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    Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage
    Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage
    Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage

    By William Glasser, M.D. and Carleen Glasser

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    About this ebook

    Applying the methods and ideas espoused in his popular book Choice Theory, world-renowned psychiatrist and relationship expert Dr. William Glasser, along with his wife, Carleen, offers a practical guide to an enduring, satisfying, successful marriage. Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage showcases eight real-life histories of troubled couples and presents simple, practical solutions to overcoming the pitfalls illustrated therein. Keeping love alive and strong is not as difficult as you think; let the Glassers and this indispensable book show you how!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061741500
    Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage
    Author

    William Glasser, M.D.

    William Glasser, M.D., is a world-renowned psychiatrist who lectures widely. His numerous books have sold 1.7 million copies, and he has trained thousands of counselors in his Choice Theory and Reality Therapy approaches. He is also the president of the William Glasser Institute in Los Angeles.

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      Book preview

      Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage - William Glasser, M.D.

      —INTRODUCTION—

      Essentially, we all get married. We’ve been doing it for eons all over the world, and there’s no indication we are going to stop. Many of us divorce and marry again—sometimes several times. Unmarried people often yearn for marriage, and many who are married yearn for freedom. But after a period of freedom most try marriage again, even though marriage is not what they really want.

      What they want the first time and every time, and almost always experience, is a delightful pre-and postmarriage interval called infatuation, which they believe is love. While they are infatuated, they totally accept each other, both socially and sexually, and fervently hope this feeling will last forever, seemingly unaware of the harsh reality that infatuation is not love.

      Infatuation begins to fade as the couple learns more about each other. As disheartening as this is at the time, the loss of infatuation seems no deterrent to this relentless process. When this happens, most couples believe that they have actually stopped loving each other and start thinking about going their own way instead of making the effort to learn how to move from infatuation to lasting love.

      There are some successful first marriages but not that many. Living happily ever after for a lifetime is more fantasy than fact because couples give up too soon after infatuation dies. But as a good friend of mine, who was married several times before a fourth marriage succeeded, said, Consider the alternative. In his case he finally got lucky, but in our opinion, there has never been a need-satisfying alternative to a happy marriage. Being lonely and single was for him and is for a vast majority of the rest of us just plain miserable. There are, of course, some exceptions to this preference. A few people are satisfied with staying single and find their own happiness. But it is an undeniable fact that unhappy marriage, with all its fallout, is a huge problem all over the world with seemingly few solutions in sight. A good way to conceive of this is to visualize ourselves as human lemmings walking off a long gently sloping cliff. A few stop walking but are still very much aware of the uncomfortable slope they are standing on. It’s an effort to stay there, and the effort drains our strength. Only a few of us are able to learn how to turn our brief infatuation into the long-term sexual friendship we call love, figure out how to stay happily married, and never start down that fatal slope.

      But while we still have some strength, quite a few of us turn around and walk back up the slope hoping to meet a new exciting lemming and reexperience the infatuation we had before. Many of us find someone, and the infatuation we once had returns with a new but in many ways similar partner. But if we can’t figure out how to turn this new infatuation into love, which only a few of us can, the new lemming we find soon becomes a too-familiar copy of the former spouse and we are back on the slope again. This unhappy ritual may be repeated several times, but the general trend is downhill.

      When one or both partners go their own way, many turn to affairs. Infidelity, a solution to the familiarity problem for centuries in all cultures, has many advocates. The initial marriage stays intact, but one or both partners have another or other sexual outlets. Traditionally, the man strays and the woman stays home with the children. But there are many variations. The only variation that may work for some couples is when they both believe that their marriage should take precedence over what the partners do with others. But this is a rare variation. In most instances, the wife and family suffer while the husband roams. It is very rare that any deviation from a loving long-term marriage can be free of problems.

      In this book we will explain in detail what we have learned both from personal experience and from years of observing the marriages of many couples who are unhappily married but who for a variety of good reasons do not want to divorce. Rather than counsel them, which traditionally is an attempt to fix their marriage, we have set out to teach both partners how to work together to create a happy marriage based on a new theory we call choice theory.

      If you read each lesson together willingly, talk it over, and try to put the information in the lesson to work in your marriage, you should be able to enhance your marital happiness. The eight lessons become a marriage enrichment experience. As you go through the book, each of you will learn how to behave differently with each other than you are behaving now, and this way will be different from how almost all married couples have behaved with each other for thousands of years. From our experience, while the lessons will be new to you, they are neither difficult to understand nor complicated to put into practice.

      Still, what could make them seem difficult for you is that you will be taught to treat each other in ways that may not seem right to you or even fair. But keep in mind that what you have been doing that may seem so right to both of you now has landed you on that slippery slope with the other lemmings. As you put what we are teaching you into practice, you will begin to realize that you are getting along better with your mate than you have in a long time. Unlike dieting and exercising which are tedious at best, these lessons are very pleasant. There is no hurry. Take your time. Think about the difference between our teaching and what you have been doing since your early infatuation faded away.

      Finally, there is a lot to learn in the eight lessons, so don’t be discouraged. You don’t have to learn immediately all there is in the eight lessons in order to get a lot of help. If all both of you can learn is the material in the first lesson, you will have learned a lot more about marriage than most couples on the slippery slope ever learn.

      We invite you to start by reading this short book together, and you will begin to get the idea. Then go back to lesson one and spend a lot of time working on getting external control out of your marriage. There is no mystery here. External control is tangible. Every little bit you can remove from your marriage will have a payoff in happiness. Keep in mind that you have spent a lot of time practicing how to be miserable. Learning to be happy together will take a little time too.

      Throughout the book you will meet a variety of married couples who will each

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