Getting married and staying married

I met with a couple I've been seeing for a while. Discontent has started to brew over the relationship. She's looking for an emotional connection, a meaningful "we" experience that, try as he may, her husband is not able to provide for her. She sees herself as having asked...and he sees himself as having failed... to meet her needs. Oh, and it's not that he's just insecure, she's all but told him: "You've failed to meet my needs."


And it occurred to me, at that moment, something that hadn't presented itself to me in quite that way of saying it before: getting married is a selfish act, staying married is a selfless act.

When someone gets married, he or she chooses a person because that person will "make me happy." Men and women go through the mental list, how nice is this person I'm thinking of marrying, how attractive, how rich, how thoughtful, how stable? What's the likelihood that this person will meet my needs? If the candidate falls short ("He's sweet, but will never amount to much" or "She's really smart, but she's not able to let go and have fun...") then the marrier-to-be takes a pass, and moves on to the next potential life mate. Let's face it, someone looking for a lifetime partner doesn't seek the person with the qualifications of "Who will be happiest in the world for my having chosen him or her," without taking into account his or her own happiness.

So, an individual picks out someone who will complete his or her needs, and there's nothing wrong with that! Then, he or she buys (or accepts) a ring, and they're off to a lifetime of happiness.

Not!

If picking the person that would make people happy would turn out as expected, I wouldn't have to write books about marriages and relationships. You see, while each partner A was plotting away on how Partner B would contribute to his or her happiness, Partner B was making the very same assumptions about Partner A. Once married, they both sit back and wait for all the happiness to rain down on them like candies from a busted piñata.

When marital problems begin, it often is in the form of unhappiness. When the discontent becomes excessive, one, or both partners, may decide it's time to bail out.

Staying married is a selfless act

Most people who are in long-term marriages have been through times when they weren't both happy. (Although many of them can't recall the time--which also tells you something.) The ability to stay in a marriage that is not bringing happiness, and shifting focus on keeping the marriage together, requires postponing the need for happiness, for at least one of the individuals, and putting an effort into finding a way to re-cement the bonds of the relationship. Often that means that one spouse must find a way to make another spouse happy, even if it is at the expense of his or her own happiness. It’s an effort that takes more than a few hours or a few days; often it can take years of sacrifice and building mutual trust.

I’ve written about many of the ways to help make marriage better, so I don’t think anyone who’s read my books would be surprised to learn that healing a relationship doesn’t come from sitting around expecting your mate to make things better. The subtitle of The Secrets of Happily Married Men, is “Eight ways to win your wife’s heart for ever.” In other words, I write about how to make a wife happy. And one need only have seen my recent interviews on “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” to know that, as I write about in The Secrets of Happily Married Women, wives in stable marriages understand how their husbands operate, and, rather than try to change them, strive to improve the relationship by making accommodations for their manly ways.

All of these things involve being selfless; and often these qualities and actions don’t come naturally. But they're essential to a healthy marriage.

Yet Karma does play a role. For, while being selfless in marriage is a blessing—and often a necessity—when you do shift from the selfish act of marriage to the selfless act of staying married, your relationship gets stronger and richer. And guess what? You end up getting the happiness you were looking for all along.