“Our culture has gone so crazy with romance that we have tossed out the door the whole reality that we are choosing someone to live with, eat with, rear children with, pay the bills with, and not just have sex with.”
—Comment from a reader on the Huffington Post
Marta was married three years before she had a sobering aha moment—she and her husband were bad companions. “I thought [romantic love] was very relevant, but I was in love with the sex and the physique of the person and not with the person himself,” the twenty-three-year-old from South Korea told us. “We had nothing in common besides tattoos.”
Having a shared interest in tattoos is great, but we never considered it the stuff of successful partnerships, either.
Clearly, you can have a romantic marriage without companionship, even if the prognosis for it lasting is not very good. But what about the reverse? Can you have a marriage based on companionship without the romantic love? Absolutely, and we believe a Companionship Marriage is much more sustaining and sustainable than the one you probably have been taught to look for—a marriage that’s all about passion-filled love.
When most people hear that a couple is getting married, everyone assumes that the couple values love above all else because this is how it’s “supposed” to be. Except that isn’t always what people want most of all. In our survey of several hundred people from across the globe, companionship was the number one reason to tie the knot (64 percent) followed by love at 59 percent. That differs somewhat from a 2010 Pew study, in which 72 percent considered companionship a good reason to marry, after love and commitment.
But whether it’s number one or number three, it’s pretty evident companionship is an important aspect of marriage. While many people enjoy periods of being single and a certain amount can’t see being anything but a lifelong singleton, a lot of other people don’t really want to be alone forever, especially as they get older.
Barbara, a sixty-two-year-old widow, married Vince because she was afraid to grow old alone. She wanted to know someone else would be in the house with her, and she wanted some legal assurances of being taken care of financially if he died first. It’s not that love was completely absent; it just wasn’t her primary reason. According to Barbara, Vince, who was a resident at the same assisted living facility, was “as good and decent as any other man out there might be.” There were no big sparks, but, at her age, she didn’t need the glitz.
Mason had no intention of settling down again after he divorced his third wife, but then he became smitten with Amy, a starving artist. Although he is American, Mason, fifty-seven, grew up in Japan—a culture that keenly emphasizes maintaining awareness of how your actions impact others. He knew he could help Amy be more financially secure so she could pursue her art, and, being in a position to help her out financially, he couldn’t just sit back and watch her struggle. “I cared about her, and I was truly concerned that if I didn’t support her, she’d end up homeless,” he told us. While you may consider his decision too self-sacrificing, he believes it was a small price to pay to help a lovely woman he thought was a talented painter. In return, Mason comes home to a great friend, someone to share his day with, and a pretty comfortable lifestyle. And, since he is a frustrated artist himself, their shared love of art is an extra bonus. He imagined a life in which they would enjoy critiquing her work together as well as discussing the artworks they’d see at the many exhibits and museums they would visit.
When Rebecca died at the age of thirty-five of ovarian cancer, her husband, Jesse, had three young children to take care of by himself. But Rebecca’s sister Naira, who never married, was happy to step in as their surrogate mom. It was their shared grief as well as Naira’s unconditional willingness to be there for him and the kids that made him fall in love with her in a really different way than he did with Rebecca. He sees Naira much more as a friend than as a romantic partner, but she was the kind of friend he wanted to keep around for a long time. To this day, they have a sweet connection, even though the children are grown and live on their own.
Celine, fifty-two, and Dan, fifty-eight, had been together since 1993 but waited to tie the knot until 2005. The reason? Dan had kids from a previous marriage and Celine—who never wanted the responsibility of being a stepmother to young kids—didn’t want to marry Dan until his kids were older and out of the house. As much as she loved Dan, if she had been his wife, it would have been that much more difficult and complicated to leave. Being a child of divorce herself, she didn’t want to add to the drama Dan’s kids had already been through.
