With the Right Skills Poor Marriages Get Better

Being married is like making a journey down a river – not some pastoral Sunday-float river but a big river with lots of challenges. Along that river you encounter calm, broad stretches, narrow passages with challenging rapids, tributaries in which you could easily lose your way, standing waves, waterfalls and shallow stretches where any movement at all is difficult.

Because many others have traveled the river, you know in advance what to expect along the way. And because you want to complete your journey without wiping out, wrecking the boat and possibly getting seriously hurt, you sensibly think about the challenges ahead and prepare for them. You learn the skills that navigating the river successfully will demand of you. You enter the river prepared. You would be a fool not to.

Like the river, marriage has its own challenges, its own version of the river's rapids, waterfalls and troubling shallow stretches. Which challenges are encountered varies somewhat from couple to couple. Some challenges are almost universally encountered.

Marriages develop through stages, just as people do. Each stage has its own set of challenges and its corresponding skills that are needed for progressing to the next stage.

Learning to accept newly discovered and unwelcomed traits in one's partner belongs to an early stage of marriage, as does the importance of compromise. Keeping the relationship vital when the demands of work and raising young children threaten to overwhelm it follows not long after. Finding meaning in each other's company after the children grow up and leave is a challenge during the relationship's later years. Other challenges, each with their own skill requirements, appear typically during the marital journeys of most couples.

It is as dangerous to begin the marital journey without skills and innocent of the challenges ahead as it would be to travel a challenging river. Neither marriages nor rivers cease moving. Even though marriages may sometimes appear static, they are always – although sometimes slowly – either getting better or getting worse. Which, more often than not, depends on the presence or absence of skills.

That skills are needed to navigate marriage is simply a fact. Just saying "I do" during the marriage vows commits you to a journey that cannot be navigated without skill, just as surely as does pushing off into the current of a challenging river. The more readily you accept the necessity of becoming relationship skilled the less you are likely to grumble at what you have to learn or blame your partner for daring to want a better relationship than is already there.

There seems to be something in us that goads us to change and challenges us to grow. More than any other relationship, this drive for growth is inherently present in marriage. Why would we marry someone who turned out to be just as difficult to deal with as our father, if we didn't want, on some level, to master the relationship challenge that we first experienced as a young child with a domineering parent?

Why would we make such a fuss about wanting to be deeply understood by our partner, if we didn't thirst for intimacy? Why would a shallow, boring marriage drive us to distraction if we didn't instinctively know that something more was possible and desire it?

We could leave the difficult spouse. We could shrug off our partner's indifference, accept the superficiality of our relationship, turn away from contact and not care – or even notice - that each day the marriage died a little more. Why make a fuss? Because despite ourselves, despite the apparently lousy odds for success, we want growth. We want a better, finer relationship. Not just that: From somewhere in our depths we want to be better, more loving people ourselves.

In that case, as journeyers on the big river of marriage, we need skills. Without them, we cannot navigate the river successfully. We need to see the necessity of becoming relationship-skilled not as something imposed upon us but what we freely choose when we get married. We will succeed best if, like people navigating an actual river, we see the journey as an adventure – of growth and the learning of new skills.

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Copyright © 2005 Dr. David E. Sanford All rights reserved.
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