The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marriage Work

By Kenneth H. Waldron Ph.D

This highly readable research-based book provides surprising answers to this simple question in plain language. Successfully married spouses have a realistic understanding of marriage and demonstrate effective marriage skills when compared to those in troubled marriages. The authors tell the reader those “secret” understandings of marriage, but more importantly, describe the skills needed to be successful and how to learn those skills.

The book is a practical roadmap for married people to realize their dreams of a life-long marriage worth lasting. The book explodes myths about marriage, explains why the challenges and struggles of marriage are normal, how to get through them and reassures us that when a marriage is successful, the effort is worthwhile.

The book treats marriage as a “game” and describes how to play it well and have fun playing it. The skills are presented as practical behaviours that can be learned and applied as soon as the next day. The skills turn many ideas about marriage, and even some expert advice, on their head, and while acknowledging that a successful marriage can seem magical, the book exposes the secrets and tricks behind the magic.

This is a book for people starting out in a marriage, for people struggling in a troubled marriage, and even for people heading for divorce who would like to turn around their marriage. The book makes clear that reaching a successful marriage is not easy, but that most marriages can be successful. More importantly, the book offers hope and a practical “we can do it” and “here is how” approach.

Finally, the book offers a roadmap to mental health counsellors (psychologists, marriage, child and family counsellors, social workers and other licensed counsellors), when working with clients who need help regarding their marital situation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398483965

Kenneth H. Waldron Ph.D

Ken Waldron is a psychologist who spent almost 40 years working in family and marital therapy and family law, in situations where spouses were going through or had gone through a divorce, or unmarried parents who had gone through a separation. He has provided extensive marital counselling and developed counselling approaches addressing interpersonal conflict based on science. He has studied both marriage and divorce, has done original research on relationship conflict and published extensively. He has also presented to other professionals around the United States and international audiences. Allan R. Koritzinsky is a family law attorney, mediator and arbitrator, who has handled thousands of divorce cases over his 50-plus year career. He has also written, taught and spoken to professionals, law students and judicial groups across the country. He is a retired partner at Foley & Lardner LLP and was the former Chair of the Family Law Team. He focused his practice on divorce and family law. He has a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. He was named a Wisconsin Super Lawyer and listed in The Best Lawyers in America. He was a Lecturer/Instructor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He co-authored of Tax Strategies in Divorce, Divorce Practice Handbook, and Wisconsin Family Law Casenotes & Quotes. With Kenneth Waldron, he co-authored Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law. While in Vietnam, he taught at the Saigon Law School. He was Fellow in the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and a Diplomat in the American College of Family Trial Lawyers.

Book preview

Introduction

Assumptions and Questions. We begin this book with several assumptions and questions about people who marry.

We assume that most people who marry have enjoyed a reasonably successful dating period and believe that they are in love.

While people have much in common, each person and therefore, each couple is unique in some ways. Therefore, everyone’s premarital relationship has patterns that are not only common to most people but also includes experiences that are unique to the people involved. Therefore, we assume that for most people, they reach a point when they are ready to take a leap into marriage.

This might not include a wedding; but does include declaring a committed relationship. That step likely includes a belief that they are in love with one another.

2. We assume that when people decide to marry, they might understand that marriage has challenges and that marriages do not always work out to be successful experiences. However, we assume that most people are optimistic that they will have a successful marriage and strongly desire that outcome.

As we will discuss later in the book, the desire to have a committed relationship that will last a long time is a human instinct that has the important benefit of successfully reproducing and raising children. However, we are also aware that this instinct is so powerful, that even when a couple chooses not to reproduce and have children, they tend to commit to one another intending a lifelong relationship.

3. We assume that people at least imagine that there are many profound benefits to marriage, in spite of the challenges, and hope with all of their hearts that their marriage will be a success.

Most marriages start with an explicit or implicit commitment to maximize the obvious benefits of a long-term successful marriage.

These three assumptions lead to the following four questions:

Are some marriages really successful?

Most people have been exposed to a number of marriages prior to marrying themselves. These usually include marriages that do not appear to be and actually might not be successful. These might also include people who appeared to be in successful marriages but suddenly divorce.

Many people might also have been exposed to marriages that seem successful, but wonder what goes on behind closed doors. This creates uncertainty.

2. What can people reasonably expect marriage to be like?

Most people enter marriage understanding that at some point there will be an end to the honeymoon period. Some even celebrate their first serious argument as the beginning of their relationship being real. However, as they have their second and third argument, uncertainty becomes a part of their relationship. Will they succeed or fail?

