Welcome to My 6 Part Mini-Course!
Hello!
Welcome to the Save My Marriage Today 6-part introductory course on the 6
Most Common Reasons for Divorce ... and How to Stop Them Happening
to You!!
In this course you'll learn powerful tips and tools designed to get
you thinking clearly about why marriage problems really occur.
You'll learn specifically how your behavior can stop the sickening threat of divorce and marriage problems in their
tracks ... even if your spouse doesn't want to help! This is truly
radical information that you need to know, backed up by the latest
marriage research.
You already know the benefits of marriage. Empirical studies prove
that married people are better off than singles or couples that live
together. People who marry tend to generate more wealth, have
better and more active sex lives (that's right... more than sexually
active singles and cohabitating couples!), and are healthier
physically and emotionally.
With so many material, social,
economic, and emotional benefits to marriage, you can't afford to
let your marriage slide. So let's get you started!
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Amy Waterman
co-author of Save My Marriage Today!
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Check out what you'll learn in my FREE Introductory Course over the next few days:
Part 1 - Risk Factors for Divorce and Why You Should Ignore Them
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The top six predictors of divorce. Be aware of the
statistics so that you can confront them head-on!
- The top six predictors of a long-lasting marriage. Are
the odds in your favor?
- The keys to a successful marriage (hint: they're not being
in love or always happy).
- Who tends to initiate divorce. Your partner may be
contemplating divorce right now and you don't even know it!
- Who has the real power in your relationship. I'll tell you
exactly who can turn your relationship around and how to
do it!
Part 2 - The Real Marriage Killer: Loss of Love and Intimacy
- How to recognize when your relationship is in danger.
Hint: it's not when you're arguing all the time!
- What to do if the love is gone. You'll be astounded at
this advice!
- 25 Relationship Killers. Keep these from poisoning your
relationship!
- The double 'D's. How disillusionment and disappointment
can eat away at your marriage.
Part 3 - Affairs: How to Spot Them and Prevent Them Before They
Occur
- When affairs are likely to occur. The stress points in
your marriage that you have to watch out for.
- Where affairs happen. Prevent an affair before it happens
by watching these troublesome areas.
- Will an affair destroy your marriage? What to consider.
- What to do if you suspect an affair. Hint: it's not to
come out straight and accuse him/her.
Part 4 - Poor Communication: Getting Touchy Feely with Your Partner
- Getting your partner to open up. Some powerful strategies
to get the communication flowing again.
- The Dos and Don'ts of Communication. Are bad communication
patterns keeping your spouse from sharing with you?
- The Rules of Arguing. It's not a free-for-all!
- The Silent Poison. How resentment can destroy your
marriage and how communication can help.
Part 5 - Lack of Commitment: If You're Involved in Something (or
Someone) Else, You're Not Involved with Your Spouse
- How modern attitudes towards marriage work against
commitment. How generational attitudes towards marriage
can sabotage commitment before it starts.
- The danger of being a workaholic.
- How children can divide a marriage.
- The danger of the Internet.
Part 6 - Growing Apart: Keep It from Happening to You!
- Incompatibility. Spot it before incompatibility splits
you up.
- Your Partner is a Book. Read him/her, even if you haven't
shared in the past!
- Mid-Life Crises. The danger zone of middle age.
This free introductory course will give you some basic tools to deal with a
dissolving marriage, but I can't possibly tell you everything in
just six emails. That's why I put everything into my online marriage saving course, Save
My Marriage Today! It's got so, so much more.
It's chockfull of
useful exercises designed to give you a better understanding of
what's causing problems with your marriage and how to fix them.
You'll learn about conflict resolution, increasing intimacy, how to
deal with an affair, and much, much more. Click on the link below
to see exactly how I can help your marriage get back on its feet
again!
www.SaveMyMarriageToday.com
Now, let's get into today's lesson.
SAVE MY MARRIAGE TODAY 6-PART MINI-COURSE - DAY 1
Risk Factors for Divorce and Why You Should Ignore Them
by Amy Waterman
If your marriage is struggling, unhappy, or on the verge of
divorce, you need to have the best information available at your
fingertips. You need to know what factors could be working against
your marriage right now, even if you see nothing wrong. Many
people believe that their marriage is working fine until their
spouse gives them the wake-up call.
Marriages either grow or weaken: they don't stay static. That
means that a secure marriage isn't one where things are always the
same. A solid marriage is one in which you never stop putting in
effort to make it better and better.
You wouldn't be visiting the Save My Marriage Today! website unless
your marriage was in crisis. This six-part course is intended as
an eye-opener to show you why your marriage may have gotten to this
point and what behaviors may be leading you further down the path
to divorce.
If you're going to restore, heal, and strengthen your
marriage, you HAVE to think frankly about the reasons your marriage
isn't satisfying both you and your partner. That's where this
course can help.
