The 7 Surprising Secrets for a Successful Marriage: Confessions of a Thrice Married Therapist 

We long for a relationship that lasts through the ages, but are often disappointed. According to statistics compiled by divorcerate.org,  40% to 50% of first marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. Most of us don’t give up and marry again, but the odds are against us. 60% to 67% of second marriages don’t last and nearly 75% of third marriages fail.

For more than 40 years I’ve been helping women and men find the love of their lives and teaching them how to keep their relationship alive and well through time. But to be honest at the outset, you should know that I’ve been married three times. My present wife, Carlin, and I have been married 35 years and we have every reason to believe we will defy the odds of third marriages and make it to the end totally in love and successfully married. Here’s what we’ve learned thus far.

Secret #1: There are 5,284 Perfect Partners For You.

Most of us grow up with the idea that there is only one true love for each person. We read stories and watch movies about finding “Prince Charming” or falling in love with “Sleeping Beauty.” It’s not surprising that we search for a Faerie Tale Romance. Most of us grew up in families that were significantly dysfunctional. We long for a model that will guide us toward happiness.

Unfortunately faerie tale romance stories are not very good models for real life. The belief that there is only one true love that is right for us is deeply discouraging. We may tell ourselves that we are hopeful about finding the love of our lives, but finding the perfect needle in a haystack of billions creates a subconscious belief that we’ll never find that special mate. Even when we find someone, we create tension and fear, afraid we’ll lose them and be alone for the rest of our lives.

We also have a lot of Faerie Tale requirements that limit us. I had always gone out with girls that were younger and shorter than me. When I met Carlin, she and I both had some resistance to dating someone that didn’t feel quite “right.” She was a bit older and a bit taller than me. If we’d kept to our programming we would have missed a perfect opportunity for lasting love. How many great partners has your Faerie Tale programing excluded?

After working with at least 25,000 couples over the past 40 plus years, I have determined that there are 5,284 perfect partners available to each one of us. OK, so the number isn’t exact, but the idea is true. There are really many people we can love, honor, and cherish. So, take a deep breath and relax. Your odds are a lot better than you feared.

Secret #2: The Purpose of Marriage Isn’t to Live Happily Ever After. It’s to Learn How to Love

With our faerie-tale view of the world, we imagine that the purpose of marriage is to live happily ever after. That’s a sure-fire recipe for failure. Following the “falling in love” phase when we project all our hopes and dreams on our partner, we find out that they don’t match our original image. We become increasingly unhappy. We tell ourselves that our partner has changed. They aren’t the person we married. We blame ourselves or we blame our partner. We either settle for a miserable marriage—“for the sake of the kids” or because “it’s the best we can expect”—or we slide out of love and start looking for a replacement.

I’ve found that marriage is the graduate program of life. We all come into it with an undergraduate’s naïve understanding of love and if we stay with the program we find out what real love is all about. It has little to do with happiness, which depends on things happening outside of us. When we get what we think we want we’re happy. When we don’t, we’re miserable. Real love has little to do with happiness. It can be confounding, frustrating, confusing, depressing, and also magical, ecstatic, passionate, and deeply fulfilling.

We often start out believing that love depends on the other person being a certain way. We soon learn that love is an inside job and depends more on our own inner work than in trying to get our partner to be the wife/husband we imagined.

Secret #3: Love is Letting Go of Fear

We all suffer from betrayal. Every child comes into the world expecting to be loved, protected,  nurtured, and cherished. None of us gets a full measure of all that we need. We all suffer asteroid strikes to our lovability from parents, siblings, and other family members who themselves have been wounded.

No one escapes childhood without some degree of PTSD. The assaults may be obviously traumatic when we are sexually abused, beaten, or neglected. Other assaults may seem minor—the time mother came home five minutes late, the time Dad missed our basketball game, when a sibling broke a prized toy—but even seemingly minor wounds can cause serious problems in our love lives.

These micro-traumas can seriously impact our lives. When I was 7 years-old, my mother told me she’d be right back and drove the baby sitter home. It soon got dark and by the time she returned I was in a full-blown panic feeling I had been abandoned. She scolded me. “I was only gone a few minutes, quit crying. You’re OK,” she assured me. But forty years later I still panic when my wife is late coming home.

“These mico-traumatic events can be even more insidious than full-blown traumas,” say George Pratt, PhD and Peter Lambrou, PhD, authors of Code to Joy. “They hide behind the veneer of innocent insignificance.” Learning to love means learning to recognize and heal all the traumatic memories that continue to resonate and undermine our peace of mind and enjoyment of our adult relationships. Love requires that we let go of fear and letting go of fear means healing old traumas, both big and small.

