The DNA of Highly Successful Marriages

By Caxton Opere, MD

Anyone can build a highly successful marriage if they know how. The knowledge of the basic building blocks for creating healthy marriages in the DNA of Highly Successful Marriages will help you do so in less time and avoid the pain of failure and disappointment that often leads to abuse, neglect, disappointment and divorce. It is easy to understand but not simplistic, precise, yet practical, easy to remember and even easier to teach others. In his fifth book, Dr. Opere brings certainty into how to truly build successful marriage relationships in an unusually practical yet authoritative way to help combat the divorce epidemic. A must read for every single, engaged, married and divorced couple as well as counselor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caxton Opere, MD
• Release date: Dec 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465876638

Caxton Opere, MD

Dr. Caxton Opere is a board certified internist, the world's #1 authority on the medical complications of divorce and 5-Minute Marriage Compatibility Tests with over 34 years of clinical experience. He is an international speaker and researcher, ordained minister and artist and has been interviewed coast to coast on the medical complications of divorce by the media including Fox Sports News and quoted by msnmoney.com on expensive weddings. He has published 18 books and hundreds of teaching programs on marriage, ministry, medicine including several videos on the Covid-19 pandemic.

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The DNA of Highly Successful Marriages

Published by Caxton Opere at Smashwords

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Copyright 2011 by Caxton Opere

Smashwords License Edition Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book can be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owner. Parts of this book were originally published in The 36 Well Kept Secrets of Successful Marriages and Divorce by the copyright owner,

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version(KJV)

Disclaimer

The reader agrees not to hold the author or publisher responsible for any choices the reader makes using the information in this book. If you need help with marital problems or issues, seek the services of a professional counselor or therapist.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Successful Marriage Puzzle

Chapter 2: The Marriage Lifelines

Chapter 3: The Building Process

Chapter 4: The Pentagon Factors

Chapter 5: The Physical Foundations

Chapter 6: The Mental Foundations

Chapter 7: The Emotional Foundations

Chapter 8: The Spiritual Foundations

Chapter 9: The Financial Foundations

Chapter 10: The B.R.A.G. Principle

Chapter 11: Parents and the DNA of Marriage

Chapter 12: The Pillars of Marital Success

Chapter 13: Combining The Foundations and Pillars

Other books by Caxton Opere, MD

Sample Chapters from How Divorce Kills

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To the immortal invisible only Wise God, creator of the original blue print for successful marriages be glory, honor, majesty, dominion and power both now and forever, and to His only begotten son, Jesus. May my love for you and obedience to your Word be eternally enduring in Jesus’ name, Amen.

To my father in the ministry, Bishop Julius Abiola, thanks for your gentleness and patience as an example to me of how I ought to live and lead.

To my wife, Id, for teaching me what it means to be a really good father and husband. To my children for their patience and understanding hearts. God will continue to protect, bless and prosper you in all your ways. I look forward to that time when you will all have highly successful marriages.

Finally, to you the reader who has chosen to invest their valuable time in reading this book, I am grateful. This book will hopefully help you address the ignorance factor related to building highly successful marriages.

Caxton Opere. Baton Rouge.

Introduction

We have harnessed electricity, mastered computing, transplanted hearts, successfully separated Siamese twins, extracted blood clots from the brains of stroke victims, cured cancer, and eradicated smallpox, put men on the moon, and treated mad men with drugs that enable them to function like normal citizens, hold down jobs and even get married, and implanted severed limbs. Yet despite all these advances in the sciences, psychiatry and medicine, marriages are becoming less fulfilling, more frustrating and more dangerous, leaving many married couples battered, wounded, and broken, if not destroyed. Too many marriages are failing woefully, leaving children with posttraumatic stress to struggle beneath their God-given potential as revealed in Judith Wallerstein’s study on children of divorce as well as the Center for Disease Control’s ACE study reported by Robert Anda and colleagues. Many of these children are addicted to drugs, video games, pornography, gambling and murderous rage. They have a higher incidence of adverse medical outcomes including diabetes, psoriasis, asthma, kidney stones and heart disease. When girls from such broken homes grow up and get pregnant, married or not, they suffer more complications during pregnancy. In Dr. Leener’s study published in the July 2006 issue of the Journal of Early Human Development for example, women raised without fathers were at increased risk of developing hypertension in pregnancy. Another study published in the November 2005 issue of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology by Dr. Wikstrom and colleagues showed that women who developed hypertension during pregnancy had almost double the risk for a heart attack. The November 2005 issue of Diabetes Care reported that the risk of autoimmune insulin-dependent diabetes was more than tripled by age two in children of divorced parents. Little wonder then that many of the children of divorce are also haters of God, bitter, depressed, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful, covenant breakers, full of wickedness, hatred and envy. When such children head sensitive government institutions, they can place an entire nation at war. With divorce rates and the number of divorcees reaching epidemic proportions, divorce may already be an issue of national security in many countries. Keep in mind that the collapse of the Russian Empire was not entirely unrelated to Russia having the highest divorce rates in the world. Also many Heads of States come from broken homes.

