Chapter 5: Meeting Difficulties Constructively 4. What is Successful Marriage?

When married lovers return from the honeymoon they take up together the task of making a home. Now, although they are not less lovers than before, their love must be seasoned with more of the practical, and each must learn to think of the daily duties as a part of their expression of regard for each other and for their home.

The romantic wife may wish the honeymoon could have continued, and may be tempted to resent the requirements of her husband's calling which inevitably make heavy demands upon his time. She must realize, however, that a new phase of being lovers is their being homemakers together. They must cultivate the art of being lovers and homemakers as they have previously found the thrills of being dates, sweethearts, and honeymooners.

The two should now study to create a mutually satisfying program of living. Their marriage can be really successful in the highest sense only if it is thoroughly satisfactory for both. One of the wife's main duties is to help her husband to a successful career as a man and a husband, and equally the husband has a responsibility for helping the wife to a satisfying career as a woman and a wife. Along these lines both their experience in marriage and their development in personality will be on a high level.

We think of a successful marriage not merely as one which holds together and keeps away from the divorce court, but as one whose members find zest in living and in which the two have not only respect but enthusiasm for each other. Happiness is a matter of knowing where to place the emphasis, distinguishing between the major and minor goals and between the minor and major domestic virtues. It is a matter of confidence, of keeping clean, wholesome and attractive, and of giving love without measure.

Married love is related to courtship love as a larger tree is related to the smaller one that it once was. As time goes on the tree puts on new rings of growth, sends its roots deeper into the soil and bears flowers and fruit which it could not bear before. It becomes sturdier and taller from year to year. The transition from romantic love to married love does not take place so automatically but growth is equally necessary.

Every marriage should have three kinds of love: 1) romantic, keeping alive something of the zest and sparkle and "special-ness" of courtship days, 2) domestic, weaving the mutual concern and passionate kindness of the two into a pattern of living, and 3) a love like the love of God which holds steady even when people are at their worst and is always ready to forgive.

If a married person wakes up some morning and wonders what has become of the romance of life, it is a symptom that something more may need to be done to put love into the pattern of living and develop it into full maturity. Love is by nature a courageous and hopeful thing. It defies definition yet makes life more meaningful, creates a spring of happiness within us, and enables marriage to triumph over many obstacles.

We do not think of marriage as a series of question marks representing this and that adjustment, but as a unity which increases the joys of life and lessens its sorrows. Marriage should be represented by a series of plus signs,.and the partner thought of not merely as a person to whom we must adjust, but much more as one who enters with us into the fuller joys of living.