3. What makes the difference between marriages that are successful and those that fail?

In other words, what can people do to increase the chances that their marriage will be successful? What can they do so that their marriage will not only last until death do they part, but also be a marriage that is worthwhile lasting?

4. What can people do to move from a probable marital failure to a probable marital success?

The book answers this last question with a word of caution. A marriage heading for divorce goes through stages. In those early stages, spouses are still hopeful and often willing to put in an effort to turn the marriage around. The book can help make that happen.

However, if in the last stages, at least one if not both spouses have given up and are apathetic, they might no longer care enough to put in the effort. By that time, affairs, alcohol or drug abuse and very damaging arguments, sometimes including violent behaviour, might have done too much damage to turn things around. Surprisingly, even then for some spouses, if they still want to try, the book can answer the pivotal question: How can this be done?

These are the assumptions we make and the questions the book answers.

Many of our answers will likely be a surprise, sometimes the exact opposite of what spouses believe, but are based on good research into marital success and failure, along with the knowledge gained through the long experienced professional careers of the authors.

This is not just a book about marriage.

It is a how-to book for people

who want a successful marriage.

So, let’s get started.

The Choice to Marry: One of the most common human choices across time and cultures is to marry (form a committed union). The drive to marry has a long history in the species and likely stems from the evolutionary pressure to reproduce successfully. Yet, as we observe the details of history and look around us today, we see that marriage is fraught with great challenges.

The rates of divorce in Western culture are frightening. While the rate of divorces in the United States has dropped from about 50% to about 40% (closer to the historical average of about 30%), that still means that, about one-third of the time people who commit to a marriage eventually separate.

Even knowing that the odds of marriage

working out long term is about 60/40 or 70/30,

most people marry anyway

(sometimes more than once).

The more optimistic view of marriage is that in spite of great challenges, the chances of a marriage lasting for a lifetime are about 60 or 70%. Why is this optimistic? It seems that people actually want to be in that 60–70% group, and they are willing to take the chance that their marriage might not work out in the end.

It might help to put these statistics in perspective. Of all the endings to the marriage relationship, the saddest of all is to lose your loved spouse to old age and death-not divorce. When most people date, they are hopeful that the date is the beginning of a long-term relationship. However, all relationships end!

It might end after the first date. That is a little sad. It might end after a dating period that lasts a while. That is sadder. It might end after a marriage of ten or more years. That is sadder still.

It might end when a spouse dies, and that is saddest of all. Yet, that is what most people seek to be married and to be happily married until they lose each other in death.

Having a marriage that lasts until death is everyone’s goal,

but there may be an even better way to articulate the goal.

A popular book makes this point in its title: What Makes a Marriage Last (Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas). Notice that the title does not say, What makes a marriage worthwhile lasting? Actually, just having a marriage last a lifetime is not the goal for most people. Most people seek a marriage that is worthwhile lasting.

The book is about having a marriage that is worthwhile lasting.

We call this a truly successful marriage.

When people marry, they have a vision, mostly populated by happy thoughts. They imagine that after twenty years of marriage, they will have a successful relationship, with all the major difficulties behind them. They imagine that they will know one another so well that they can read each other’s mind.

They imagine walking hand in hand with feelings of security and love. This is not an entirely unrealistic vision and is a goal worth working towards. It can happen!

However, marriage success does not happen just because people love each other and want it to happen.

Success requires a

realistic understanding of marriage and

the skills to make it work.

What makes the difference

between those who have that successful marital experience

and those who do not?

The Successful Marriage: This is the question that the book answers. The purpose of this book is not only to explain how it works, but also to provide the tools to make it happen. The first step is having a realistic picture of what a marriage is, what it can be, what it is not, and what it cannot be. This is what the first four chapters of part one of the book is about.

However, more importantly, there are skills that people have or can learn that lead to a successful marriage. People who are weak in some or all of those skills, are those whose marriages end in divorce or in long term marriages filled with strife. Although, some of those people are bad people who do bad things, most are good people who are weak in the skills that we will describe in this book. In part two of the book, chapter 5 introduces the skills and chapters 6 through 12 describe the skills.

In part three of the book, in chapters 13–15, we describe the journey and destination to a successful marriage, putting it all together in chapter 16.

In the Appendix, for each chapter there are points for discussion by spouses, including exercises and drills to learn and practice the skills. The book not only describes what is necessary to reach marital success, it prescribes the knowledge and skills to make it happen.

