The Book About Marriage: Entering It, Sustaining It, Ending It

By Lenard Marlow

The simple message of this book is that divorcing husbands and wives should not allow divorce lawyers to send them off on a fool’s errand that will take what is already a tragedy in their lives and turn it into a nightmare. That is when they are persuaded to employ the law as a weapon in a legal tug of war the object of which is simply to get as much as you can and to give as little as you have to. Rather, they should look to the law as a common framework that they can turn to in their effort to conclude an agreement and thereby get on with their lives. There is a name for this. It is called divorce mediation and it doesn’t take forever or cost a king’s ransom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664160095

Lenard Marlow

A graduate of Colgate University and Columbia Law School, Lenard Marlow has spent most of his professional life working with divorcing husbands and wives, first as a divorce lawyer (he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers) and then, for more than thirty-five years, as a divorce mediator (he is a Past President of the New York State Council on Divorce Mediation). In addition to lecturing and putting on trainings throughout the United States, Europe and South America on the subject, he has written many books about divorce mediation, including The Two Roads To Divorce; Metaphors For Mediators, and Divorce Mediation: The Conflict Between Getting It Right and Getting It Done.

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INTRODUCTION

As its title indicates, this is a book about marriage. It is the companion book to two other books I wrote, A Common Sense, Practical Guide to Divorce and Divorce: Accepting Imperfect Solutions To Imperfect Problems, which, as their titles indicate, are about divorce.

This book was originally conceived as a book addressed to someone in a troubled marriage who was struggling with the question of whether they should go forward, get a divorce, and end their marriage, or go back, get some professional help, and try to sustain it. From my experience working with married couples, I knew that this was a problem that many husbands and wives struggled with for a very long time, often for years. I wrote this book because I felt that I could help them answer that question.

After I began to write the book, I realized that it could also be of value to someone who was not married but who was in a relationship that might lead to marriage. If you are someone in this second group, you are probably not reading this book to answer the question of whether or not you should marry. The fact that you are in love has answered it for you. (As they say, love is the argument that doesn’t admit of any argumentation.) Rather, you are only reading it because someone you know told you it was a good book and that you should read it. Nevertheless, I think that it may be of benefit to you as well.

The first reason is that very commonly, couples in a relationship that might lead to marriage are also faced with the question of whether they should terminate the relationship or go forward and make it a permanent one. If you are in that second group, and struggling with that question, reading this book may help you make that decision.

The second is that, contrary to what we have been brought up to believe, love and marriage do not, as the famous song says, always go together like a horse and carriage. All too often, when marriage hits a bump in the road, they separate and come apart. My hope is that reading this book will give you a more realistic understanding when it comes to love and marriage and, in doing so, help you to keep them together.

As you will find, the principal theme of this book will be that husbands and wives do not get divorced because of the problems they find in their marriage. They get divorced because of the problems they bring to their marriage. In Part I, I will provide example after example of this. It is my hope that, in reading them, if you are married rather than just in a relationship that might lead to marriage, you will be able to see aspects of your present relationship that the blinding power of the love you experienced, and that so characterized your relationship before you married, disabled you from seeing, as it disabled the couples I will refer to from seeing.

But the book goes well beyond that. If you are someone who is in a troubled marriage and struggling with the question of which direction to go in, by the time you finish reading it, you will feel that you are in a position to make that decision. In fact, there will be a short test for you to take that will answer the question for you.

The book will also help you in a second way, regardless of which direction you decide to go in. It will provide you with a road map that will point you in the right direction.

As I learned over the last thirty-five years of my career working with couples who had turned for help in an effort to sustain their marriage before they came to me, the sad truth was that, more often than not, the mental health professionals to whom they had turned for help were of no help. They struck out more often than not. Moreover, unlike Babe Ruth, they did not have a lot of home runs to which they could point to correct the imbalance. It was just one strike out after another. Worse, it was not generally understood why that was so.

Part I will explain why and how this happened. In the terms that I will put it, it was because the professionals to whom they had turned for help were following the wrong road map. As a result, they were as lost as were the husbands and wives who came to them for help. But Part I will go further. It will provide those of you who have decided to go back in an effort to sustain your marriage with a better road map. More important, rather than just selecting the mental health professional you will turn to for help at random, knowing what you will now know, you will only select someone who follows the new road map that I will propose.

But suppose that, rather than going back and attempting to address the problems in your marriage, you decide to go forward, get a divorce, and end it. If that is the case, how will this book be of help to you? Again, by pointing you in the right direction. Toward that end, Part III will refer you to the companion books that I wrote to this one, which I previously mentioned, and you owe it to yourself to read them.

Although husbands and wives do not realize this, they also instinctively follow a road map when they decide to divorce. It is the one given to them by our adversarial legal system and the divorce lawyers who are its agents. Unfortunately, there is a very serious problem with that road map. Moreover, it is not that it won’t improve the situation. It is that it will only make matters worse. That, unfortunately, has been the sad legacy bequeathed by our adversarial legal system to all of those who have followed that road map. It took what was already a tragedy in their lives and turned it into a nightmare.

Those companion books will provide you with a better road map. And just as there is no other book that will give you the road map that this one does when it comes to your marriage, there are no other books that will do the same when it comes to your divorce.

Providing you with those better road maps was the intention of all of the books that I have written on the subject. May they be of help to you.

I will close this Introduction by just adding three things. Although this book was not written with couples who were in a sound marriage in mind, I nevertheless believe that it could be of benefit to them as well. The relationship of a couple who has been married for five years or more is not the same as it was when they first married. On the contrary, it is an entirely different relationship. Thus, though they may both still love each other, they are not in love with each other as we generally use that term. Put another way, they have a different marriage today than they did when they got married.