Top Six Predictors of Divorce
Let's start out with the things that you can't change. Some
marriages start off with a number of challenges arrayed against
them; other marriages have factors in their favor. If any of the
following situations apply to you and your partner, don't despair.
These are risk factors--not determining factors. It may just mean
that you need extra help (such as professional counseling) to work
through the issues that you and your partner are facing.
1. You married in your teens.
Study after study shows that age at marriage is one of the most
powerful and consistent predictors of marital stability. If you
marry before you turn twenty, you are much likely to divorce.
2. You lived together before marriage.
Many young people today believe that living together before
marrying will test their compatibility and keep them from making a
mistake by marrying someone they don't know fully. Despite the
widespread prevalence of this belief, the evidence just doesn't
back it up.
Even though over half of all first marriages are
preceded by a period of living together, don't do it just because
everyone else is doing it. Living together before marriage
considerably increases your chances of eventually divorcing--unless
you were already engaged beforehand and marry soon after moving in
together.
3. Your parents or your partner's parents were divorced.
Children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce themselves
(as well as less likely to marry in the first place). This risk
can be mitigated if one of you comes from a happy, intact family.
If both you and your partner come from broken homes, the divorce
risk soars.
4. You have a child together before marriage.
On a positive note, couples with children have a slightly lower
risk of divorce than childless couples, if their first child is
born seven months or more after they marry. Having a child
together before that period will increases your risk of divorce.
5. You haven't been married long.
The first two years of a marriage are critical, and half of all
divorces occur by the seventh year of a marriage. The longer
you've been married, the more likely you are to stay married.
6. Your annual income is under $25,000.
Money matters. Financial strains often break up marriages, as when
money is tight, arguments and marital tensions increase. In fact,
the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers considers financial
problems to be one of the five most common reasons for divorce
(along with poor communication, lack of marital commitment,
infidelity, and a dramatic change in priorities.)
Top Six Predictors of a Long-Lasting Marriage
If you're facing challenges in your marriage, it may be comforting
to know that you have some factors in your favor. These predictors
are limited to factors that were set in place when you married and
don't include aspects like good communication and conflict
resolution skills.
1. You were both older when you married.
Getting married over the age of twenty-five (as opposed to your
teens) will decrease your chances of divorce. This is because
older individuals tend to be more mature, clearer about what
they're looking for in a partner, and have more economic stability.
2. You share the same religion or belief system.
Sharing a religion is a powerful bond, because it brings you and
your partner together on a spiritual level and gives your marriage
a sense of a higher purpose.
When you are both active in a
religion, you have counseling and a strong support network
available to foster you through difficult times in your marriage.
Too, your shared values and life goals sustain your marriage and
keep you growing together rather than apart.
3. You have some higher education.
A college degree isn't necessary to increase your chances of a
long-lasting marriage, but some higher education will decrease your
chances of divorce considerably with comparison to a high-school
dropout.
4. Your parents are still together.
If you grew up in an intact family, your chances of divorce are
less in comparison to someone who grew up with divorced parents.
This is because so much of what we learn about marriage and marital
behavior comes from watching our parents.
If our parents developed
strategies for staying together, we'll absorb those strategies in
childhood and be able to use them ourselves in our adult
relationships.
5. Your income is above $50,000.
Couples with medium to high incomes tend to experience less strife
over money management. They have the financial security to worry
less about making a living and more about making a life.
6. You have a child together.
Couples with children have a lower risk of divorce compared to
childless couples. However, be warned: the most stressful time in
a marriage is after the birth of the first child. That's why it's
so important that the first child is born only after the marriage
has developed a strong foundation.
The Keys to a Successful Marriage
According to Michael P. Johnson, professor of sociology at Penn
State, there are three things that keep a person in a marriage:
people want to stay, they feel they ought to stay, and/or they have
to stay. This combination of personal, moral, and structural
commitment serves to keep people in marriages.
Notice that commitment keeps people in marriage--not happiness. Dr.
Ted Huston of the University of Texas Austin studied couples from
courtship to marriage.
His ten-year-plus study exploded many
popular misconceptions about love. For example, he found that many
recently wed couples did not experience newlywed bliss; in fact,
couples whose marriages began with "Hollywood romance" intensity
soon burned out.
A couple expecting wedded bliss every day of
their lives was actually more likely to divorce than a couple with
a less exciting relationship, because they were more likely to
consider divorce when those intense feelings subsided.
Does that
mean that less exciting, even lackluster relationships last? They
do indeed, perhaps because they have less far to fall.
Research shows that unhappy periods in a marriage are not
indicative of future unhappiness. In fact, one study showed that
86% of unhappily married couples who stayed with their marriage
were happier five years later--three fifths of whom were "quite" or "very happy."
