The Secret To A Successful Marriage

There seem to be three general groups of people who visit our website. The first group is seeking information about how to deal with a specific problem. Let’s call them the ‘skills group’. The second group is looking for a solid foundation on which they can base their marriage. Let’s call them the ‘foundation group’. The third group is seeking ongoing help in dealing with the routine struggles of married life. We’ll call them the ‘support group’. Each of these groups is seeking a different answer to the question: ‘what is the secret to a successful marriage’.

The skills group tends to look for communication skills, conflict resolution skills, and other practical advice. This group generally finds books such as the seven principles for making marriage work by John Gottman and The five love languages by Gary Chapman very helpful, and will find Dr Phil’s website to be useful. According to this group, a successful marriage is mostly about having the right skills. You can have all the love in the world, but unless you know how to show it, it’s useless.

The foundation group tends to focus on concepts such as love, commitment, respect, trust, and other important factors which lie at the heart of a married relationship. This group generally finds books such as Love and Respect by Emerson Eggrichs very helpful, and finds most websites to be useless as they’re written for the other groups. According to this group, successful marriage is about getting your foundations right. Having skills without foundations leads to a hollow and loveless marriage, and as emotions rise, skills are useless.

The support group tends to have realised that marriages have ups and downs, and that regular maintenance of any sort tends to reduce the downs and boost the ups. This group are interested in both skills and foundations, but they will do so in a small yet consistent manner. They’ll subscribe to our newsletter, and consider themselves to be actively working on their marriage. They tend to handle most of their marriage issues not with one particular approach, but with a range of tips and ideas that they’ve accumulated over time.

As often happens in life, each group tries to reduce marriage success into simple ideas. Many marriage counsellors and gurus are guilty of the same thing. As hard as we try, marriage.com.au also tends to oversimplify. With that being said, we’re not going to give up, and tell you that there is no single secret to a successful marriage. We think there are a few ‘secrets’.

1. Build you marriage on a solid foundation.
2. Learn skills that flow from this foundation.
3. Always maintain both the foundation, and your skills.

So what is a solid foundation to build your marriage upon? We believe that a solid foundation involves three primary components (We’ll explain these on the website over the next few weeks):

1. Love
2. Commitment
3. Teamship

And what are the skills that flow from this foundation? There are too many to mention, but almost any good book or website (see our links section) on marriage will give you some great ideas. The point is that if you are going to practice the skill of listening, it should flow from a foundation of love. If you are going to be faithful to your spouse, it should flow from a foundation of commitment. If you are going to be connected and close to your spouse, it should flow from a foundation of teamship. Every skill should flow from the foundation, or reason for using that skill. If you are simply using skills to create a successful marriage, the skill will inevitably fail.

Finally, how do you maintain your foundation and skills? Interestingly, this flows once again, from your foundations. Maintaining your marriage is an act of love, by both of you (teamship), which requires a commitment to loving each other. All of these things work together. Of course, marriage is much more complex than this, but sometimes it can be helpful to put things into perspective. Otherwise you can get caught up in every new book or idea about what makes a great marriage, and lose track of where each new idea fits into the ‘bigger picture’. We hope, as marriage.com.au grows, that this picture will become bigger and bigger.