These couples came together not necessarily to make a public statement of love or to grow as a person or to have children together or to have sex while hanging from the chandeliers; they married to keep each other company, to help each other emotionally and financially, and to make life easier. Their marriages are less about romance and more about serving an admittedly utilitarian purpose—being with someone who has their back.
While Celine wasn’t keen on becoming a stepparent, many other women and men are. Slightly more than 12 percent of all children living with two adults in the United States are part of a stepfamily, according to a 2009 census study. A Pew report indicates 42 percent of U.S. adults have at least one step-relative. A 60 percent divorce rate for second marriages is telling, especially since many have blended families. But marrying for companionship may make for a more successful blended union. According to psychologist James H. Bray of the Baylor College of Medicine, who has studied and written extensively about stepfamilies, stepfamilies tend to fall into one of three categories—neotraditional, matriarchal, and romantic. Matriarchal families, headed by strong, independent women who marry for a companion, not a co-parent, were almost as successful as neotraditional stepfamilies, which he describes as a “contemporary version of the 1950s white picket fence family: it is close-knit, loving, and works very well for a couple with compatible values.” The least successful stepfamilies were the romantics, whose unrealistic expectations of immediate family cohesiveness, marital satisfaction, and obedient children prove impossible to achieve.
When Susan and her husband, Michael, exchanged vows in 2004, they were not quite blending families—just two beloved rescue dogs that had brought them together. They were middle-aged when they wed, neither had been married before, neither had children from previous relationships, and having children was not part of their plans. Unbeknownst to Susan before writing this book, she and her husband were entering into a Companionship Marriage. Although they easily could have continued living as an unmarried couple, they, like many of their friends and people their age, found the idea of being legally married more appealing.
The unconscious nature of their decision hit Susan and Michael when they were having dinner with a colleague who asked them, “Why did you get married?”
“We love each other,” Susan replied.
Their colleague pressed on. “But, why did you marry? You don’t have to get married just because you love someone.”
That’s true. Initially, Susan and Michael were perplexed. They had never thought that much about their decision to wed, and no one had asked them before. Like so many of the people we interviewed for this book, Susan and Michael admitted they married because they were in love and “it’s just what you do.”
When they thought about it more, however, they could see that companionship was a huge part of why they wanted to tie the knot. Why does that matter? Well, the expectations of having a companion don’t include the need to stay in an intense “in love” state. In truth, that “in love” state fades anyway, as you probably have seen in marriages—and divorces—of your friends and maybe your parents.
As you mature and life circumstances change, your priorities shift. If we were to create a continuum of what’s most important to men and women in relationships throughout their life span, it might look something like this (warning: we are generalizing, and you may have other desired traits not listed here, but you get the idea):
• eighteen to twenty-four: good sex (see note below) and good love, aka the madly-in-love stage
• twenty-five to thirty-five: good potential, aka the career-building stage
• thirty-six to fifty: good partner, good co-parent, aka the homemaking, family-making stage
• fifty-one to eighty: good companion, aka the “you’ll still like each other when you’re empty nesters and retired” stage
• eighty-one to (we hope) a happy, healthy long life: good caretaker, aka the “I’ll drive you to the doctor and make sure you take your meds” stage
(Note: we’re aware some of you would include good sex for all the age groups, so go right ahead . . . and good luck!)
Let’s face it; people have different needs at different times, which helps explain why it can be hugely challenging to have a lifelong marriage. That’s why many people are multiple marriers. But it’s also evident that a good chunk of a romantic relationship—especially later in life—is spent wanting your partner to be a good companion.
What if the companionship part came first?
IS COMPANIONSHIP JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR SETTLING?