According to the 2004 "State of Our Unions" report by the National
Marriage Project, the percentage of married people 18 or older who
said that their marriage was very happy has declined over the last
quarter century, from about 69% in the mid 1970s to 64% for men and
60% for women today.
That's less than two-thirds of the married
population who considers themselves very happy in their
relationship. Clearly, you don't have to be blissfully in love or
very happy for your relationship to last. What do you need?
It's not love and luck. It's commitment and companionship.
Commitment means that you have powerful personal, moral, and
structural reasons to stay in the relationship. Companionship
means that you and your partner form a unified team against
whatever challenges life hands you.
Team members may fight,
disagree, and encounter stalemates, but they know that their
happiness and satisfaction in life depends on the success of the
team--not on their individual success.
When Marriage Fails ... Who and How
Contrary to popular belief, it's not men who seek divorce. It's
women, by an overwhelming majority. The reasons for this are
varied. Part of it is the nature of divorce laws; another part is
the fact that men tend to have more problems with
marriage-destroying behaviors like alcoholism, affairs, and
substance abuse, that cause their wives to seek separation.
Divorce is hard on everyone. The damage divorce causes to children
is usually worse than the damage caused by living in a two-parent
home with marital difficulties.
This is contrary to the popular
belief that children are better off if their parents divorce rather
than live together. Studies show that only in a minority of
high-conflict situations is this true.
After a divorce, a woman's standard of living can be expected to
drop while a man's standard of living may actually improve. Yet
men suffer in other ways. Divorced and separated men are two and a
half times more likely to commit suicide than married men.
This is
partially due to the fact that men, unlike women, are less likely
to have a strong support network to share their feelings. Whether
due to this need for companionship or not, divorced men are more
likely to remarry than divorced women, and they're more likely to
remarry sooner.
Who Has the Real Power in a Relationship
Regardless of whether you're a man or a woman, whether you pay the
bills or stay at home, or whether you need your spouse more than
your spouse needs you, there is only one person in control of any
relationship.
That person has the power to turn a relationship
around or run it into the ground. And that person usually never
realizes how much power he/she wields until it is too late.
That person is you.
You have the choice to either react to the situation you're in (by
complaining about your marriage, allowing yourself to be swamped by
negative emotions, or feeling out of control), or to take
responsibility and choose your actions. Eleanor Roosevelt once
said, "No one can hurt you without your consent."
Even if you cannot change your partner's behavior, you can choose
how you respond to that behavior. You can internalize the blame,
the hurt, and the criticism, or you can take responsibility for
your own feelings and choose to act the way you want to feel.
Think again about that last concept. You should act the way you
want to feel. If you want to feel more loving towards your spouse,
act more loving. If you want to feel happier in your marriage,
smile more and express gratitude for the good things in your
marriage.
It's one of the strangest aspects of human psychology
that the more you act the way you want to feel (thankful, peaceful,
loving, affectionate, etc.) the more you will begin to feel that
way.
Few people realize this. When a marriage begins to crumble, their
first instinct is to act out their emotions. They feel hurt, so
they lash out. They feel criticized, so they become defensive.
They feel vulnerable, so they close up. These are reactions, not
actions. Your feelings should NOT make you act in ways that you
don't want to.
You have the power to transform your marriage, even if your partner
doesn't want to. That's because your behavior has an enormous
influence on your partner, to the point that married people
actually grow alike over time. We can't help but pick up our
partner's moods, preferences, and ways of saying certain things.
If you transform yourself--your attitude, the way you communicate,
how often you show love and affection--your partner will be
incapable of resisting. A happy, fulfilling relationship begins
with you. And in the next part of this mini-course, I'll show you
how to start achieving it.
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Want to Know More Ways To Rescue Your Marriage?
Make sure that you don't leave anything to chance. Get Save My Marriage Today and learn every last detail on what it takes to turn your marriage problems around and recreate the loving marriage that you always dreamed of. With our help, it is possible to rescue any marriage!
You can be on your way to repairing your marriage within minutes. Simply go to:
www.SaveMyMarriageToday.com/course
and get back your marriage today!
Yours in marriage success!
Amy Waterman
co-author of Save My Marriage Today!
 About "Save My Marriage Today"
The "Save My Marriage Today" course is a comprehensive collection of marriage rebuilding tools designed to assist troubled couples in turning around the negative patterns of behavior that exist in their marriages.
We have a range of experience with a large variety of problems among the members of the Save My Marriage Today team and have managed to help many couples in crisis turnaround their patterns of negative behavior. We have a range of life-changing e-books, and also have a new e-book specifically written for couples in extreme crisis. We also offer free access to personal consultations from a member of the "Save My Marriage Today" team.
Visit www.savemymarriagetoday.com/course
I am sure that we can help with any problem that you may have in your marriage. |
