by Brian Peters

Created on: May 13, 2009

Having worked with hundreds of couples over the last several years, and having experienced significant challenges in my own marriage in years past, I have pondered why marriages fail for some time.

At one time I thought the reason marriages fail was as varied as the number of couples who struggle with their marriages. However, my experience has led me to conclude that, while every marriage has it's unique challenges, there are some very significant, and common, contributing factors to the failure of marriage.

Not to be overly-simplistic, but the bottom line is that marriages fail when the couple stops working on the marriage. Relationships, especially marriage, take work. Any relationship will fail when one or both parties to the relationship stop working at it. Think of any relationship you've ever been in, whether with your parents, a friend, or your spouse. If you were to graph the ups and downs of any of those relationships, you would find the relationship is up when you are working at it, and down when you are not.

Of course, this is not the full answer as to why marriages fail. In a sense, we can look at the absence of working at the marriage as the final symptom of marital failure. In other words, if we see a marriage where one or both parties are not working at the relationship, we know it's probably going to fail. But how did they get there? There has to be some reason, some cause, for the failure of the couple to work at the marriage. Are there any commonalities here?

Again, somewhat surprisingly, the answer is yes. A husband and wife will stop working at the marriage when they lose hope that the marriage can be satisfying; can be what they expected it to be. And this loss of hope or faith in the marriage comes about, in almost every case, as a direct result of feeling devalued. Now we find ourselves at the heart of the matter.

Every human being has the need to feel valued. During courtship, the emotional high that couples experience flows from this new sense of being valued by someone other than a family member. The thought that another human being enjoys being with me, appreciates my sense of humor (or even lack thereof) and listens to what I have to say, makes me feel valued. And that sense of feeling valued gives me the motivation and energy to work at the relationship. This is what most couples experience during the courtship phase, and often early in marriage.

But at some point, almost every couple will move from valuing

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