Rule #1 of my 10 rules to divorce-proof your marriage
Few people, if any, get married expecting to one day find themselves in a divorce lawyer’s office. Most couples approach their wedding day with either the optimism or hope necessary to justify getting married in the first place.
Perhaps that’s the crucial distinction: optimism and hope are different.
Hope is having a positive outlook based on your past and present efforts. Hope is earned.
Optimism is having a positive outlook based on your disposition, naivete, or preferred mindset. Optimism is unearned.
For those couples whose goal is to stay married to the same person for life, hope trounces optimism. Hope means you have concrete evidence of why you should look positively toward the future.
You can think of this 10-part series as an evidence-based roadmap to hope. By following at least some of these 10 rules, you’ll earn the right to be hopeful about the future of your marriage.
Disclaimer: The best time to start divorce-proofing your marriage is right now, whether you’re married or not. Some of the tips in this series may be more or less applicable depending on whether your wedding has already happened.
Nevertheless, I’d recommend reading each tip in its entirety because they can each serve in unique ways depending on your relationship status.
The following ten tips are based on decades of research on married couples and the experience of many marriage therapists, including myself.
Rule #1: Define Marriage Properly
Modern marriage, at least in the Western world, is largely thought of as a love-based marriage. You get married because you love someone and want to make a public declaration of your intention to spend the rest of your life with that person.
It’s a fine definition, perhaps even a good one. However, it’s not a definition that works for 40% of first marriages.
So, naturally, it must be missing something.
The modern-day conception of marriage only involves why you would choose to get married, not why you would choose to stay married once the original conditions in which you made those vows have changed.
So, as the feeling of love ebbs and flows over time, or the reality of married life doesn’t align with expectations, many couples struggle because their definition of marriage relied on the persistence of those feelings and the realization of those expectations.
Let’s look at some examples. Couples are more likely to divorce when
- The husband loses his job
- They have fertility issues
- Their child gets sick
- Either spouse’s physical attractiveness significantly decreases
What would happen if we were better prepared for the challenges of marriage by changing our definition of the commitment?
The definition of marriage I propose to my clients is this:
“Love is a decision to will the good of someone else purely for that person’s sake. When I married you, I committed to a lifetime of choosing to love you every day.
Regardless of how I feel, I will choose to love you. Regardless of how you feel, I will choose to love you. If we have more bad days than good, I will choose to love you.
If you aren’t properly loving me, I will choose to love you. Until the day I die, I will choose to love you.
Only then can I reasonably hope that you will choose to love me, too.”
It’s a radical definition, and it certainly won’t suit everyone. However, as time goes by and the feelings you had when you said “I do” fade, why you got married in the first place no longer matters.
All that matters is the reasons you have for staying together. And, if you hope to be married for life, your reasons for staying together must matter more to you than your moment-to-moment happiness, pleasure, pride or avoidance of pain.
If your reason for staying together is to honor the commitment you made to choose to love your spouse every day until death, regardless of if you don’t feel like you’re in love at times, your life isn’t what you expected it to be, or you aren’t as happy as you want to be, that’s a reason that can work.
The literature on long lasting marriages seems to agree with this premise. Take this study from 2014, for example. It confirms the theory of Stanley and Markman (1992) that a couple’s commitment not only to continue their marriage, but “to improve it, to sacrifice for it, to invest in it, to link personal goals to it, and to seek the partner’s welfare, not simply one’s own”, is one of the leading predictors of marital longevity.
Interestingly, this level of marital commitment often introduces a paradox to the relationship that one might not expect.
The moment two spouses decide they aren’t walking away from their marriage is most often the moment things start to get better.
After all, if you’re stuck together for life, better to figure out a way to solve the problems plaguing you than to stay miserable.
So, the earlier you make the decision not to leave, even if staying together is the harder choice, the sooner you two can start building a marriage held up by your mutual commitment to love as a choice, not as a feeling.
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Important: Under extreme circumstances, it is better to love someone from a distance. Some examples include threats to your or your spouse’s or children’s psychological or physical safety, remorseless infidelity, and a change in core values that causes misalignment such as when one spouse decides s/he no longer wants to have children.
These exceptions matter because they do happen.
Domestic violence, for example, seems to occur in roughly 20% of all couples with 80% of these cases happening in nonmarried couples. In these instances, the decision to will the good of your spouse, yourself, and your children properly may require a separation.
Today’s Challenge
- If you aren’t yet married, ponder the question: Are you prepared to honor the marital commitment you plan to make even after the feelings you had when you made the commitment have faded?
- If you’re already married, ponder the question: What is one concrete, attainable way you can better honor the marital commitment you made starting today?
Wishing you hope,
Cameron
Marriage therapist & founder of HITCHED
Marriage is hard. It’s also worth the fight. HITCHED can help you fight as a team for the relationship you’ve always wanted. To get access to your own personalized, evidence-based guide to lifelong marriage, check out HITCHED here.
Cameron Rechenmacher 
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