Love is not enough! Our point is that a long-term successful marriage does not just happen because people love each other and want it to happen. A successful marriage reflects a realistic understanding of marriage and the marital skills to make it happen. The book is a toolkit of realistic knowledge of what a marriage offers and about the skills needed to reach marital success.

Parts of the book briefly explained: In part one, we will first give you the perspective of trained and experienced marriage counsellors. What do they know about the reality of marriage? This will include taking you through five Myths of Marriage, some of the major obstacles to having a successful marriage and will then focus on the mindset that is needed to have a successful long-term marriage.

In part two, we will introduce you to the seven skills that people have in successful marriages. Each skill will be accompanied in the Appendix by topics for discussion by spouses, exercises and drills to learn the skills.

Finally, in part three, we will wrap up with a realistic vision of a successful marriage and what makes it worth the effort. The information in this book is practical and pragmatic, supported by research, and answers the simple question: what works and what does not work?

Book Examples: Many examples will be given in this book. However, examples can be a way of cheating. Examples can be made up to make a point, but not be realistic. Every example in this book is drawn from real cases, and not made up.

We change some facts to disguise the cases, but will stay true to the point we are making. Ken has been through a divorce early in his adult life, and now is in a nearly forty year marriage that appears to be a successful relationship, at least so far. Allan has been married for over fifty years, and thus far, he also appears to be in a successful relationship.

Some of the examples in this book will come from their direct experiences in their marriages. The exception to our promise to use real cases is that at times, we will make up a short vignette just to make a point, but we will do this sparingly.

How to get the most out of this book: This is a book for both spouses. One spouse can improve the quality of a marriage by putting the lessons of this book into practice. However, in most cases, when only one spouse is participating, this may reduce some conflict and make the relationship more pleasant, but probably not be as successful as it might have been if both spouses were involved.

A great basketball player can help a team, but cannot make a great team without the effort of the other players, preferably all of them. To have a great marriage requires both spouses to be part of the team.

For those of our readers who are already in troubled marriages, there are two important things to remember:

It is never too late to change.

All marriages are troubled.

People can change. However, the way that people change is not always obvious, especially to people in a troubled marriage. In most challenging marriages, spouses want each other to:

Stop acting like that… or

Stop doing that…

However, that is not how people change. Imagine that you have a one-year-old baby who seems ready to walk, but will not do it. The baby just keeps crawling around on the floor. You decide that the baby needs some help learning to walk, so you start yelling at the baby,

Stop crawling around like that!

Pretty obvious, isn’t it? The baby might stop crawling, but is not going to walk. Babies learn to walk by parents teaching them skills, with a lot of help and practice. Once babies see the advantages of walking, they never go back to crawling.

Their hands are free, they can see and touch more, and they can move more quickly. Walking just works better than crawling, and they never look back.

The same is true of improving a troubled marriage. Forget about telling each other to stop doing things. Focus on learning the skills in this book and practicing them until you are pretty good at them. Your marriage will be so much better than before and you will never look back.

Are all marriages troubled? As you will read in chapter 3, all spouses go through a stage that lasts years and is a real challenge. Just think about all of the differences between people: what time to go to bed, how high to keep the heat in winter, what friends to spend time with, how to manage money, how often to have sex, what decisions to make, how much involvement to have with extended families, how to raise children, and on and on it goes.

All these issues need to be worked out, and it is not easy to do. Even being on the road to a successful marriage takes grit and determination. And love. But going through the stage of working out all those differences includes living for a while in a troubled marriage. Some people who begin with skills might have less trouble than others, but everyone faces at least some trouble.

A marriage is like a marathon. Everyone is excited and happy to start the race, but then the middle part is when everyone is tired, hungry, thirsty, aching, bored and starts wondering, Why the heck am I doing this? However, towards the end, everyone gets into the zone and feels great, and even picks up the pace to the finish line. Marriage is even better because the end lasts a lifetime.

How people learn

People have to learn many other lessons to enjoy life, like how to work in a certain job, how to make money and build wealth, how to raise children, how to negotiate the realities of where people live, and on and on it goes. In order to put the lessons of this book into practice, it might be important to understand how people learn. This is a little technical, but as the reader will see, it makes a lot of common sense.

Play while reading this book and have fun: We learn best when we are having fun, even though there is a good deal of work involved. Remember sitting at a desk in school, listening to a boring teacher drone on and on about grammar or algebra, or some other subject, about which you had little interest? Learning in that setting is just plain work, and after class, very little sticks.

Remember some science project, another project in school, or a math problem that was fascinating to you? You had to work just as hard to learn, but because you were stimulated, interested and having fun, you learned quickly, and the important lessons that you learned stuck with you.

