Divorce-Proof Your Marriage
The Gottman Institute has studied married couples for over 30 years and have been able to pinpoint with 94% accuracy of whether a couple will stay married by the couples fighting style. Do you fight fair and/or do you consider yourself superior to your mate? Check out the Gottman Institute for this 8 point checklist.
Author, Fawn Weaver, after interviewing 10,000 couples in 110 countries around the world, documented in her best selling book “Happy Wives Club“, that there are six practices that happy couple have in common.
1. Put Marriage Before Children
“This is controversial but it was a common denominator among these couples,” said Fawn Weaver. If you put your children before your mate, your mate begins to resent you and thus the marriage begins to break down. However, if you put your children in the proper place the whole family is happy.
2. If the Bond is Solid, Sex will Follow
According to Weaver, the topic of intimacy only came up once in passing during her myriad of interviews with international couples. We place a lot of stock in this one thing but these couples made it clear, if you take care of the relationship, this will take care of itself.
3. Spirituality Can Be a Stabilizer
“While the couples may not have all agreed on who or what they believe God to be, all believed in a higher power,” said Weaver. “They had a healthy fear of disappointing that higher power in relation to their spouses.” Similarly, a 2001 report in the Journal of Family Psychology, found that in 120 couples studied, celebrating religious holidays together had helped to cement and re-establish their beliefs over the years and further bonded their marriages.
4. Rituals Enhance Romance
From coffee together in the morning to a cocktail every night before dinner, each of the couples interviewed kept a ritual for decades. “[This is] something that is just for the two of them and they maintain it every day.”
5. Divorce is Not an Option
Or, as Weaver puts it, “there was no Plan B. Each couple decided at the outset that they would subtract divorce from the equation,” she said. “This led to a much greater level of patience with each other.“
6. Aretha Franklin Had it Right
The number one answer to a happy marriage, according to Weaver’s survey, is “mutual respect.“
