CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE ARTICLE:"Do Married Couples Really Live Happily Ever After?"
• "From the E-Mailbox"

JUST VISITING

While we were preparing for the recent "Mending a Messed up Marriage" seminar, Ann read through Saving our Marriage Before it Starts by Doctors Les Parrott and Leslie Parrott III The Parrotts believe that the most widely held and most destructive of these is "And they lived happily ever after." They are many other myths but here are the four the Parrotts consider the most harmful and most common.

1. "We expect exactly the same things from marriage."
2. "Everything good in our relationship will get better."
3. "Everything bad in my life will disappear."
4. "My spouse will make me whole."

This week's feature article addresses the first and most destructive of the marriage myths.

Norman

In the story books, the handsome prince marries the fair young maiden. Fairly tale authors apparently exhausted their creative writing skills helping heroes and heroines escape wicked witches and ugly stepmothers along with various and sundry trolls and dragons. They always ended with the same tag line ". . . and they lived happily ever after." A line like that would never make it past an editor's blue pencil today. If they did get published, they would probably be sued for plagiarism.

Make fun of the "happily ever after line" if you dare, but aren't we still expecting it to happen in the real world? Don't we feel cheated the very moment a dark cloud rises over our relationships? Family therapist, Norman Wright believes all of life moves in cycles and patterns and marriage is no exception. He says we go through "hot" and "dry" cycles. I think he could have added rinse cycles because some days it seems like our marriages are all washed up.

A few days ago, I was sharing this concept with a recent bride. I said, "The 'in love' experience doesn't last, so you have to build your relationship on something else." She said, "Oh, that went by the boards after two months." Some people get a little more mileage than that, but most of us are going to experience some form of disillusionment, dissatisfaction or disappointment within a relatively short period after the wedding.

After Ann and I had been married about six weeks, Valentine's Day came around. When I came home from work I brought neither flowers, candy, nor a greeting card. I don't even remember speaking kind words. Probably my most romantic line was, "What's for supper?" I didn't even know it was Valentine's Day. So what happens when the house built on romantic love starts crumbling? Does it mean the marriage is over?

Absolutely not. Or at least it shouldn't. Actually, it provides a couple the opportunity to start building a real love relationship. What does that mean? For one thing it's healthy. Your blood pressure will no longer rise to alarming levels every time you see your spouse. Besides that, you begin noticing the real person you married. Mr. Wonderful will be exposed for what he really is - just an ordinary guy with some virtues and some faults and a whole lot of insecurities. After a few months, you'll realize that you did not marry a perfect woman after all. You'll discover irritating habits and blemishes that you somehow overlooked during courtship. And that's good because now you're seeing a real person. Instead of seeing charm, good looks, and a sense of humor, you're seeing a person's character, integrity and potential.

Perhaps potential is the best thing you have going for you. A friend of mine likes to say, "Potential and 60 cents will buy you a cup of coffee." Well it will in some places. But in this case, I'm not ready to disparage potential. Potential means the opportunity for growth. Had you married the perfect person, there would have been no possibility of growth and perfection could get pretty boring after awhile. But once you become aware of each other's flaws, you can begin the life long process of helping one another grow. Maybe that's why 1 Peter 3:7 portrays married Christians as "partners" and "heirs of the gift of life."