Our point is a simple one. Just like learning in the classroom, as a couple, have fun learning and reading this book. Tease each other and make a big deal out of mistakes that you make. Laugh at yourself and each other.

When athletes learn a sport, they do not call it working. They call it playing. We do not work tennis, we play tennis, even though we are always learning and improving.

Play this book and have fun together.

Reward yourselves: We apologize in advance, as we get slightly technical. It took hundreds of years to discover how people learn, in spite of the fact that people are very good at learning what they need to learn to survive. Many models of learning were developed, and then later dismissed.

It was not until science was literally able to look into the brain of living people that we figured out how it really works.¹ When humans engage in certain behaviours, and at the end experience an unexpected reward, humans immediately remember and learn what led up to the reward and are driven to repeat the behaviours (In the brain, this is excitation in the pleasure centre of the brain).

It is like a science project that ends in a surprising success, where you and the other students who did the project with you jumped for joy! The reward at the end cemented what you learned in your brain.

Reward yourselves when reading the book. When you have completed a section, reward yourselves. Grab each other and give your spouse a big hug and kiss. Go for a walk and hold hands and talk about what you learned. Go on a date.

Sit across from each other, hold hands, look into each other’s eyes and tell each other that you are forever. Compliment each other on your efforts. It might feel a little awkward at first, depending on what your marriage has been like, but do it. Ken’s Tai Chi teacher often says, If you are not having fun you are not doing it right.

Three steps to take when reading this book: Each chapter has a topic. Okay, that is pretty obvious. Some chapters have one topic with several different parts. Each part is a little different, but all have to do with looking at the one topic from different angles. In other words, some chapters are pretty simple and some are more complicated.

The first step to understand this book is to read each chapter and really understand it. Each chapter that describes the required skills for successful marriages has points for discussion between spouses, including exercises and drills to learn how to put the skills into practice. Those are in the Appendix.

The second step is to read the Appendix for each chapter. If you think that you really get it, but are a little lazy, you can go on to the next chapter. If you think you need some practice to put a skill to work in your marriage, do the exercises and drills.

The third step is don’t forget to have fun and reward yourselves with big fat kisses as you go!

The Journey

The book is a roadmap for your journey to a successful marriage. The book will answer the following important questions:

What does it mean to communicate effectively with a spouse?

How can spouses successfully solve problems?

What can spouses reasonably expect from their marriage?

What is a marriage unlikely to provide?

What is your spouse really like, not what you might be thinking now?

How can this knowledge enhance the marital relationship?

What are the expected potholes and bumps on the unpaved road to marital success and how to get past them?

Do not think that reaching a successful marriage, even with the knowledge and skills in this book, is an easy task. Success in any endeavour requires a good deal of commitment and effort. Even already successful athletes spend enormous amounts of time practicing and do not expect to be perfect. Success is a matter of percentages.

A highly successful baseball player might have a batting average of 400, meaning that four out of ten times at bat the player reaches base. That means six out of ten times the player either strikes out or hits out. The goal in this book is to be a successful spouse about 80% of the time.

That means being a lousy spouse about 20% of the time, which should be good enough to have a successful marriage. Then, spouses can keep working to be even better.

We come to an important point that we will repeatedly make in the book. A successful marriage is not a day far into the future that people reach and are blissfully happy. There is a famous story about a great Tai Chi Master whose nickname was Undefeatable Yang, because he never lost a single martial arts match. When an advanced student came to him and asked how to reach mastery, Yang responded that he has not reached mastery himself and still had much to learn.

Neither you nor your spouse will ever be the perfect spouse, but you both can be good enough to enjoy a successful marriage.

The Tai Chi Master’s point, if we can borrow it for the purpose of this book, is that the day two spouses begin this book marks the first day of their successful marriage. Ultimately, they will reach a point at which they will be more proficient at the skills involved, and at that point, will be much happier than they were when they started the book. They will also be more confident in their marriage.

Hopefully they will continue to play, rather than work, at getting better at marriage. There will always be challenges and opportunities and the marriage will never be perfect.

The day that spouses begin to apply the lessons in this book,

is the day the marriage starts to improve.

This first step is on the road to marital success.

The authors look forward to travelling on this (unpaved) road with you. We are all flawed human beings, and when we marry, almost all of us are sincere and work hard to reach and enjoy a long-term successful marriage. It takes a great deal of tenacity, and sometimes just plain stubbornness, to reach that goal.

