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 each other to devaluing each other. And what they do when this happens is the critical factor in determining whether the marriage will succeed or fail. The devaluing can begin for any number of reasons. This is where we find uniqueness. Every couple has issues with each other that will lead them into at least the possibility of devaluing. Whether those are differences in conflict style, failure to understand each other's "love language" (how we give and receive love), or all-too-common struggles over time and money management, every couple will find issues that cause each of them to begin to perceive each other more negatively than positively. And as they begin to perceive each other in this more negative light, the possibility of communicating devalue, rather than value, rears its ugly head. If the couple then begins to act on the negative thoughts, and actually starts communicating devalue, the slide towards marital failure has begun.
So marital failure looks like this: value communicated between husband and wife moves to devalue; husband and wife, experiencing being devalued over some period of time will begin to lose hope that the marriage can be what they expected (the amount of time this stage takes will vary from couple to couple); and finally husband and wife stop working at the marriage causing it to fall apart. While this is the subject of another article, let me conclude by saying that we actually find hope in this analysis. If, as I believe, most marriages fail by moving through this cycle, then we can not only prevent but actually reverse potential failure by working with couples to move them from devaluing to valuing each other. The cycle then changes. As the couple values each other more, they begin to have more hope that the marriage can be satisfying, and they have the motivation to work harder. As they each work harder, the valuing increases even more, devaluing decreases and the hope continues to grow.
The bottom line: marriages don't have to fail. Couples can learn to stop devaluing and begin again to value each other ultimately leading to a greater experience of satisfaction in marriage. It does take work, and often help from a third-party, whether that's a friend, pastor or counselor. But it can be done. Marriages can not only survive, but thrive and be satisfying. Marriages don't have to fail.