Marriage was originally designed by God to be the greatest bond of love joining a man and a woman together in sacrificial love and holy matrimony. It was to be entered prayerfully and was meant to be a purposeful, pleasurable, peaceful, potential-releasing, progress-building and powerful institution for the couple, their children and communities. Through marriage couples were to discover hidden treasures in each other, enjoy the greatest pleasures physically possible, comfort each other in difficult times, and be the most powerful prayer unit on earth. Through such union, they would overcome evil, and put the greatest enemy of mankind, Satan under lock and key. Marriage was supposed to be the model for creating better communities, cities and countries. Yet today, marriage has become for the most part, a yoke of bondage and oppression, a source of ridicule and the prime target of the gay right agenda. Sometimes, a bad marriage or divorce, through its medical complications, as revealed in my book How Divorce Kills, may be the trigger for a stroke or heart attack. Sinful man! Man’s sinful state has brought on him a dangerous plague of ignorance that makes it impossible for him to build a successful marriage without help. Hence the proliferation of self-help books and entire university departments dedicated to training others how to counsel married couples. Today, man is not only ignorant, he compulsively tries to cover up his ignorance, his sins, weaknesses, failures and mistakes when exposing them is the only path to securing peace, pleasure and progress in marriage.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Hosea 4:6

Two bothersome yet avoidable issues seem to be responsible for the currently high divorce rates—ignorance and deception.

High Ignorance Levels in Marriage

Divorce rates are high because of our ignorance of how successful marriages are built. Most couples and counselors are ignorant about how to prepare for marriage while single, how to choose a good mate, how to build a good marriage, and how to maintain, magnify and multiply what they build in the marriage. The latter three, maintaining, magnifying and multiplying what has been built, represent one single phase of ignorance so that we have a total of four phases of ignorance. These are the key areas of ignorance most people have that can accelerate divorce rates. Consider the first phase, the preparation phase, for example. The Bible in Proverbs 22:6 says train up a child in the way it should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Parents must train their children well in advance for both disappointments and success in the real world and for marriage. If a child is not well-prepared for both, he or she is almost certain to be a problem in marriage. Such children often grow up unable to function in any long-term relationship and unable to maximize a marriage’s fullest potential. Sometimes by watching a misbehaving child with its parents at a grocery store, you may predict the child’s marital future and how much of a nuisance they will be to themselves, their spouse, their children or even society as an adult, if care is not taken. Dealing with ignorance at all four levels can drastically reduce the marriage failure and divorce rates. Since the Bible offers the only real cure to all four phases of ignorance when it comes to marriage, any nation that forgets God will see its divorce rates climb to epidemic proportions.

Cover-ups Are Too Many

Besides ignorance, there is a second major factor that makes it almost impossible for married couples to experience a truly wonderful marriage - cover-ups. The Bible says

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper Proverbs 28:13

Too many enter into a marriage without sharing, discussing or confessing their past sins or mistakes to one another, particularly those that could make one partner say no to marriage. From several counseling sessions, it appears that Christians in particular are often deluded about the negative effects of their past sins on the future of their marriage. They hide things they dare not hide from a non-Christian, thinking that if the issue is not discovered until after marriage, that person’s religious beliefs will force them to remain trapped in the marriage. But this is spiritual kidnapping, punishable by eternal fire. God cannot force you to stay in a marriage you were tricked into and do not want. Staying in such a marriage would not be based on God’s standards but on a personal choice and whether or not your well-being and health are jeopardized by such a marriage. Christians ignorant of this reality may find themselves victims of marriage vampires or wolf-in-sheep clothing. This is one more reason why divorce rates have climbed drastically inside the church. Wolf in sheep-clothing or not, gold-digger or not, if you use religion to trap an unsuspecting Christian, you have sown the seeds of a disastrous future for that marriage. Jesus Christ brought redemption to mankind but does not expect us to trap other people into marriage just because of their commitment to Him. Religion or not, it is your absolute responsibility to explain to a future mate in clear language without metaphors, any tragic events in your life or negative things about you that may affect the other person’s decision to marry you. Don’t ever leave the other person to figure it out after marriage if there is something you know they cannot be expected to live with. Expose it all when your relationship has gone far enough to consider marriage. It’s called casting your bread upon the waters. Tell the truth. If the man or woman is yours and was meant to be, they may withdraw at first, but they will gradually come to accept the real you and your marriage will be authentic and not based on deception. Such openness and confession will eliminate many hidden barriers to true love and communication down the road. Withholding information on the other hand could make your partner feel cheated once the deception is discovered. He or she may lash out at you in anger, cheat on you or do something more dangerous after the discovery. Withholding information is never honorable and could be the downfall of your marriage and it is very rare to have a partner thank you for withholding a secret from them till after you married. So the woman who goes back to her ex-boyfriend to sleep with him just before her wedding day needs to confess that act before getting married. Likewise, a man who loves pornography should confess this addiction to his future bride. A woman who has had a hysterectomy need not bother marrying a man who wants to have lots of children. If she wants to marry the man, she should tell him she can’t have children and why. Admitting the truth gives the other person an option and this could strengthen your love for each other unconditionally. Without honesty and true confession, a marriage can be exposed to an arsenal of spiritual, financial, emotional, mental and physical attacks from internal and external forces beyond a couple’s control. This could create extreme conflict and eventually marital collapse. Therefore not only must you confess to one