The Good News About Marriage by Shaunti Feldhahn

Author:Shaunti Feldhahn [Feldhahn, Shaunti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60142-563-8
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Good News #4

The large majority of remarriages last. Among women in second marriages, 65 percent are still married to their spouse, and of those who aren’t, many were widowed rather than divorced.

6

How Most Marriage Problems Can Be Fixed by Small Changes

After the release of my book For Women Only, people began sharing the most rewarding stories about couples whose marriages had been saved, changed, or restored through the knowledge they gained from that research. In the same way that I had been astonished by what I was learning about men (especially Jeff) while I was writing it, my female readers seemed to suddenly see something they simply didn’t know before. As I began speaking at women’s conferences, countless women were relaying stories of how they would read the book in bed next to their husband, come across a finding about men that shocked them, turn to their man, and say, “Is this true?” Upon hearing (most of the time) yes, that was true, they would begin a deep conversation and discover things about their man that they hadn’t learned in twenty-five years of marriage, usually things their husband hadn’t known how to articulate. And upon the release of the corresponding book about women, For Men Only, the aha moments went both ways. Using these discoveries, men and women started to change what they did and said to align with what they now understood about their spouse.

What I was continuously struck by, though—in their lives and in mine—was how simple the changes often were. It was as if, with a little bit of extra knowledge about their spouse, people could scoot themselves into a whole new realm of marriage. Some folks already had a good marriage, while others had been unhappy for years; but either way just a few eye-opening pieces of information somehow allowed these men and women to help themselves instead of feeling helpless.

And early on, I heard a story that clued me in to the fact that there was an even bigger implication behind this trend, an implication that has a vital part to play in countering the current sense of futility about marriage.

After twelve years of marriage, a couple we’ll call Nelly and Brad had separated. Although neither started out believing in divorce, he had given up on the idea of ever being able to please her, and as he grew more and more distant, she became more and more critical and was convinced he had a personality disorder that made him narcissistic.

Finally Brad gave up. He rented an apartment closer to his trucking company’s headquarters about two hours away. By this point, things were so bad between them that his only regret was being so far away from their twin four-year-old daughters. He told me later, “That was what really killed me—the idea of not being able to see my girls all the time.”

About two months later, on the road in his rig, he caught a few minutes of a radio interview where I discussed For Women Only and what I learned about how men think.

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