This post may be more of a rant than anything else. But it’s something I’ve been brooding, thinking, praying, and researching over the last 3-plus years. And I just can’t be silent any longer.
There is a marriage crisis in America. I know, you probably already know that, or suspect it, or assume it. But it’s getting worse and someone’s going to have to do something about it.
I read a statistic the other day that for the first time in the history of our country, singles out-number the married. That’s right. We are now under fifty percent of our population that are married. That doesn’t mean only fifty percent have ever been married. Probably a huge number have been married, but have gotten a divorce. And in America the greatest way to go broke is to get a divorce. Statistics prove that the best way to build wealth is to get married and stay married to the same person over a working lifetime. The statistics about how much better married people do than single people are undeniable. But in light of the fact that getting married and staying married over a lifetime is the best guarantee of success; in light of that why are we still in such a marriage crisis?
The answers to that are obviously complex. But here’s what I believe; after 37 years of marriage and 37 years of working with people who get married, divorced, and everything in between, here is my conclusion. No one gets married to a boring person, not having fun.
That may not be much of a revelation to you, but I find that’s what most people end up with: married to an unhappy person, bored to tears, and wondering why in the world we made such a mistake. So here is what I want to dedicate the rest of my life to: helping married people make marriage fun again.
Here is the truth. People who are living at the highest levels of their lives are doing so because they are having fun. They are having fun because their whole heart is involved. There is alignment, passion; there’s movement, intention and advancement in their career and in their relationships. Marriage ought to be the very same thing. Before you give in and throw your marriage in the scrap heap, you need to understand that there is always hope. Every marriage is savable. Yes, every marriage is savable, because marriage is about skill. And everyone can learn the skills about how to be married.
That’s the other problem with marriage. We focus so much on getting married, we almost lose sight of the fact that we’re going to be married a lot longer than it takes to get married.
So here is where Paula and I are. We’re going to commit what we know and have experienced, what we’ve learned in the hard-knocks of life, what we’ve learned through training and research, and by counseling literally hundreds and hundreds of couples over these many years. And we’re going to begin to lead a movement; a great American marriage movement, because a great marriage is within reach of every person who knows how to do the right thing.
There is a crisis of marriage in America. We need men and women to get married, be married, and stay married, happily; not just make marriage work, or make marriage hard. We’ve made it difficult, we’ve made it complex, and we’ve surrounded it with myths and taboos. And what we have failed to realize is that a marriage that’s having no fun at all is doomed. So we’re going to make marriage fun again.
Over the next several weeks and months and years, we’re going to be talking about the Seven Super Keys of an amazing marriage. We’re going to be talking about the things we’ve learned, these themes, laws as it were, of how to be married and stay married over time that not only allow you to just not get divorced, to not just be happy, or not even make the marriage work. We’re going to make it fun.
More than anything else, healthy, growing, vibrant marriages that produce super-confident and competent kids is the solution to what’s wrong with our country. We need it more than we need new churches, we need it more than we need better government, and we need it more than we need bigger colleges. We need great marriages. It is the core and the backbone of what our society is built on. I hope you believe that and I hope you will join me in the weeks and months ahead as we begin to announce our plans to attack this issue. Paula and I truly believe that we can help you save your marriage.