How to Make Your Marriage a Success
Instead of a Divorce Statistic

Judging by the ever-rising tide of divorce statistics, it has become increasingly difficult for a young couple to make a success of their marriage. But if you understand the causes for failure and the essentials for success, you need not end up among the failure statistics. Your marriage can be a success.

One reason for the marriage failure rate is the tendency of people to take marriage for granted, like steam heat and hamburger stands. Marriage to them is just something you do, like wearing shoes, getting your hair cut, or brushing your teeth. As such, it does not seem to call for any special training or understanding. Whatever knowledge and skills you may need you can pick up, just as you learned to walk, or get on and off the bus. "Doin' what comes natcherly" seems to be enough.

Another reason for failure in marriage is the tendency to regard marriage as a guest does a prolonged party. At a party you may have to do a little work as a guest, like getting out the bridge tables and rolling back the rug. But mainly it is an occasion for fun which requires little effort and no especial effort or competence. And so people expect marriage to be like that! Isn't it swell? After you marry you have ready social and sexual access to one you love, without having to worry about competition, or what the neighbors will say. In addition to all this heaven, you will, according to the advertisements, have a gleaming modern kitchen. You will have a charming living room, ornamented later on by neatly dressed, attractive and well-behaved children to whom you will come home. You will have all the things so vividly pictured in your dreams.

This picture is not so much false as incomplete. Marriage is lots of fun. But it is a party in which you are host as well as guest. Therefore it is work. It can mean what seems to be an endless round of dishes and diapers. It means bills, worries, and sometimes burdensome debts. If the relationship between husband and wife is to continue rich and worthwhile, and if their children are to have attractive personalities, marriage means hard work and almost saintly forbearance. People who come to marriage as to a party, expecting loads of pleasure at little cost, are likely to feel cheated. If your marriage is to become a success, rather than a divorce statistic, you must put real effort into it. Yet effort alone will not be enough. You must know what to do, and what not to do, and have the skills which are necessary for success.

Intelligent understanding is an essential to the complete success of a marriage. Many people still fail to appreciate the importance of sound knowledge for marital success. This attitude is not new. In earlier times they regarded special training as unnecessary in many areas where we now know that it is essential. The village blacksmith once was the dentist. He did not need any special training. All he needed was what he already had—strength and forceps. The barber was the surgeon, as his striped pole still reminds us. The idea that anybody needed anything except "experience" and a few "tips" to be a farmer would have seemed ridiculous.

Today we know better. The physician who treats you, the dentist who fixes your teeth, the druggist who makes up your prescriptions, even the beauty parlor operator who sets your hair—all must be trained and pass an examination before they are granted a license. We are coming to see that marriage, also, is a serious vocation which requires trained competence for success. If you must have specialized training in order to raise corn and hogs successfully, how much more should you know in order to be successful parents! Judge John A. Sbarbaro in his book, Marriage is on Trial (Macmillan, 1947), urges that all couples be required to complete a course in premarital training before they are granted a license to wed. He suggests the inclusion of a study of the economic problems of the family, fundamentals of child psychology, sexual relationships, "in-laws," the effects of broken homes upon children, and the responsibilities and opportunities of the church and similar agencies in the strengthening of family life. A divorce court judge sees every day that good intentions are not enough! There must be technical, scientific knowledge.

Such scientific understanding is especially important and difficult regarding the whole matter of love. Through the years there has grown up in our culture, a whole system of beliefs about love. Some contain much truth. Others are partly true. Some of those held most strongly are basically false. One reason why marriages fail is our inability to tell the difference between the fictions and the facts of love.

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