Enduring Marriage

Home - Quora: Edwin Trench, Author of Book "Triumph of Family"
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My wife returned one day from a PTA meeting amazed with the amount of mothers who were either divorced, separated, re-married or in any sense not in their original marriage. The fact is only three of eighteen mothers in the meeting were still married to their first husband. Most of these women were coping with different degrees of success to their new and different stages of separation and/or divorce. Even so, the main topic of discussion revolved around self-growth seminars, therapies, difficulty (or not) with the payment of alimony, psychiatrists, children time-share negotiations, ex-husband problems, etc.

After some time listening to them my wife asked them if it would not have been easier for them to have fought for their original marriages instead of trying to piece together what was left of their lives after a separation or a divorce. This obviously generated dissent and a lively discussion among them, though she saw more than one pensive face among those present.

This situation reminded me of what a co-worker once expressed regarding the same situation. We had been taking some drinks and were discussing our children when he mentioned he was into his third marriage. Curious and given the right atmosphere I asked him what he thought had happened to his marriages and what he had learnt from the experience.

He mulled it over a bit and told me the following story:

“The first time I married I was relatively young, 22 years old, though I don’t think it had anything to do with the separation. During the first year of marriage everything was just fine and dandy, during the second year things started to go south and in the third year the novelty had worn out and we started to have fights and discussions that eventually led into a divorce. Once free I gave myself all the time in the world before taking the decision to marry again. This I did with my second wife, whom was a radically different person from the first one. Our first year of marriage went just fine. During our second year the first signs of boredom appeared and though I had a sense of d�j� vu, during our third year we started to break apart and though we tried, each finally followed their ways. The third time I decided to take the plunge, we talked the situation over very carefully with my wife to be. After thoughtfully analyzing the situation we went ahead and got married. The first year was marvelous, yet when during the second year I saw the first signs of boredom showing up I decided to fight it through. The third year passed and even though we did have our fights and discussions we managed to survive and save our marriage. We are now into our seventh year of marriage. Though I would not tell this to any of my former wives, with whom I get along with very well, I cannot help but think if I had fought it out with them just as I did with my third wife maybe I would never have separated in the first place”.

The message here is not if you fight it out every marriage can be saved, but if one or both of the spouses would have fought it out…maybe several of those marriages could have been saved. The truth is you can’t know it for a fact unless you try it. So my suggestion would be if you ever are in the situation, try anything and everything to see if you can revert the situation, it might just work and it’s a lot easier to patch up your marriage than to sell of the pieces that are left after a divorce or separation.

All good marriages (which is what most surviving marriages end up being) have gone through the periods my co-worker intuitively mentioned and there are several studies to back this up. What these studies conclude is that romantic love, the one that first brought the couple together, usually lasts three years. After this period, romance (at least in the many splendored, cloud N� 9 sense we conceive it) has generally faded, leaving in its place a more permanent feeling. This feeling is born from respect, knowledge and caring and is the basis for a more profound love, which though less romantic is more durable and resistant to the pounding of time. If (and for many couples this seems to be an insurmountable “if”) we manage to survive this period and grow from the marriage “that was” into the marriage that “will be”, we will have taken the first great step towards a more enduring relationship.

What I have learnt from my own marriage and many other long-lasting relationship’s is that marriages are tempered by adversity and difficulty, much as steel is tempered by fire or heat.

In other words, every time you overcome the many problems a couple is sure to encounter in life, you are adding value to said marriage and strengthening the ties that joined you in the first place. The secret is to allow yourselves the opportunity to overcome these problems and benefit from the building up of bonds you have obtained from this process, instead of giving up at the first, second or who knows how many difficulties.

Every time we overcome a break in our marriage, every time we analyze a fight and find out why it came to be, every time we share grief in each others arms, every time we grow out of our own egotism’s and support our partner, every time we ask for forgiveness, every time we forgive even though we think we are right, every time we reach out first, we will have stoked the fire that will strengthen the ties binding our marriage together.

The fact is, as we continue feeding our marriage with these efforts, lessons and overcoming, we end up giving so much value to the bond itself, that living apart becomes an unacceptable alternative to being together.