Miles - The Ultimate Guide to Saving Your Marriage: How to Save Your Marriage, Spice Up Your Life And Be Happy Forever

An on-line article on Psychology Today s web site says that marriage is a process. Hmm. A process . And all this time we, at least I, thought of it as a thing, a noun, something that was created by two people upon making a decision and filing certain papers. Then, at that point, you have a legal institution like, for example, a 501 (c) (3) corporation. You create it. There it is. Now lets get on with life.

But a process ? That means its something that continues; its more a verb than a noun; its something that has to be worked on continuously. A manufacturing plant uses countless processes and each one has to be carefully monitored and maintained. A process may run for a little while without maintenance, but sooner or later youre going to end up with a disaster on your hands if you ignore it.

Yes, I think Psychology Today hit the nail on the head: marriage is a process, and if you dont maintain it sparks are going to fly and youll be bound for a major meltdown.

If youre reading this, then thats something I probably dont need to tell you. All your good intentions during your engagement and right after your wedding may, by this time, have run into a few of the roadblocks were going to discuss in this e-book. We humans are capable of creating an infinite number of problems for ourselves. We get into situations we couldnt have imagined only yesterday. But while the devil is in the details, the basic problems we all encounter in marriage normally fall into a countable number of options.

Lets take a look at those basic problems and some ways of thinking about them that you might not have considered. While a full discussion and analysis of each of these topics could fill a 500-page book and still not exhaust the topic, my hope is that this will serve as a starting point to zeroing in on your particular issues and give you some food for thought on how to approach them with your partner.

The courtship was enjoyable, if not without a few bumps, but nothing that being deeply in love couldnt handle. The wedding went off without a hitch and everyone had a good time. And the honeymoon Well, we wont even go there.

But sometime between the honeymoon and nowit may have been a few months or several yearsthings changed. Money problems, challenges with in-laws, boredom, childrenthey all conspire to make your marriage more difficult than its supposed to be. And then, theres the two ships passing in the night thing. Think about itwere all changing all the time. Lets say you were in your late teens or early twenties when you met your mate. At that time, you both clicked, fit together hand-in-glove. But we continue to mature and change well past that age. We develop interests in new things and new people. Our politics can change. Our religious views can change. Our interest and tastes in sex can change. Heck, the changes we can go through between the ages of 20 and 40 can make us seem like a completely different person. Compound that with the fact that your partner can change just as much, and its no wonder that at some point, years down the road, we wake up next to our partner and think, Who is this person sleeping in my bed?

So now were back to the process. This thing called marriage requires maintenance. This person sleeping in your bed isnt just an overnight guest. He or she is a life partner, someone you made promises to, committed to, thick or thin, rich or poor, better or worse, sickness or health. There was a purpose, a basis in emotion and reason at a time in your past that caused you to believe what you said, and then gave you the courage to say what you believed in front of a whole lot of people you cared about.

Everyone reading this isnt in a marriage on the rocks. Some of you may be reading this and other books about strengthening your marriage for the same reason you eat vegetables, take vitamins, and exercise regularlyto make sure you minimize the challenges we all experience in marriage, to halt the problems before they even begin.