Marriage Series: It Is Surprisingly Easy to Improve a Marriage

It really is easy to improve a marriage, but there are obstacles.  The obstacles are not what spouses think; it is what the spouse believe, summarized as follows:

1. Spouses develop beliefs about why their marriage is not better than it is.Most of the time, those are negative beliefs about the other spouse.  Spouses in a marriage that has too much conflict try to make sense out of why that is.  Sometimes, they can point to themselves, but most of the time, they blame their spouse.  They might even develop complicated negative beliefs about their spouse that explain the failure to be happy in their marriage most of the time.
2. No matter how much they have in common, spouses inevitably have important differences.Some of those differences might enhance the marriage, but some of them lead to disagreements about money, sex, affection, parenting, household demands of living together, and so on. The key challenge to spouses is to resolve those differences and disagreements in ways that are good for both of them.  That takes skills.  The absence of those skills is an obstacle.
3. Skills. Without the necessary skills, spouses try to win arguments, but when they fail, they start believing that it is their spouse’s fault. Conflict takes up more and more time in the marriage, either in the form of arguing or in a cold war of limited involvement with one another.
4. All humans have a mixture of traits.Many of those traits are usually positive and attractive, probably playing a big role in why the spouses got married in the first place.  People also have negative traits; no one is perfect or all good.  A marriage in which unresolved disagreements take up more and more time also brings out the negative traits.  A marriage in which disagreements are resolved well, negative traits take up less and less time.  In a successful marriage, 80% of the time is spent taking care of business and having fun, with 20% spent in disagreement, struggling with one another.  It is the reverse, or worse, in marriages dominated by conflict. A good marriage brings out the best in people; a bad marriage brings out the worst.

Differences and disagreements.  Here is the simple explanation for why many marriages fail to live up to their potential, or even end in divorces.  Spouses have differences.  Even when spouses begin their marriage with much in common, there are significant differences between them.  Those come from the facts that they are different people, with different backgrounds, priorities, values, emotional rhythms and on.  Some of those differences might be minor, such as how tidy to be.  However, inevitably, there are differences that really matter to the spouses.  When an important difference leads to a disagreement, spouses try to control the marriage and try to get what they want.

Differences lead to disagreements, which turn into arguments.

Successful and unsuccessful marriages have differences, disagreements and arguments, but there are there are two differences:

1. Successful marriages have most if not all of the nine ingredients that are necessary for a marriage to work well.
2. Spouses in a successful marriage also have most if not all of the seven skills for resolving disagreements with solutions that work well, or at least as well as possible, for both spouses.[1]

            That is all there is to it! That is why your authors say that improving a marriage is surprisingly easy.  Just agree to the ingredients and learn the skills together and start enjoying one another most of the time.[2]

To illustrate what we mean by saying that improving a marriage is easy, we will explain one of the nine necessary ingredients:  understanding how to change a marriage.

Understanding How to Change a Marriage

People have personalities, but what is a personality?  It is simply a pattern of behavior.  Assume that you have a friend that is a lot of fun because he or she is very funny, tells jokes and has a great laugh.  If someone asked you to describe his or her personality, you would say that he or she is very funny and jokes around a lot.  In other words, there is a pattern of behavior that you call a “personality”.  A marriage also has a personality, made up of patterns of behavior that the spouses, and anyone that knows them, think of as the “personality of the marriage”.

Changing a marriage for the better just means starting a pattern of behavior that is better.

 We give the following example.  Ken was known some years ago to be an expert on children of divorce. i.e., how to help children get through a divorce in relatively good shape.  A man, we will call him Jim, came to Ken for counseling. At the beginning of session, Jim explained he had two sons. One was a young teenager and the other in his mid-teens.  He announced that, although he had not yet told his wife, he was going to divorce her.  He wanted guidance on how to go through the process with the least harm to the children.

When asked, he told Ken that for years his wife had become so negative that he could not stand being around her.  When asked to describe this, as an example, Jim reported that she worked from home and he had an outside job.  Every day when he came home, she started in telling him all the negatives from her day.  He tried to avoid her as much as possible, but ultimately got fed up and wanted out.  He reported telling her to stop being so negative, but she would just escalate until he walked away.  She would start most conversations being negative about him (e.g., “You just don’t care what my life is like…”)

Ken saw Jim’s situation very differently and had an idea.  Ken told the man that he was not going to charge him for the initial session, and wanted him to make an appointment in two weeks. At that time, Ken said he would help him plan his divorce.

In the meantime, since he had nothing to lose, Ken shared his idea with Jim.  He told him to change the routine when he came home.  Every day when he came home from work, he was to tell his wife to stop what she was saying. He added she was to wait for him to pour a couple of glasses of wine so that they could sit down, and she could tell him all about her day.

Two weeks later, Jim came to his appointment, WITH HIS WIFE!  He proudly reported that he did as Ken recommended.  In addition, on the third day, they found themselves laughing about some of his wife’s experiences.  Then she did something she had not done for a very long time: she asked him about his day. Things began to change. She  told the children that when their dad gets home, it was “their time” and to leave them alone so that they could talk about their day.  He and his wife wanted therapy to continue to improve their marriage.  Jim no longer wanted a divorce.

This is an example of learning how to change the personality of a marriage.  Ken had ignored the description of his wife as negative, because in Ken’s mind, both of them were ignoring each other. Both of them were simply starving for attention.

Of course, there are eight other essential ingredients and seven skills for successfully resolving disagreements, which became the focus of the therapy for Jim and his wife.

When Ken began marriage therapy with a couple, he let them know that if they cannot fix the marriage in ten sessions, it probably cannot be fixed.  Of course, that put pressure on people to understand the essential marriage ingredients and learn the skills for successfully resolving disagreements.  Noone wants to believe that their situation might be hopeless!

Once people give up their negative beliefs about their spouse, agree on the necessary ingredients and learn the skills, it is really pretty easy to improve a marriage.  Just change the personality of the marriage by changing the behaviors.

Ken can give another example of how easy it is to change the personality of a marriage that involves him and his wife of 42 years.  When out for dinner with a couple who are good friends, as Ken and wife were leaving, their friends took each other’s hands and walked to their car.  Ken thought that looked really nice and proposed to his wife that when they leave a restaurant, they hold hands and walk to their car.  That elevated the feelings about going out to the level of a “date”.  Much more romantic.

Summary: Once again, the primary obstacles to improving a marriage relate to the beliefs that the spouses have built up because they lack some of the marriage ingredients and/or lack or lag the skills.  When spouses agree to the nine ingredients and learn the seven skills, the rest is pretty easy and actually can be fun.  After all, while all marriages struggle at times, they should be fun most of the time.[3]

[1] Our book, The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marriage Work, details the nine ingredients and the seven skills and how to learn and apply them. Marriageanddivorce.org.

[2] The book is meant to be fun.  In fact, our motto is, “If you are not having fun, you are not doing it right.”

[3] To learn more about the other ingredients and the skills for resolving disagreements, see our book, The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved, Seve Skills for Making Marriage Work.  Available on marriageanddivorce.org.