What do you do when you have marriage problems? Serious problems? A lot of couples bail. That’s always sad, because I know that in most cases if they hung on, better days would come.

Someone said marriage is like a lilac bush…in the winter it looks dead & lifeless and you might think to uproot it. But if you leave it, next spring it will blossom again.

When you work through a difficulty in your marriage, it is a confidence builder. You realize that tough problems don’t have to destroy your marriage. You can overcome those problems and you know that you can handle any future problems too.

Research bears this out. A national survey of marriages found that 77 % of marriages rated as “not good” at some point were rated “good” or “very good” 5 years later.

But many will divorce thinking that’s the only way to find happiness (called “the divorce assumption”). Research again suggests otherwise.

A study conducted by a team of leading family scholars headed by University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite found no evidence that unhappily married adults who divorced were typically any happier than unhappily married people who stayed married. When people divorce, they discover another set of problems often greater than the ones they had.

And the “divorce for the sake of the children” doesn’t work either. Marital problems are not “statistically significant” factor in affecting the well-being of children on into adulthood. (Of course, we are excluding abusive situations).

So what do couples do who find themselves in what they or others would consider a “bad” or at least troubled marriage? How do these couple’s marriage make it when others don’t?

The research finds three approaches:

One is called the marital endurance ethic (most common of the three). These couples marriage improved in time simply because they outlasted their problems - problems like unemployment, depression and even something as serious as infidelity.

The second approach is the marital work ethic. These couples worked to find ways to solve their problems….proactively improving their marriages.

The third approach is the personal happiness ethic. Here the marriage problems didn’t necessarily improve. Rather the individuals in the marriage found other ways for personal happiness outside of their mediocre marriage.

Food for thought! When problems come to your marriage, don’t assume that getting out of it is the easy solution. Or that you will be happier. Or that it will be better for the children. Realize that sometimes just the passage of time will help. Other times you may have to put forth some effort in rebuilding the marriage.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under Conflict Resolution, Marriage News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.