Our enemy is the ever-present but unrealistic dream of how we think our marriage should be. In a way, we are all know-it-alls and think that we know how to have a happy marriage, if only our spouse would do what we want them to do. Our ally is being realistic, remembering that our spouse is also a flawed human being trying with us to reach the same goal, which reminds us of one of our favourite anniversary cards:

I don’t know why I put up with you, with all your crazy ideas and the way you treat me sometimes. Oh yeah. It’s because you put up with me. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

The road to a successful marriage is unpaved,

rough, full of potholes, bumps

and often with no road signs.

What makes walking that road worthwhile

is that you are not walking alone.

---

¹ For anyone interested, the current model is called The Rescorla-Wagner Model, after the two scientists who discovered and developed the model. It is based on what happens in the brain.↩︎

Part One

How a Marriage Counsellor

Thinks About Marriage

When a couple comes to marriage counselling, the counsellor asks questions and listens first to whether the couple has a realistic understanding of marriage and the basic ingredients of a successful marriage. These are the foundation and the bedrock that must be present to fix a troubled marriage. If there are weaknesses in this part of the marriage, this is where the counselling begins. The focus of the counsellor is on:

Do the spouses believe in any of the five myths of marriage?

Are they facing problems in their marriage that have no solutions?

Do they understand the stages of marriage and understand the challenges of the control stage?

Are the essential ingredients to a successful marriage present?

So, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be really hard: we’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, every day. You and me, every day.

Nicholas Sparks

Okay, let’s get started.

Chapter 1

The Five Myths of Marriage

Everyone who marries has an idea of what a marriage should be, usually only to find that their marriage ends up a bit different from what was expected. People get their ideas about marriage from many sources. Important is the marriage of their parents, but marriage is also represented in television shows, movies and books. People also witness the marriages of friends and neighbours.

We might even have templates for marriages in our genes. The primary goals of marriage can be very different from person to person, culture to culture and even age to age.

For about forty years prior to the 1950s and 1960s for example, the focus of marriages was on culturally prescribed roles. Men were to be providers, and women were to run the household and raise the children. A review of the literature explains that most divorces during that period were caused by men and women not fulfilling their prescribed roles.

After the cultural revolution of the 1960s through the 1990s, personal satisfaction became an increasingly important goal of marriage. This was because of the shift to egalitarian marriages without prescribed roles. Men and women became involved in all aspects of their lives together, including working for income and raising children. This cultural change posed and poses many new challenges to spouses, along with many new opportunities.

The road to marital success is best travelled

if spouses are realistic in their expectations

and abandon mistaken beliefs (e.g., myths) about marriage.

It is important to shed the myths of marriage. Otherwise, spouses will find much of their married life to be a disappointment, and even more important, fail to appreciate what their marriage can offer. In this chapter, we look at the five common myths of marriage.

The Five Myths

Myth 1: Marriages were better in the past.

Marriage is a wonderful institution…but who wants to live in an institution?

Groucho Marx

In an enlightening book,² sociologist Stephanie Coontz points out that the natural tendency to be nostalgic can fool us into believing that things were better in the past. For example, the notion that there was a traditional family that was a stable platform on which to raise children successfully is a myth.

Except for the very wealthy, throughout human history, when most people lived an agrarian life, everyone in the family worked, including women and children, where people lived in family groups, and grandmothers typically raised the children, at least those children who lived. Prior to antibiotics, only about one-half of all children made it to five years old.

Prior to finding cures for many of the pandemic diseases, not only children but also many adults simply died young. Small pox is a good example, killing almost one-half of those who became infected.

When the Industrial Revolution occurred, people began to work away from their homes. Then cures for diseases began to be discovered, most notably, antibiotics. The traditional family changed from everyone working and grandmothers raising small children to what we like to call the nuclear family.

It only took one earning spouse to support a family. One spouse took on the title of housewife and children were largely raised in homes separate from extended family members. This was all very new.

Later research tells us that those separate homes were often not very happy places. Rates of depression for women and alcoholism for men were high. Divorce rates rocketed and about half of all fathers deserted their children following divorces.

The pressure for a different life sparked the Cultural Revolution, where women sought broader horizons and men sought to play a larger role in the lives of their children. Women’s liberations was really people liberation. Relegating spouses to narrow unsatisfying roles was a cultural experiment that simply did not work.

At the same time, there is a reality behind this myth. Stable family and tribal structures are important ingredients to a functional society. This was the drive behind developing a myth that role-prescribed marriages stabilized culture. In fact, the rise of divorce in western culture, from about 20% in the early 19th century to a