Secret #4: If You’re Going to Keep Your Marriage Alive, You Have to Risk Letting It Die

The longer a couple is together, the more they have to lose. When there are disagreements there is a tendency to gloss them over. After being with Carlin for ten years I realized that we were growing apart. She was involved with her own work and her own friends. I was working hard getting books published and travelling a lot.

We both needed a lot of reassurance, but we became increasingly afraid of confronting troubling issues in the relationship. Consciously or unconsciously we had the fear that if we talked about “that” or confronted “this,” it might be the end of the relationship.

Usually, some kind of crisis forces the couple to deal with the things they fear the most (after all fears need to be confronted if they are to be healed). For us it was our slow slide into depression. Carlin became more fatigued and I became more irritable and angry. When we were finally forced to confront our lives, we realized that something had died. It wasn’t our relationship that was dying, as we had feared, but some old parts of our lives that needed to be trimmed, pruned, and discarded.

Secret #5: Join a Men’s/Women’s Group

When we’re in love we normally think about spending more time with our beloved, but one of the best things we can do for a relationship is spend time with a group. One of the things that Carlin said attracted her to me was that I was in a men’s group. There were seven of us in the group and we met once a week for three hours. We talked about everything—our hopes and dreams, our fears, our work, our wives, our children—and we developed deep connections many of us had never had.

We’ve been meeting now for 36 years. The fact that Carlin and I have a 35 year-long marriage, is due, in part, to the long-term commitment we have to our groups. Carlin has been in a women’s group during much of that time and she derives a similar level of support that allows the relationship we have together to continue to grow and blossom.

Throughout much of human history males went off together as “hunters” and women spent time together as they gathered food for the family. We need to build men’s and women’s groups back into our lives. It’s good for us as individuals and good for our relationship and even for our kids. My grown son and daughter still have fond memories of falling asleep as children hearing the sounds of male voices rising and falling in the next room.

Secret #6: Settle for a Good Enough Marriage. Quit Trying to Fix Him/Her

In our search for a Faerie Tale marriage where we are happy forever, we all want a “great relationship” that is a close to perfect as we can make it. The drive for “great” puts a huge pressure on a relationship and the stress undermines the very thing that we want. When things start to slip and our fears arise we spend more and more time trying to change our partner. We may do it directly by nagging or criticizing or we do it more subtly by comparing our partner to some ideal and doing our best to change them.

Forget trying to have a great marriage. Instead make having a good enough marriage your goal. Most think that “settling” for less than the best is a cop out. In fact, it’s the key to real joy in marriage. Here’s a quick story to illustrate:

Early on in our marriage my wife and I went to see the famed psychotherapist Carl Rogers give a talk on how to have a successful marriage. He and his wife had been married for nearly sixty years at the time and he recalled that stretch where things were pretty bad. I thought to myself, “wow, even the experts have problems.” And then I assumed I’d hear about problems that may have lasted a few months. Instead he went on to recall that “ten year period when things were pretty difficult. During that time the marriage wasn’t great. When things were difficult for ‘us,’ I got to work on myself.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ten years and things were difficult?

It never occurred to me that a successful sixty year marriage might have many years, not just months, which were difficult. Too often we insist on great and when we don’t get it we try and change the other person. Rogers taught that we can continue to focus on our own ability to love, even in the face of difficulties that can last many years.

Secret #7: Marriage is Only Meant to Last 15 Years.

We still make vows “Until death do we part.” That may have made some sense when the life-span was around 40 years, which was true up until the beginning of the 20^th century. A long marriage might last 15 years or so. But now we live into our 80s and 90s and we may be married for sixty or seventy years.

One solution is to get divorced and remarried numerous times. That’s what we tend to do today. The other option is to recognize that the “old marriage” is over after 15 years and it’s time to reflect on the relationship and decide if each member of the couple would like to create a new marriage with the same person.

That’s what Carlin and I have done. Every 15 years, we reflect on our lives and discuss honestly whether we want to create a new marriage with each other. So, we’ve actually been married three times to each other. Once when we first fell in love, again after 15 years together, and most recently after we’d been married for 30 years. I’m looking forward to marriage #4 with the same woman. Well, not really the same woman. We do change and it’s exciting to get a new wife every 15 years without all the trouble of divorce, dating, and hoping to find that special someone.

I’ll look forward to hearing from you and learning what you’ve experienced in your relationship and what secrets you’ve found for a successful marriage that can last a lifetime.

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