Marriage Is Like a Three-Legged Race
As a child you may have had picnics where you competed in three-legged races. Two players had their middle legs tied together, so that between the two of you, you had three legs, with the objective of running in unison. This game requires great dexterity. Runners must bring their shared middle leg forward in a stride and rhythm that is comfortable for both. It is not an easy task, but eventually the pair learns how to run together by coordinating two bodies as one. Marriage requires a similar mind and skill set.
The secret to running as a three-legged team is harmony and collaboration. Telling your partner he's doing everything wrong only slows you both down. The left leg (you) feels it is superior to the right leg (him). Since you are joined together in this race, criticizing him harshly is actually attacking and sabotaging yourself.
If you lose the race and berate your partner for his performance you are guaranteeing your team will fail the next race as well. In a three-legged race you either win together or you lose together. This is also true in marriage. Either you both succeed, or you both fail. Blaming your partner for a marriage failure is like the left leg criticizing the right leg. It may briefly make the left leg feel better, but it will not remedy what's not working in your team.
How is a good marriage different from a bad one?
If marriage is viewed as a competitive sport, a good marriage is a cooperative effort that produces a winning team. A bad marriage is where the two players put more efforts into their individual successes, and thus create a losing team.
One of the biggest and most consequential errors a couple makes is to assume teamwork skills come naturally. They don't. The most negative consequence of this mistaken view is a failure to identify and learn the necessary skills required to make marriage work.
Marriage is no different than learning how to drive a car or play a team sport like baseball. Finishing with the three-legged race analogy, to have a chance of winning the two of you must operate as one. This requires practice and patience as you learn how to support each other through the trial and error of learning how to move, step by step, through your combined lives.
The Illusion of True Love as Effortless
Can you imagine climbing Mt. Everest without any training, preparation, or forethought? Picture it: All you have to guide you up the highest mountain in the world is the conceptual idea that getting to the top would be very rewarding. Then off you go, with enthusiasm and the romantic notion of adding this achievement to your resume.
It is not an exaggeration to say that many people of all ages and educational levels get married with about the same amount of forethought and preparation as the would-be climbers in this silly example. What they soon discover is that succeeding in a successful long-term marriage (not a so-called bad marriage) is as challenging as climbing Mt. Everest.
Fact
Since the Middle Ages, Western culture has made romantic love the primary source of life's meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy. Paradoxically, the experience of falling in and out of romantic love is also the source of the deepest wound in the Western psyche.
More Than Luck
To get another myth out of the way, it takes much more than luck or good karma to produce harmony and happiness within marriage. Obviously luck or karma may play a part, and there are some couples that fit together so well they prompt others to wonder if they've not been blessed as soul mates, meaning a couple who are destined for each other.
Maybe, but this lucky couple still needs to decide who's going to take out the garbage and who'll do laundry. However destined, they're not saints and they'll have to cope with each other's flaws. Even the luckiest couples face the same reality: Marriage is a challenge that requires new skills, practice, and enormous patience.
If any area of marriage requires luck, one would have to say it's the mate selection process. Those who marry young have to look for the right life partner without really understanding what marriage entails, and without knowing the important ways in which both may change ten, twenty, or thirty years down the road. Then there are all the unknowable ups and downs life will deliver that will test you as a couple and a family.
Essential
Marital love is a rational commitment made between two imperfect humans who believe that within marriage they can support each other to be better people than they would be alone.
Choosing the Right Mate
Certainly some individuals have more self knowledge at an earlier age, giving them a better set of criteria to work with in choosing someone compatible, while others will have to learn by painful trial and error about who the appropriate partner for them may be, picking the wrong person first, perhaps experiencing a “broken heart” or a painful divorce.
Then again, if experience were the main factor, it would follow that second and third marriages should exhibit higher success rates than firsts — and, unfortunately, this just isn't true.
What the data suggest is that young or old, and whether it's your first, second, or third marriage, men and women are marrying without having learned important lessons about who they are, what they need from a partner, and the essential skills required in any marriage. This sad reality makes a persuasive case for premarital counseling, practice with couple communication, and financial management — whatever the two can do to prepare for the rigors of marriage.
The Must Haves
Clinical observation of successful marriages indicates that good relationships have three essential components that qualify them as superior: trust, honesty, and effective communication.
To these, for the purposes of making this Everything® Guide useful for most relationships and each stage of marriage, please add teamwork, conscious daily practice, and humor to this “must-do list.” Simply put, if most or all of these qualities exist in your marriage the chance of achieving success as partners is greatly enhanced.
