Making Marriage Simple (16 page)

Love is contagious!

The more you practice, the stronger your relationship will become. Until you experience a profound communion no one can take away from you.

CELEBRATING YOUR RE-CONNECTION

Helen and I actually reached the Promised Land of this communion. Feeling joyfully alive, we had to stop ourselves from shouting our happiness from the top of the tallest building in New York (yes, even I, the Turtle, felt this way).

Instead of doing that, we created a re-commitment ceremony and decided to follow it up with a big party to celebrate. This is not normally our style. I’m more of a home cooking served on paper plates in the back yard kind of guy. But Partnership Marriage takes you into undiscovered territory.

By picking up this book, you’ve “boldly gone where a relative few couples have gone before.” And we believe your willingness to do the hard work of stretching deserves a celebration. It is about re-committing to each other from this new awareness that you’ve
created. Knowing that, together, you have all that you need to “live long and prosper.”

Don’t worry. You don’t have to invite everyone you know to a gala event, march on Washington, or even leave home. It’s just really nice, at this juncture, to renew your commitment to each other in whatever way suits you both best.

Truth #10: Your Marriage Is the Best Life Insurance Plan
EXERCISE: IT’S TIME TO RE-COMMIT

First:

1. Write down the vows you want to make to your partner today (see “My Vows to Our Relationship” on
this page
). As you consider what you want to write, reflect on your journey of creating Real Love. Loosened from the force of Romantic Love and free from the Power Struggle, what can you vow to your partner now?

2. Once you both have finished your written statements, share your vows with each other. You can do this right after you’ve written them, sitting on your bed in your sweatpants. Or you can wait and share them during a re-commitment ceremony in front of family and friends (or both!).

3. Plan a way to celebrate your re-commitment to each other and the process of creating Real Love. There are so many ways you can do this:

    • Have an actual re-commitment ceremony.

    • Throw ceremony to the wind and just have a big party.

    • Go away for a romantic weekend or week—a second honeymoon. And share your vows with each other in the midst of an apple orchard or on a beach.

    • Do something completely out of the box, or even out of character, such as skydiving or hot air ballooning. Something that maybe you’ve both wanted
to do, but never made a priority. This could include renting Harley-Davidson motorcycles and attending a rally, taking a trip to an exotic location, hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and back out), or camping out for a week.

Then:

Put your vows into practice, using them as inspiration to continue to create the relationship of your dreams!

And Remember
:
Be the change you wish to see!

AFTERWORD
The Relationship Revolution

H
ELEN AND
H
ARVILLE

We wrote this book to share with you the culmination of our work so far. Our goal was to give you the most simple and effective ways to make your marriage great. We’ve offered you ten powerful truths to change your understanding about what makes relationship work (or not). Each one of these truths has been offered to shift your understanding about what is needed to create a successful partnership. And now, as we come to the end of our time with you, we want to give you the biggest shift of all.

You may think you purchased this book to breathe new life into your relationship.

This is true.

But that’s not the whole story.

YOUR MARRIAGE, THE BETWEEN AND BEYOND …

In the last chapter, we shared some statistics with you about the impact marriage has on the two who say “I do.” For those of you who are curious and want to know: “Is there more?” we have some important news to share about how marriage impacts our broader society.

Imagine the following newspaper headlines:

Economists Predict an End to Global Poverty in the Next Five Years!

CEOs Share the Wealth by Raising Employee Salaries

Heart Disease on the Decline

More Prisons Closing as Nationwide Crime Drop Continues

What could happen to cause these dramatic shifts? It could all start when people choose to shift from judgment to curiosity. Then, liking how this felt, they deliberately decide to give up negativity, growing empathic instead. Honoring each other’s uniqueness, they speak more respectfully to one another. In other words, what makes this possible is when couples begin to practice important new relationship skills in their marriages. Because doing this transforms how they feel about and interact with the world around them.

LOVE: THE ULTIMATE UPSTREAM SOLUTION

In these pages, we’ve distilled the essence of the work you as a couple need to do, making it as simple as possible. But we don’t make the mistake of assuming “simple” means “easy.” We know this work is challenging. So, we want to remind you of the many reasons why it’s worth doing.