In 2009, journalist Lori Gottlieb wrote an essay, “Marry Him,” in the Atlantic and, a year later, came out with a well-researched book by the same name that expanded her argument. Gottlieb said that instead of spending time looking for Mr. Right, women who want to marry and have children should adjust their expectations and consider marrying Mr. Good Enough. As she good-humoredly writes:
“Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling ‘Bravo!’ in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)”
Gottlieb, a forty-eight-year-old single mom who conceived via a sperm donor a decade earlier, used her own frustrating story of looking for The One as a somewhat cautionary tale, but her article and book ruffled a lot of women’s feathers. Actually, it set off quite a firestorm, and numerous blogs and articles attacked her logic and saw her as contributing to single women’s angst.
Much of the fracas over her article and book rested on the word “settle,” which was unfortunately all too often interpreted as choosing a partner who was “less than” or a plain vanilla bore. But Gottlieb and the experts she interviewed weren’t advising women to get hitched to just any Joe Blow. Instead, she advocated that women throw out their quest for finding a soul mate, a man who will “complete” them, and the rom-com fantasy of love and marriage, and instead look for a man who would make a good partner. Not a ho-hum partner, but a good partner.
In that respect, we agree. A Companionship Marriage is not based on marrying someone who will be your “everything.” It’s not based on marrying someone who is going to be the best lover and provider, homemaker, or father or mother (remember, not all people want kids or have kids. If you want kids, please take a look at the Parenting Marriage chapter). Honestly, you are not going to be someone else’s everything either, even if your mother thinks you are perfect and even if you believe you’re perfect, too. We hate to break it to you, but you’re not perfect—but you will be a good enough person for someone, or maybe several someones. That’s a good thing.
Would some say you’d be settling or lowering the bar to marry for companionship instead of love? Sure. But because people want different things from marriage (and want different things from it at different times), anyone who insists you’d be lowering the bar wouldn’t be right. “My husband and I married for companionship and compatibility,” one couple of fifteen years proudly wrote to us. If that’s what they wanted and that’s what they have and they’re happy, we’d say that’s a marriage that works.
Rather than calling it “settling,” we prefer to say that by identifying your priorities instead of spending energy and time looking for The One, you are better able to pick a mate who will share those priorities. That’s making a marriage successful by your own terms. It isn’t a matter of semantics, either; people are happier when their expectations match their reality.
A thirty-five-year-old unmarried Seattle woman who told us that, while she could do without the sexual aspect of marriage, in part because of a history of being sexually abused, she does want a mate one day. “I am not a sexual person. That being said, I want companionship. A lot. I’m a really touchy-feeling person; hugs are awesome and one of the things that keep me sane. When I think about getting married, I feel that saying vows in front of friends and family is important to that companionship for stability. That someone would be willing to say these vows is important to me.”
That is not lowering the bar or settling.
Another woman contacted us to thank us (as many others have, which confirms for us that there’s a great hunger for this discussion). After reading about our proposal to tweak marriage, she told us that she felt validated for the first time about her own marital choice. In the past, she often wondered if her decision to marry for reasons other than romantic love was a mistake. That’s the message society keeps sending out. She now realizes that her marriage—one she says is “based on our lifestyles and desires in life”—is no less a happy marriage than one based on romantic love.
Yet another reader admits that, while love was part of the reason she married her husband two years ago, “common interests, political views, companionship, and other various factors carried a lot more weight than love actually did. . . . This may sound harsh to some, but I can honestly say that I don’t love my husband the way I used to, but there are other things that help keep me invested in our marriage.”
She, like the others, sought someone she could share interests and friendship with. One definition of companionship is “the good feeling that comes from being with someone else,” and that’s actually a pretty grand feeling. Companionship is the stuff you fall back on when physical attraction and appearance fade (as they inevitably do), as comfortable as your favorite pair of worn jeans or T-shirt. So if people are willing to accept companionship later on in life, what’s wrong with putting it at the top of your list? Sure, it may be nowhere near as sexy or exciting as romantic love, but it’s just as valid a reason to say, “I do.”
