Learning Skills Essential To Marriage
The most crucial finding in the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (OMI), supported by our own research, having a successful marriage is a skill-based proposition.
Skill is defined as "an ability that comes from training or practice. Marriage skills can be taught to any race, culture, or economic class and to couples at any stage of relationship---dating, engaged, newlywed, long- term married, or remarried. The earlier the skills are learned, the greater the chance for long-term success. Successful behaviors build mastery, self-confidence, and appreciation of one's partner. Failure in relationships, or ineffective behaviors, lead to anxiety, self-doubt, blame, boredom, withdrawal, despair, violence, break-up and divorce.
A traditional view of the family is that couples should stay married even though they experience conflict in the relationship. An overwhelming number (60%) of people in our study felt it was important to stay married through conflict. However, this is dramatically opposed to the OMI study in which only 28% (overall average) agreed that staying married was a good idea when the marriage has overwhelming conflict. This begs the question of the myth of "conflict resolution" in relationships. The goal in relationships is not "conflict resolution," as if couples can and will resolve conflict and never experience it again. The issue is not how couples experience conflict, but rather how do they manage the conflict inside the relationship so that they can experience success.
I happen to believe that most couples can fall in love again. However, the skills applications are most crucial in an early intervention time frame. Skills are most certainty effective at all the identified marital stress points: becoming parents, entry of children into school, life with teenagers, the empty nest, and retirement. Marital skills are helpful at any stage of marriage. If couples learn skills, then their relationships will remain a continuing, reinforcing source of pleasure and satisfaction. The relationship will be more adaptable to change and to stress from both internal and external sources, such as children, illness, unemployment, fame, infidelity, substance abuse, Monday Night Football, the internet, and even shopping.
Couples who learn the skills necessary for success will model the behavior for their children, thus possibly reducing the divorce rate in future generations. The marital relationship is the foundation of the family; and the family is the foundation for society. If we can somehow learn the skills necessary to strengthen the marriage, we strengthen the family, and thereby strengthen the community.
One of the primary problems is that in spite of all our readiness and all our revolutions, couples tend to operate with an old worn out premise about marriage. The premise is the myth that "love" with keep couples together. The five million or so persons who get married every year somehow believe their love is special, different, more passionate, and even stronger than the people who divorce. Then, at the other end of this tunnel-of-love, couples decide this great, special, unique, beautiful love has simply up and died. "I just don't love you anymore." And, according to the prevailing "love logic," that means we should end it. If it isn't working; I must have picked "the wrong person," or it must mean we weren't really in love, or saddest of all, we were in love but it died. This logic is so pervasive that it is accepted as the reason for marital failure. Couples want to end the marriage as quickly and painlessly as possible for all concerned so that they can get out there and renew the search for "true love" and personal happiness.
It's not "love" that keeps couples together, it's another four letter word---W-O-R-K. It's the daily working on the relationship, working on learning the skills necessary to survive the onslaught of conflict, working on being a partner, that makes the marriage survive and grow. Sometimes, as the research shows, it's plain old commitment to the other person until the relationship gets better, which is an incredible skill to learn.