First, couples in a sound marriage are more likely to take their relationship for granted. It is not that they no longer appreciate each other. As I said, if they have a sound marriage, they undoubtedly still love each other. But they are not necessarily aware of the compromises that they have both made along the way to sustain it. I think that they would have an even better marriage if they were consciously aware of this.

Second, although I have talked about couples who were in a relationship that might lead to marriage as if they were one group, in reality, they are divided into two groups. The first consists of relationships in which one (or both) of the parties is struggling with the question of whether they should terminate the relationship. The second consists of relationships in which one or both of the parties is asking themselves whether they should go forward and make the relationship permanent. However, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to talk as if they constitute one group.

Finally, the fact that I will be referring to so many different people in so many different relationships presented a problem for me. Since what I will say will call into question so much of the conventional wisdom when it comes to marriage and divorce, what I will be presenting will be complex enough as it is without adding to it. Thus, unless I indicate to the contrary, it should be assumed that in every instance, I am referring to a marriage between a man and a woman.

CHAPTER 1

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

If you want to get the right answer, you will

first have to ask the right question.

As I said in the Introduction, this book is addressed to basically two groups of people. The first consists of people who are not married but who are in a relationship that might lead to marriage. The second consists of couples who are married but who are having serious problems in their marriage. As a result, one or both of them is questioning whether or not they should terminate their marriage. As I said, I believe that a couple who is in a basically sound marriage might also benefit from reading this book, but it is not primarily addressed to couples in that third group.

Part 1 of the book will be primarily addressed to couples in the first of those two groups. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, the first of those two groups is often made up of two sub-groups. In the first, one or both of the parties is considering whether they should terminate their relationship. In the second, one or both of the parties is considering whether they should go forward and make their relationship more permanent.

Having said that, I must add that Part I will also be addressed to couples who are already married or, in the terms that I have previously put it, have already moved forward and made their relationship more permanent, but where one or both of them is considering terminating their marriage.

The purpose of this book, as I said, is to help those in that second group to make the decision they are struggling with—whether to go forward, get a divorce, and end their marriage, or to go back and attempt to successfully work on the problems in it with a view to sustaining it. Moreover, since, if you are in that second group, I am going to give you something that will enable you to decide whether or not it is realistic for you to believe that you will be able to work on the problems in your marriage;, you should be able to make that decision by the time you have finished reading the book. That is the better road map I referred to in the Introduction. If you are like most husbands and wives, that is the question you have been struggling with for some considerable time. Putting you in a position to make that decision will free you from that conflict. Since the key to that is the new road map that I have referred to, I want to tell you how I happened to come up with it.

For more than fifty years of my professional life, I worked with husbands and wives who were in the process of getting a divorce, first as a traditional divorce lawyer and then, for the last thirty-five of those fifty years, as a divorce mediator. In that latter period, I also wrote numerous books addressed to how divorcing husbands and wives who had decided to go forward and end their marriage should do that. In not one of those books had I ever raised the question that I am in this book—whether or not it was realistic for them to believe that they might be able to go back and successfully work on the problems in their marriage.

I never gave any thought to this until I decided to retire, which I did at the end of 2015. One possible reason was that, because I had been so focused on the problems involved in their going forward and ending their marriage, it never occurred to me to address the possibility of their going back and working on the problems in their marriage. But that answer didn’t satisfy me, and I knew that there had to be more to it than that. Nevertheless, I didn’t give very much thought to it.

Ironically, the answer only occurred to me when I began to give thought to writing this book. That is when the many books I had written about divorce proved very helpful to me. What had really been the theme of all of those books? It was that what turned a husband’s and wife’s divorce into the nightmare that it all too often became was the fact that they made the mistake of following the wrong road map, the one bequeathed to them by our adversarial legal system. (In an earlier book, Common Sense, Legal Sense, and Nonsense About Divorce, I referred to it as a script. For my present purposes, I felt the metaphor road map worked better.) And what was the message in all of the books that I had written? It was that if they wanted to avoid that for themselves, they would have to follow a better road map. It was coming to that conclusion that enabled me to write this book.

Though the mental health professionals to whom they had turned did not realize this, the road map they were following had also been bequeathed to them by our adversarial legal system. What was wrong with that road map? Its focus was on the wrong place. In my terms, it was causing them to look at the presenting problem rather than at the underlying problem. The presenting problem was the complaint that one or both of them now had when it came to their marriage. The underlying problem, at least from my perspective, was one that the two of them had brought to their marriage. Put another way, my thesis was that the seeds that took root and eventually undermined their marriage were planted a long time ago. They were planted before they got married.

Ironically again, that conclusion was implicit in many of the books that I had previously written, particularly The Two Roads To Divorce, and I am going to quote from Chapter 2 of it, entitled The Garden of Eden.

When something goes wrong, it is natural to look for an explanation. After all, everything must have a cause. The same is true of divorce. There must be a reason. Or, as the law has traditionally put it, someone must be at fault.

This belief derives from our view of the world, which is grounded in the story of the Garden of Eden. That story tells us that the disharmony that we see everywhere between man and nature is not an inherent part of the human condition or, therefore, inevitable. Rather, what caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from the Garden of Eden (to fall from grace) was human failing (sin).

Our view of marriage and divorce is grounded in the same understanding. Like Adam and Eve, who originally lived in a perfect state of harmony with the world in the Garden of Eden, we believe that husbands and wives did as well. Accordingly, the disharmony that led to their divorce was not an inherent part of their marriage. It was not there in the beginning. Rather, their falling out of love (the fall from grace) was caused by the misconduct of one of them. That is what we mean when we say that the divorce was caused by one of the parties—that it was his or her fault. If one of them had not been guilty of misconduct, they would still have a happy marriage (still be in love). Put simply, marriages do not