We love how one woman explains the success of her long marriage: “I’ve been married to at least ten different men. They just all happen to be the same one. The secret of our fifty-seven-year marriage is that we are totally supportive of the other’s continual transformation, glad to accept the anxiety that accompanies that freedom instead of the boredom that drives most people apart.” She beautifully captures the sobering reality that relationships aren’t static, nor should the people in them be.
In one of our surveys, we asked people around the world about the role of romantic love versus utilitarian love in marriage. The results were about fifty-fifty. In other words, people thought both had value. What mattered more to them, we discovered, is that the type of love a person used to guide his or her decision on choosing a mate was less important than if that decision was in line with his or her values about love.
This is not unlike how some people view their livelihood. To many, their job is nothing more than a means to an end. They don’t have to feel passionate about it, and the trade-off is that they have a steady paycheck that affords them a satisfying life in their days and hours off. If and when this is congruent with their belief system about work, they have relatively few complaints about their job.
Insert someone else into that same job who needs to be passionate about his work, and he will be pretty miserable if he doesn’t feel jazzed to go to work every day. For many people who took our survey, staying with a mate who is good enough is not a problem; they are content with their choice. But we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that some people have big regrets that they chose companionship as their focus over love. For those people, there’s a lingering nagging doubt that they’ve missed out on a grand passion by letting The One get away or by not waiting long enough to find him or her.
One woman lamented to us, “He never had a sex drive that matched mine. Any mutual passion we had is pretty much gone after twenty-plus years. I don’t want anyone else to take care of that part of my life, but I sure wish he was more interested and enthusiastic.”
And one man professed, “I married a woman who had the qualities I was looking for in a wife. I avoided the love thing because I had been hurt badly, and I was determined to never let love derail my life again. After twenty-five years, I can say, my decision was practical, wise, and wholly unfulfilling. I know I have to face the fact that I will never know what it is like to be with someone I am madly in love with. Yes, love may fade with time, but so do the practical reasons for being married in the first place. So go ahead and find someone you love—it may not work out, but I can guarantee that you won’t regret it while it lasts.”
Does he make a good point? Yes, although he is somewhat contradictory in his feelings about how love derailed his life while “guaranteeing” there will be no regrets if you allow love to derail your own life. The problem with his thinking, however, and the problem most people face when searching for a mate, is that he may never actually meet someone he’s “madly in love with.” He may, but he may not. Ever. After all, there are no guarantees in life or love. So to project how much happier he might be in some imagined relationship he believes he’s missing out on is an illusion; people are really bad predictors of how happy they’ll be in the future or in certain circumstances because that happiness is based on how they feel right now, according to Harvard psychologist and Stumbling on Happiness author Daniel Gilbert. So instead of regretting that he didn’t marry for love, he might instead end up regretting that he didn’t marry a good gal when he had the chance to.
Couples that consider themselves good friends tend to be quite harmonious, handle conflict in a healthy and respectful way, and share similar goals and values on the big-picture stuff, like raising kids and religion, sociologist Paul Amato has found.
That doesn’t sound so bad (again, you can skip the kids if you’d prefer to be childfree). It certainly doesn’t sound like settling to us.
“Love will make you blind to the other person’s faults. When you go into a marriage with your eyes open, it will make life a lot easier,” a Southern California woman in an arranged marriage of eight years wrote us. She agreed, at first reluctantly, to have her parents find her a mate because she was ready to have a family, she was looking for security, and she frankly admits, “I wasn’t getting any younger.”
She does not regret her decision.
“Love will come when you see your partner take care of you, your kids, your family, and when they respect you and when they do the small, little everyday things that matter. Love develops when you have mutual respect for one another,” she wrote us. “But romantic love can disappear when the hardships of life take over. Romantic love is usually a changing emotion. But when you go into a marriage that is practical, love will develop. . . . I wish we didn’t have fantasy ideas of marriage. Because when we do, it’s a big reality check after marriage.”
