If you were asked to define what constitutes a happy marriage, you might be puzzled for a minute. It’s sometimes easier to recognize one than to actually explain what it consists of. We all know couples who are happily married … and probably know marriages that careen from crisis to crisis or that stagnate into a sullen partnership without passion or even love.
But what do we really mean when we say two people have a happy marriage?
One thing we don’t mean is just that they’ve been together a long time. (A client once told me that she was glad her husband of fifty-three years had died, since she’d been miserable for the past half century.) A long marriage does not necessarily equal a happy marriage. And yet, we almost always assume they are synonymous. A silver anniversary, a golden anniversary—we usually take these benchmarks as great accomplishments, rare achievements in a society littered with the corpses of failed marriages. But the truth is that a long marriage is only that—long. It just means that two people have stayed legally bound for a lot of years—maybe joyfully, maybe miserably, or maybe both.
A happy marriage, however, has a certain effervescence as well as a quality of emotional sanctuary that makes your world a better place.
This section looks at the fundamentals of what actually creates such a happy union (Chapter 1) and the habits necessary to keep that happiness in place (Chapter 2).