If you want a great marriage, you have to make it a priority. Jed Diamond on how to achieve success in relationships.
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I’m getting ready to teach a class on how to have real, lasting love and wanted to know some things about those people who were on my mailing list. The results were interesting. Where would you fit?:
- 80% were married or in a long-term committed relationship.
- 20% were single, but 80% of the singles were looking for a partner to share real, lasting love.
- 49% of those in a relationship said it was good, but they wanted it to be great.
- 28% of those in a relationship were struggling, but were hopeful that it would improve.
- 23% of those in a relationship were worried that it might not survive.
I’ve been a marriage and family counselor for more than 40 years, but I have a confession to make. For the first 15 years I was counseling men and women, my own love life was a disaster. I was pretty successful at finding a partner and falling in love, but I couldn’t seem to make a marriage work successfully. I was married and divorced twice. I felt like a fraud as a marriage counselor, and a failure as a husband and a father.
Before trying again I decided I needed to find out how marriage really worked. I found the answers I was looking for and applied them to my own life. My present wife, Carlin, and I have now been together for 36 years and I’ve written a book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. I’d like to share a few of the best practices I’ve learned.
If you want a great marriage, you have to make it a priority.
Although most of us want a great marriage, we assume it should come naturally. We believe you meet Mr./Ms. Right, you fall in love, and you live happily ever after. Every year people make New Year’s resolutions, but rarely do they put “Improve my marriage” at the top of their list of things they are committed to doing. Here are the top 10 resolutions for 2016:
- Lose weight.
- Get organized.
- Spend less, save more.
- Enjoy life.
- Stay fit and healthy.
- Learn something exciting.
- Quit smoking.
- Help others in their dreams.
- Fall in love.
- Spend more time with family.
To make a great marriage a priority you have to recognize how rare it is.
According to marriage expert Ty Tashiro, author of The Science of Happily Ever After, the majority of marriages fail. They either end in divorce and separation or devolve into dysfunction. Only 3 in 10 marriages remain healthy and happy.
A great marriage is not only rare, it is extremely valuable.
How valuable is a good marriage? A study by Dr. Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, reported in the prestigious International Journal of Epidemiology calculated that marriage brings the same amount of happiness as $132,400 of annual income. What do you lose when you separate? When we separate and divorce, it would take an additional income of $249,700 of income each year to balance the loss. These figures didn’t even calculate the actual cost of separation and divorce (moving out, two households, lawyer’s fees, etc.).
There are not only monetary and emotional benefits of a good marriage, but health benefits as well. People in good marriages are healthier and have less stress in their lives. They live longer and have lower rates of everything from depression to diabetes.
Finding a mate isn’t easy, but making a marriage great is the real test of our lives.
Single people spend a lot of time trying to find a mate. A Google search for “how to find a mate” turned up 214,000,000 results. There are over 1,500 dating sites online and 40 + million singles looking for that special someone. But there are very few experts who have mastered the science of real, lasting love.
In addition to my own book, The Enlightened Marriage, I recommend John Gottman’s What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal, Sue Johnson’s, Love Sense: A Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt’s Making Marriage Simple, and Helen Fisher’s The Anatomy of Love.
If you’d like more information about my upcoming training: The 5 Stages of Love: The Masters Class for a Great Marriage, drop me a note with “Master Class” in the subject line.
Also by Jed Diamond
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Regarding the stress and overall health benefits of a marriage: “But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single… Read more »
Jed,thanks for references to good litterature about this subject.
I think the thing I find most disheartening is that for so many, marriage has lost the deep value that it once held because the things that most think make a marriage are not at all most influential. Nevertheless, the most trivial facets of human encounters now matter the most and marriage has for many become cheapened to the point of being all but negligible. Partnership, companionship, togetherness, support, trust, work and play have been trumped by titillation and subjugation, one-upmanship, competition over who does more, gives more, talks more, pays more, hurts more, works more, looks better, makes more… Read more »