by Brian Peters

Created on: May 19, 2009   Last Updated: May 21, 2009

While there are a variety of reasons and causes for divorce, all of which should concern us, my work with couples considering divorce over the last several years leads me to believe the primary cause for a majority of divorces is a decline in love, hope and work.

In a healthy marriage, these three primary, interrelated concepts of love, hope and work combine to keep the "marriage flywheel" turning. However, in failing marriages, we see decreasing levels of all three of these which ultimately bring the marriage flywheel to a grinding halt. Here's how they work together.

Love is a notion that most of us think we understand. And while most couples believe, when they get married, that they have enough love for a lifetime, the reality is that they may not actually have enough of the right kind of love to sustain the marriage. Let me explain what I mean. In recent years, researchers have been actively seeking to discover factors that might predict whether a marriage will ultimately end in divorce. So far, the only factor they've discovered that helps us understand when a marriage might be in trouble has do with the ratio of positive to negative comments exchanged by the couple. Generally, researchers believe now that any marriage in which the ratio of negative to positive comments exceeds 5 to 1 (in other words there are 5 or more negative comments for every one positive comment) is in trouble.

This helps us craft a better definition of what we mean by love for purposes of marriage. What we ultimately say is simply an overflow of what we're thinking and feeling on the inside. Couples who express more negative than positive comments are showing us that, rather than valuing each other, they actual devalue each other in their thoughts and feelings. Therefore, for purposes of marriage, we can more accurately say that the love necessary to sustain a marriage is that which chooses to value rather than devalue your spouse. When couples begin to think and feel in ways that devalue their spouse more frequently than in ways that value their spouse, we know the marriage flywheel is beginning to slow down.

Certainly there a number of factors that contribute to couples moving towards devaluing and away from valuing each other. That will have to be a topic for another article. For now, let's move to looking at how this failure of love (devaluing rather than valuing) contributes to the next component of the flywheel, hope. When couples get married they believe

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