Commitment

There is a lot of information out there about why marriages fail.  A quick search of the internet turns up articles on how communication is the key to marital success.  I don’t buy it, and neither should you.  Communication is important, but what many don’t realize is that we are always communicating.  In fact, you cannot NOT communicate. Everything you do communicates something.  Whether you communicated what you intended is another story.  Tony Robbins explains it best when he says “communication is defined by the response you get.”  Communication is not the reason marriages fail.  Neither are money problems, health
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June 1, 2009 | by
Categories: Marriage.
Tags: communication, Couples, and Marriage.

Household Labor – Are you Pulling Your Weight?

Picture a husband and wife in their late thirties, let’s call them Bill and Marie.  Bill and Marie both work and have two school-aged kids. Bill’s workday is usually finished first, so he picks up the kids on his way home.  When he gets home, Bill often chills out on the couch reading the mail while his kids watch cartoons until supper. When Marie gets home she hurriedly starts preparing dinner and puts another load of laundry in the wash while looking through the kids papers from school.  She’ll often plop a load of clean laundry in front of Bill
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October 22, 2008 | by
Categories: Marriage.
Tags: communication, household, Marriage, and responsibility.

Happiness, Marriage, and Divorce.

Can marriage make you happy?  Or, if you are unhappily married, will divorce make you feel better?  Probably it will not.  I’ve been working with couples long enough now to see patterns, tendencies, and trends in marriage and divorce.   One tendency I want to highlight here is the human tendency to pursue happiness in all the wrong places and then get upset when those places in our lives don’t produce happiness.  “The pursuit of happiness” was written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson as a right of all the people, and so we Americans expect happiness to
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August 7, 2007 | by
Categories: Divorce, Marriage, and Mental Health.
Tags: depression, Divorce, happiness, Marriage, and research.

Women’s Health: What Social Science Research Tells Us

This month’s focus on women’s health provides an opportunity to share some valuable information regarding family dynamics.  Recent research has taken a serious look at the effects of marriage and family life on women’s well-being.  Much of the research in the social sciences suggests that marriage is beneficial to women’s health.  For the women who are reading this article: Before you start laughing at that last statement please understand that these studies are based on huge amounts of data from surveys of thousands of people.  The findings are based on averages, and comparisons of married women to those who are
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May 3, 2007 | by
Categories: Marriage.
Tags: Divorce, domestic violence, emotions, Marriage, mothers, research, and women.