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How Focusing on Love and Happiness (Instead of the Past) Can Restore Your Marriage? When I was a kid in school, we were taught there are “hard” sciences like physics and “soft” sciences like psychology. Marriage didn’t fit neatly into either category, so Western psychology stepped in to fill the gap. If you’re one of the millions of people who have tried marriage counseling, you may have discovered it often falls short. The reason is simple: marriage is not fundamentally a psychological issue.
Marriage is a spiritual entity — rooted in love and sustained by infusing happiness. Also, contrary to psychological teachings, love is not just an emotion or a chemical reaction in the brain. It is of the soul — a spiritual force that transcends emotions and idiosyncrasies. That’s why trying to heal a marriage by focusing primarily on psychological “issues,” past traumas, or childhood wounds misses the mark. It is using the wrong tools. It’s like trying to fix a broken heart with logic.
Instead of emotions and other “feelings”, restoring a marriage begins with returning to two fundamental questions:
The honest answers to both questions are remarkably similar is we are honest with ourselves. We got married because we found someone we believed was our soulmate — someone with whom we felt deep love. And we hoped that sharing life with them would bring us ever-increasing happiness, Love, not the fleeting emotional kind, and true happiness. That’s the foundation for marriage and so I say it the foundation, or it should be, for restoring love and happiness now.
Everything else — communication skills, finances, chores, parenting — is important, but they are still just details.
When I first got into the marriage-saving business, it was an awkward transition because I was, of all things, a divorce mediator (in San Diego). I became a divorce mediator because the pain of going through divorce was even more brutal due to the court system and I wanted to help people. By approaching a couple’s divorce pragmatically, in my office, I was able to save my couple tens of thousands of dollars, plus make it easier on all involved emotionally.
But then something I now believe was a God-message happened. A couple who was referred by one of my marriage counselor assets begged me to help them save their marriage. They believed that as a communications expert I was well suited. After a deep dive, and eye-opening one at that, I did it, and the rest is history. The approach I took was simple; go for marriage fulfilment rather than dig up the garbage of the past.
What do I mean by that? I mean that when you go to a traditional marriage counselor they begin with all the usual searching for causes of suffering you really can’t do anything about, like childhood traumas, past relationships, not enough income (well, let’s hope the economy improves) and other outer conditions. But I began with what I know to be more relevant to questions.
It is on its face simple. Do you see how simple it is? There are things you can think of right now that will improve your marriage. You don’t need a marriage expert to tell you what you, not your husband or wife (I found that when an individual concentrates ONLY on their own changes the other will, being positively affected, start to come around) but what ‘you’ are doing that undermines the three things we seek in our marriages.
The goals of marriage are the same for everyone.
Interestingly, as simple as this is, like gravity, it is scientific! But then come the details. You cannot escape the details, the how’s, and so forth. It took me about eight years to put all of that together, and although all of it remains in the simple category, it is extensive.
I wrote two books and, at the behest of a mediator friend, we started The Marriage Foundation to help people all over the world. Think of this article as your starting point. Because I am here to tell you that the idea of marital bliss is real. It is not too late for you, and you can have it all.
