A prescription for a marriage in trouble

This is a "rerun"; I posted it a year or so ago. But I think it contains a lot of wisdom. 



Dear Kenneth,

Your letter tells me that you and Nancy are no longer happy together and that you are wondering whether it might not be best to end your marriage. You add that, since I was the minister who married you, both of you feel you owe it to me to talk the situation over with me before doing anything final. You hope I will understand. I do understand. I understand that two people who stood before me nine years ago and promised to love and cherish each other for ever are about to join the ranks of those who decide to demonstrate publicly that they lack the moral courage, intelligence and unselfishness to make a marriage work.

You say that you and Nancy are no longer happy together. Do you really believe that constant happiness is guaranteed in marriage or in any other aspect of life? Aren’t you mature enough to know that every marriage has its areas of friction and that the stresses change as you move through the years? You will never solve all your problems; you would be bored if you did. This belief that each of you is entitled to receive happiness is at the bottom of your trouble. You are not entitled to any such thing! What you do have is the privilege and the problem of giving happiness. When you master that art, you discover that you can’t give happiness without getting it back.

At times I wonder if this obsession with having things just the way we want them, and sulking if they are not, isn’t becoming a kind of disease. Somehow we must get a quality of toughness and endurance back into our concept of marriage. We must stop thinking of marriage as a ‘maybe’ proposition – maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, and if it doesn’t we can always shuffle the cards and deal again.

Two generations ago, there were plenty of marriages in which the going was rocky. But those people didn’t run to divorce courts at the first sign of trouble. They thought of marriage as a contract; it was an affront to God and society to break it. They were like pioneers who always had more rivers to ford, more mountains to cross. The vast majority kept going until they had reached the goal they sought.

Certainly there are some cases where a marriage has been allowed to die and nothing can revive it. I don’t think that you two have reached that point. But you will reach it unless you take some constructive action, and take it quickly. You say you would like to talk to me. All right. I shall be glad to see you one week from today – if, between now and then, you and Nancy will agree to an experiment. If you accept this condition, there may be some point in our meeting. Otherwise, I see little reason to waste my time – or yours.

Half an hour each day for the next six days is what I ask you to devote to the experiment. I don’t guarantee that these will be pleasant half-hours or easy ones. But surely you owe this much to your children, if not to yourselves. Let’s face it, the decision of divorce that you are about to make will affect all five of you for the rest of your lives.

The experiment I want you to try has been tested and found to work. The equipment you will need is simple: an alarm clock – preferably one with a loud tick – two chairs and a quiet room where you will not be disturbed. One other requirement: for this week I want you both to stop drinking. Perhaps neither of you drinks much; but even in small amounts, especially when relations between people are strained, alcohol lowers the threshold of irritability. So give it up. The discipline will be good for you.

Each day, go together into that quiet room, close the door, set the alarm clock to ring in 30 minutes’ time and place it where both of you can watch it. Now mentally divide up the time into five-minute periods. In the first five minutes, project yourselves into the future. Separately and silently, visualize life as it will be if your marriage breaks up.

Kenneth, ask yourself what happens to a man when he gets a divorce. He loses his home – the comfort, the familiarity, the closeness. He usually loses his children, possibly their respect and affection, certainly most of their companionship. He may find that in his business or profession he has gained the enmity of people who can influence his career. He will certainly lose some friends; in marital breakups, people tend to side with the wife.

Nancy, in my 42 years in the ministry I have learnt that, emotionally, the wife suffers most from a divorce. Her sense of failure as a person is greater than the man’s, her loneliness more complete. A man has his work to fall back on, with its demands and contacts. A woman usually does not. If she has children, her chances of remarrying are far less than the man’s.

In the second five minutes, I want each of you to make a supreme effort to stop judging the other and examine yourself. Ask yourself certain uncomfortable questions. Have you magnified this or that grievance out of all proportion? Have you been too rigid in your demands? Have you refused to compromise on key issues? Have you judged your marriage partner guilty while leaving yourself exempt? Doesn’t the law of averages whisper that sometimes you must be in the wrong?

