So, since I’m assuming you all chose to turn left, lets continue.

The first point here is that what you just did in this simple model was to decide to have a happy marriage as opposed to an unhappy one. Simple as it may sound, the first step to not having marriage problems is making decisions that benefit the marriage.

How often do decisions come up about benefiting or hurting your marriage? I will give you the answer. Every single day of your life, they will come up. Let’s continue on with this idea of how they come up so often.

Can you accept that most marriage problems are based on sex and money? It is to your benefit to do so. Let’s go on like you believe it.

We will first talk about sex. When you first met, what made you desire you spouse? What made them desire you? Did they dress well for you or you for them? Were you keeping yourself in shape? We are all getting older, but we don’t have to get old. By this I mean, if we take care of ourselves physically and mentally we will stay more attractive to our spouse longer.

Conversely, if you decide that fast food is more fulfilling than having sex with your spouse, you will Continue reading Marriage Problems, When the Team Breaks Down, Part 2

Today, I was thinking about my life and marriage. Could the economy be any worse? Could the daily news be any worse? How is your marriage surviving through all this?

The saying goes “the only two things you can count on are death and taxes”. But there is one other thing you can count on if you don’t keep your eye on the ball, and that is marriage problems.

Are you having a great marriage or are you having marriage problems? When each of us got married, barring getting married due to a surprise pregnancy, we went into it with hopes and dreams of a bright future, or a feeling of security, or at least a feeling of connection. For those of you who honestly feel you have a great marriage, or at least a good one, those same feelings to some degree are still there. To those of you who are having marriage problems, something happened along the way that changed those feelings.

Let’s take a look at what happens that leads to a happy marriage or marriage problems and then give some useable suggestions. We are going to start the talk with a premise that most marriage problems begin with one of two problems. Those problems are Continue reading Marriage Problems, When the Team Breaks Down

This last month I have been living in a different city than my wife because of business. It got me thinking about my marriage. I was reading a statistic that said couples, in which one spouse is out of the home one week per month, have a 25% chance of getting a divorce. Couples, who have one spouse gone two weeks per month have a 50% chance of divorce. I was looking at all these marriage problems and getting scared for my own marriage. You read on my blog regarding the sexless marriage how important it is to keep intimacy going in order to avoid marriage problems.

I discussed these issues with my wife, who turned out to be equally scared. Being away has been tough on both of us. I told her we cannot let ourselves become part of the statistics. I told her we need to step up our game in expressing our commitment to each other. I shared with her, we couldn’t avoid having a sexless marriage at this point but we could be very intimate. We took a vow to call each other a least 3 times a day. I was determined to avoid any major marriage problems.

I thought, ok, this should keep things under control. But what happened was we started talking about all the boring stuff like bills and chores and soon were fighting on the phone a lot. We were getting miserable. The calls were becoming a whining session. For a minute I thought, maybe it was good to be away if this is what our marriage was.

Then, like a lightning bolt, it hit me. Continue reading Revisiting the Sexless Marriage

In the sexless marriage Part 1 we talked about how marriage is an accumulation of the actions you did on a given day. If your actions were good on a given day you had a high likelihood of having a good marriage on that day. If your actions were very intimate on that day you had a much better chance of not having a sexless marriage on that day.

A very important point about sexless marriages is that they can happen and often do happen to very good people. Sometimes we fall into becoming best friends in marriage or literally become marriage partners. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless this partnership loses its intimacy and becomes a sexless marriage. In fact a sexless marriage isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless you start to notice that the joy of being married to this person has been lost or greatly diminished. The point is, though, why would you want to have a sexless marriage.

A sexless marriage is not the problem. It is typically the end result of a loss of the intimacy between the partners.

Intimacy is the difference between friendship and a great marriage. In order to have a great marriage the fine line must never be crossed or if crossed it must be crossed back. In other words, never allow your marriage to fall into friendship or you risk the sexless marriage syndrome.

The sexless marriage syndrome is where, in your marriage, you fall into becoming a friendship relationship from being an intimate partner relationship, (who also happen to be friends). Unfortunately, for many couples, this starts a destructive trend of substituting sex for alcohol, drugs, infidelity, computer, video game, or some other addiction. This is not always the case but if you look at the statistics it is more often, rather than less often, true.

The good news is that Continue reading The Sexless Marriage: Part 2

The sexless marriage is considered probably the number 1 cause of divorce today. The reasons why there is no sex in the marriage are varied. In this talk we won’t discuss the medical reasons and solutions.

The sexless marriage comes about because there was a change in the dynamics of the partners. Marriages are not things like tables and chairs. A table is a table no matter what happens. Any four people, no matter what issues are going on in their life, are going to look at the table and say that is a table.

Marriages are different. They are based on what you do on a given day. If you are rotten to your partner on Tuesday then on Tuesday you have a rotten marriage and probably on Tuesday you have a sexless marriage. On the other hand, if on Tuesday you realized you were rotten and called your partner up and apologized profusely, with sincerity, because you realized that person you were rotten to is the one person in life you shouldn’t be rotten to because you love them to death and they love you the same…the odds are you have a good chance of having a great marriage on that day and maybe not have a sexless marriage.

So you can see that in isolating Continue reading The Sexless Marriage: Part 1