Get Married, Stay Married: ...live happily ever after.

By Sarah Nicole Nadler

"There are great authors who can teach us to become better people every step of the way...Sarah Nadler is one of those very few." - NY Weekly

Get Married, Stay Married is a deeply personal self-reflection from award-winning author Sarah Nicole Nadler, who shares her 10+ years of experience as a minister and certified marriage coach.

Written for couples regardless of faith, Sarah Nicole Nadler outlines the foundational pillars upon which love is built. Without holding back, she tells the story of her own failed marriage, and how learning these pillars allowed her to find love again, and make it last. The book is a guide to the skills required to build happiness into a relationship, and will give new hope to any couple looking to overcome marriage autopilot.

Readers who follow these simple guidelines — building happiness into the woof and warp of a relationship —will inject new life into their marriage. As a world-renown human rights advocate, Sarah Nicole Nadler shares a powerful weapon against broken homes and divorce rates by shedding light upon one of the most basic rights we all share - the right to loving union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649692085

Book preview

Introduction

I grew up as an American Princess.

Don’t get me wrong - life wasn’t always perfect.

When I was two years old, I lived with my single mother in a tiny apartment in Oakland and every Friday her best friend Mari would invite us over for dinner because there was no food in the fridge.

Years later she remarried, and that was the beginning of the easiest part of my life. Thanks to my stepdad, from 5 to 18 I had what I jokingly call first world problems, but more realistically you would probably refer to as white privilege. 

Dance lessons, piano lessons, annual trips, vacations that lasted several weeks, second homes and summers filled with horses, sailing and blueberries...

I saw the world through the lens of a Disney Princess, or a Jane Austen novel. During that time everything about my future was bright and shiny, and nothing frightened me. World events seemed so over there - never anything that could possibly encroach on my plans and Big Dreams.

Until one day it suddenly could. 

When I was eighteen my sister was diagnosed with cancer. 

In the succeeding six months, the world became very different. It was suddenly a frightening, terrible place where even giants could fall. Like my parents, who had seemed so powerful and unshakable, yet for the first time in my life they were without answers.

What could I do?

I gave up the dance classes. I moved out on my own so they could sell the house. When my mom came to me, holding my youngest sister (just 9 months old) and asked me to care for her, I said yes. I took the baby to work with me, stayed up at night with her in the tiny one-bedroom apartment I shared with my boyfriend, and worked three jobs.

But I couldn’t change what was happening.

Emily eventually passed. My parents divorced, my boyfriend cheated and left. And then our dog died.

Right about this point, you’re probably thinking, Is there a country song in here somewhere?

Maybe someday I’ll write one.

But all of this leads us to a point...and that is this:

At nineteen, I left my life behind and went backpacking through Mexico. And I discovered something there - something extraordinary. A philosophy that has given me wisdom and hope in the darkest corners of the world. 

Martin Luther King Jr. once said:

Only in the darkness can you see the stars. 

Walking through the ruins of an ancient powerful civilization that had been replaced by nothing more than a Third World country, I met people who lived in poverty the likes of which I’d never seen...who yet greeted me warmly, shared what they had generously, and treated me as one of their own.

Studying in a tiny hole-in-the-wall internet cafe in Coyoacan - art district of Mexico City, I first began to glimpse the true nature of the world. 

I realized that my perfect life had been a lie. Life isn’t perfect, all on it’s own. You have to work for it.

And so I became a student of philosophy. 

I wanted to understand why my life had gone so awry, and how to prevent it from ever happening again. 

But I was soon to discover that what I could do to help others was far, far more important to me than anything I could learn about my past.

After countless hours studying the scriptures, I was ordained in 2008 just after my twenty-first birthday. In the decade that followed, I ministered to the homeless, movie stars, business owners, drug addicts, gang members, sorority leaders, and many many more across Mexico and the US.

Everywhere I looked, I found that my ideas were valid, and people who suffered were helped by what I had learned. 

And so we come to this book. 

I have written this book to empower you, make a believer out of you, show you how to be a husband or wife, and how to transform what you have now - all the good, the bad and the ugly, into a true Happily Ever After. 

But most importantly, this is a book by a completely shameless Disney Princess, who believes in happy endings, has had her own struggles with love as well as life, experienced the heartbreaking stark pain of broken vows, relationship endings and the shame of a failed marriage and divorce - not just once, but twice. 

This is a book by a woman who became a minister, delivered 500+ hours of marriage counseling, failed in marriage herself, gave up, tried again, rose up, found her Prince - discovered he was as faulty as any other man, and finally, at long last - found a system for salvaging marriages that not only brought her very own happiness, but has been proven to work for others.

The proof is in the many testimonials of couples who have come to me for help, and gone away again with a salvaged marriage and happy lives.

I have tried hard to distill what I know of marriage and keep it distinct from theology, philosophy,