Do you know why I recommend an alarm clock with a loud tick? Because one man who tried this experiment that at the end of five minutes the clock seemed to be repeating over and over again the word at the bottom of his trouble: self, self, self. Here is one other point for you to ponder in this self-examination. You may expect to marry again; most divorced people do. But, unless you face the immaturities in yourself, unless you learn more about self-discipline and unselfishness than you have shown so far, you will probably find eventually that you have simply exchanged one set of emotional problems for another.

The next five minutes are to be spent thinking about your children. You may believe that an atmosphere of discord and hostility in the home is worse for them than the dislocations of a divorce. But this selfish rationalization is based on a assumption that is not necessarily true – that the hostility and discord are inevitable and will go on for ever. Certainly, quarrelling parents are bad for children, especially if they lack the self-control to quarrel in private. But an uneasy home with two parents may well be better than a broken home with one. It has been my observation that when children become greatly upset in these situations the thing that bothers them most is the fear that their parents are going to split up, and that they are going to lose one or the other of them.

Nancy, I think that you are the one who must refuse to be stampeded into an unwise course of action. My wife is convinced that women hold the solution to the divorce trend – and that they could reduce it sharply if they would study the problems of marriage. Recently at a dinner party I overheard her say, “It is the woman’s job to provide stability in a marriage, to make the home an ‘island of quietness in a noisy world’”. And it is the wife, she said, who has to do most of the adjusting. “That’s why marriage is the most demanding and exciting career a woman can choose!”

For the first 15 minutes you will have been sitting in silence. Now it is time to communicate with each other. I want each of you to read aloud, taking turns on alternate days, these verses from the Bible: 1Corinthians: Ch13, Verses 4 to 7. These four verses contain the most profound and inclusive definition of love ever written. I doubt whether you have ever taken time to meditate on just what St Paul meant: that love suffers long and is kind, that love is not easily provoked, that love endures all things (not some). After you have read these four verses aloud, don’t try to discuss them. Just close the Bible and think about them for five minutes. Inevitably, you will use them as a yardstick to measure your own performance.

Now it’s time for that nostalgic game called, “Do you remember?” Let each of you recall from the past and remind the other of some episode that was a moment of harmony and closeness. Perhaps the time you walked together on a beach, hand in hand. Perhaps the time you sat up all night with a sick child. Perhaps some tender or ludicrous moment that turned into a family joke. There need be no discussion; just recognition of the fact that once there was love and sharing, and that no possible change of heart can erase those moments – or eliminate the possibility that they might occur again.

In the final five-minute period, I ask each of you, first, to hold one other Biblical phrase in mind: “Be still and know that I am God.” Whatever your concept of God may be, I want each of you, speaking aloud, to tell Him what you think has gone wrong with your marriage and what your share of the blame may be. Speak from the bottom of the heart. This, of course, is prayer.

You may hesitate or even balk at the idea, but I can tell you this: I have married hundreds of couples and helped hundreds of others, and I have never yet known a marriage to fail where the partners had – or acquired – the habit of praying aloud together. It is an emotional lightning conductor that deflects anger and resentment into an area so vast that they are simply swallowed up and forgotten, like pebbles cast into the sea. This need not be a lengthy process; perhaps one minute will do. And there is no set formula. But I will guarantee that if you try, you will find yourself speaking in a different tone of voice, and when that alarm clock rings your whole point of view will be subtly changed.

I hope you will try this experiment. Because, if your marriage breaks up, something in each of you will always regret it. No matter how permissive society has become about divorce, I have never yet known one divorced person who, in total honesty, would not admit to some trace of sadness for the failure of a first marriage.

Not long ago, a colleague of mine preached a sermon in which he said that he had found in one short sentence the answer to many of life’s thorniest problems. The sentence was: “The way out is the way through”. He meant that when you’re faced with a difficult situation you can’t solve it by running away or by pretending that it isn’t there. You have to plow through it until you come out on the other side. This takes courage, and it takes facing of facts. It takes persistence, determination, control. That’s what you two need.

If you and Nancy will take your courage in both hands and hang on long enough, you will achieve a closeness and a strength that will make your honeymoon years seem like puppy love – which in a way they were. Something in you, some wisdom deeper than your conscious mind, knows this; otherwise you would never have written to me.

Come and see me a week from now. The way out is the way through; there is a way through. With God’s help, I think, I hope, I know, that we can find it.

Norman (Vincent Peale)