What makes a marriage successful?

What makes a marriage successful?

�Most people don’t know, but many are desperate to find out. �They imitate what they think worked for someone else. �They do what their parents did. �And try what their friends suggest. �But their friends probably don’t know any more than they do.

Some people go to marriage therapists. If they can find a great one, recommended to them by someone they trust, with a history of success with families like theirs, then maybe they can help. But we have to ask ourselves why so many of them can’t sustain a relationship of their own.

Many look to the Bible, which has excellent advice that was written for a pro-natal culture with large extended families and an ancient, stable set of marriage customs that we do not have. Without the necessary personal and social foundations, they cannot implement the solutions they interpret from the Bible in our modern, disconnected, and rootless world.

Many church leaders don’t know what makes a marriage work, and the statistics speak for themselves:

☠️50% of pastors’ marriages end in divorce. ☠️70% of pastors continually battle depression. ☠️80% of pastors and 85% of their spouses feel discouraged in their roles. ☠️95% of pastors do not regularly pray with their spouses.

Some look to the past, but they can’t copy their ancestors patterns because most families left the village and lost their old ways during the World Wars or even earlier. Even if they had their ancestral wisdom, how would they apply it to modern, chaotic dating situations?

There is no single book on the market that provides the self-help needed to make a successful marriage. A person could spend decades reading contradictory advice from people who may not even be able to maintain a relationship of their own.

So what can you do?

Marriage is for adult men and women. That is the missing, underlying basis that society is struggling to supply. None of the great advice from any source is applicable if you lack the maturity to apply it.

Every case of marital discord that I have ever encountered in my long career helping people in relationships comes down to a lack of maturity on one or both sides. This is nothing to be ashamed of. We lack the rigorous correction systems of the past that removed immaturity and forced us to grow up.

Today, many parents are failing to do their job—to deliver their children into adulthood as competent men and women ready for marriage and children. It’s not just a failure to teach some domestic or communication skills, but a failure to teach mental, emotional, and spiritual discipline. Most people today lack the ability to be who they need to be and do what they need to do.

It takes most people about 6 months to get all that they are missing, achieve maturity, and save their marriages. And I’m not just talking about keeping the marriage intact, but letting it thrive for life as a happy and satisfied couple deeply in love.

DM me if you have questions about how this can be done.