How to Have a Great Marriage

Great marriages don't just happen. There's a Western romantic lie that if you just meet the right person then you'll have a great marriage without making any effort. And that's just not true. All the people who I know who have successful marriages, they put more energy into their marriage than any other single project in their lives. That means more energy, more time, more money. In every way, that is their top priority, and that makes a great marriage. If you're looking for the person that you can marry who, once you marry them you'll just have a great marriage without effort, you're going to wait a long time.

So what sort of things do we have to do to ensure that in fact our marriage becomes and remains a great marriage?

Falling in Respect

We'll start off with a topic which is not often discussed in public, certainly not in most courses that we take in university or in high school on relationships. Every really good marriage has two parallel themes. On the one hand, the couple is aggressively pursuing intimacy. A closeness together, a sharing, an openness. Intimacy flourishes best in a playful environment, an environment which is not too heavy or too serious. And therefore a couple has to be careful not to become so formal with each other that they can't play, laugh and joke. That most people realize. What most people don't realize, what many people forget, is that, as aggressively as a couple pursues intimacy in their relationship, they also have to pursue respect. That is, before one can fall in love, one has to fall in respect. One has to feel that the person that they're facing, the one who is going to be their life partner, is an awesome human being. Now, I've heard people object before — But my partner is not an awesome human being! — The truth is, though, that the only people I've ever met who are not… pardon the vernacular… blown away by… the only people I've met who I'm not tremendously impressed with are those people I don't know well. But if somebody has spent 20, 30 years of their life doing something, learning about the world, picking a way of life, there are things inside of them that are astounding. And in order to have a great marriage, I must find out what is so astounding about my partner. Beyond that, when I pursue

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