Divorce is costly for the fractured family, as we confirmed in the last chapter. But this is just the beginning. Estimates on the average cost of a divorce in the United States range from $15,000 to $30,000.
¹
Divorce and unwed childbearing cost American taxpayers an estimated $112 billion each year, and at least $1 trillion over a decade.
²
And it is our taxes that fund the agencies bearing the burden of these costs.

According to a special report: “even very small increases in stable marriage rates would result in very large returns to taxpayers. For example, a mere 1 percent reduction in rates of family fragmentation would save taxpayers $1.12 billion annually.”
³
One percent! And our government could have an extra billion plus a year to spend on other things.

How’s that for lowering the deficit. And not by cutting any programs—but by enhancing the quality of relationships!

Marriage didn’t always hold this kind of potential. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem spoke for many women when she said back in the ’70s, that marriage is a dangerous place for women. This was due to the dominator/submissive model of traditional heterosexual marriages. Therefore, for women to become strong within themselves, some had to leave home—and still others had to leave their marriage.

The Partnership Marriage changes all this. Once two people learn to live in a conscious partnership, the process can help women develop their most resonant voice and deepest wisdom. Within a respectful relational paradigm, both women and men can now flourish.

So if we’re looking for ways to help strengthen our society, there is a growing new consciousness that holds wisdom for us all. As we deliberately expand the marriage advantage into our culture, we offer five final truths to aid in this transformation (here you thought you were purchasing a book with ten truths, and we’ve given you an additional five for free!):

1. Healthy Marriages Are the Ultimate Upstream Prevention

Unfortunately, the headlines we read every day are very different from the ones listed earlier. Our society struggles with many
issues, such as teen pregnancy, alcoholism, increased high-school dropout rates, and poverty—to name a few.

Focusing on these issues is what we call “downriver cleanup.”

Of course you want to clean up a river that’s full of pollution. But sooner or later it will get polluted again. Which means you’ll have to clean it again. You’ll have to
keep on cleaning up that same river over and over again
.

Our governments and so many private organizations pour billions of dollars into downriver cleanup. How about figuring out where the pollutants are coming from?

Downriver issues are symptomatic of an unhealthy community.

To go upstream, you’ve got to fix the community.

The core of any community is the family.

And the core of the family is the couple.

Put simply: Healthy homes lead to a healthy society. And the way to ensure healthy homes is to have healthy couples.

If you want to create a society full of individuals who know how to take personal responsibility, you have to create that at home. If you want to build more compassion and caring in the world, you have to build it at home. To build a healthy home, you have to heal the couple. Because couples are where our society comes from.

And it can be as simple as focusing on the ideas and exercises you learn in this book.

2. Healthy Relationships Create Strong Individuals

For years, it was believed that to become a strong individual you needed to focus on caring for yourself. The philosopher Socrates believed wisdom was born from “Knowing Thyself.” “You Know the Self, By the Self” said Krishna, who is considered a Supreme Being and Deity in the Hindu tradition. “I Think Therefore I Am” declared another philosopher, Descartes. These are just three of the many who avow this approach.

We disagree. We believe that we discover who we are in relationship, not in isolation. We are born in relationship. We are wounded in relationship. We are healed in relationship. We
cannot know or become who we are
except
in relationship. Essentially, we are our relationships. And the most powerful relationship for self-discovery and transformation is our primary love relationship. It is within this context that you can actually rewire your brain, shifting how you think and feel.

We are not alone in this belief. A subtle shift is rippling across the globe, one that moves us from a focus on the individual to a focus on the relationship. It is a paradigm shift from the self as center to the relationship as center. As the boundaries that separate states and even countries become more porous, we have come to realize that we not only
can’t
escape each other—
we actually need each other
. More and more people are recognizing that we are wired for connection. That makes the key question: How can we be in healthy connection?

Committing to share a life with someone else is an honor and a responsibility. And we don’t use those words lightly. The role of those choosing to commit to a life partner is that of friend, supporter, advocate, and healer. It is about growing oneself to take on the welfare of the other. It is about committing to create a healthy relationship, in order to mature as an individual.

3. Couplehood as a Spiritual Path

We once heard someone say: “If you want to test your level of enlightenment, spend a week with your family.” Oh boy, can some of us relate!