This seems like a good place to pause and make clear that we are in no way encouraging or endorsing you to pick or stay with a partner who, despite sharing your values and goals, has other traits, attitudes, or behaviors that are damaging to you or the relationship. Being with a good enough partner is not the same as being a martyr.
What we found from our survey is that people who were happy with their marriage—regardless of whether it was based on idealized love or practical love—believed it was because they chose the right type of marriage for their situation.
One couple in their thirties who’d been together for eight years told us, “We were in the military when we got married. Still going strong with a three-year-old now. Now I’m a cop in Boston and she’s a nurse. I think it works ’cause we’ve never had that ‘romantic love.’ Always been more of a friendship with awesome sex.”
Companionship, yes. Friendship, yes. Best friend? Maybe not. While we’re all for you picking a spouse you genuinely like, marrying someone you consider your best friend is dicey. It’s yet another instance of trying to have a mate meet all your emotional and physical needs. Generally, all that does is lead to frustration (and typically, people are much more tolerant and accepting of a best friend’s bad behavior than a spouse’s).
In her work, Susan has seen many women disappointed that they can’t talk to their husbands about the details of their day the same way they do with girlfriends who relish the same information. And she’s seen lots of men who resent being bombarded with information they can’t process (or maybe don’t want to). Call it a male brain–female brain thing or a Mars-Venus thing, but we’ll bet most heteros have experienced this with at least one romantic partner in their lifetime.
This begs the question, should mates be best friends? No, says Karen, who was in a lesbian marriage for five years. She told us that in her experience, “it’s dangerous to have a spouse as a best friend because if problems develop, you don’t have a neutral person to talk to.” That was knowledge she really would have valued when she and her wife were having difficulties. “You’ve got to have that objective feedback that you can only get from an outside friend,” she says. She blames their extra-close relationship as contributing to their downfall. Ironically, they have remained best friends since their divorce, but they just can’t be in a romantic relationship together. Combining the two didn’t work.
So forget the fantasy partner and forget the best friend. Being good companions means you’re pretty focused on what you do well together, and, honestly, few people do everything well together.
CHILDFREE COMPANIONSHIP
Perhaps no one understands the desire for companionship in a marriage more than couples that choose to be childfree (and we are making a distinction between childfree couples that don’t want kids and childless couples that want kids but for a variety of reasons are unable to have them). Raising a family is a huge reason why many couples wed. But why marry if you don’t plan to have children?
“Love and companionship” is what Laura S. Scott found herself saying to the many people who asked her that. But she isn’t alone. The author of Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice found that companionship was considered a priority by many of the couples she surveyed for her Childless by Choice Project.
So did Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine, who surveyed childfree couples about how they go about creating a family when clearly there are no children involved. Marriage was what made them see themselves as a family, and companionship was often mentioned as a motivating factor to tie the knot.
“I thought my husband would be a great friend and dependable companion through my life,” one woman in our survey told us. “I wasn’t keen on having children back then, so procreation didn’t factor into my plans.”
And we’ll leave you with what a wise thirty-year-old bride-to-be told us. “I am currently engaged, and logic played a huge role in my decision. Not love or lust. I love my fiancé, but it’s because of our shared values and acceptances of differences, not because of a mushy nebulous feeling. I’ve done that feeling before . . . and it ends in a mess.
“I’m marrying my fiancé because he lets me be who I really am. We both don’t want kids; we both want the same life. We are equally educated, rational, and are making this choice together because it makes sense, not because some emotion is telling me this is what I should be doing.”
BECOMING COMPANIONS IF YOU’RE ALREADY MARRIED
As you saw above, most marriages drift into Companionship Marriages at some point or another, often after the kids leave. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t shape the way that companionship looks.
Consider Warren and Betsy Talbot. The forty-four-year-olds were friends first and married—a second marriage for both—for the tax perks they’d get instead of continuing to live together. The childfree couple made tons of money in their corporate careers, had a huge house that they filled with what they now describe as “a lot of crap,” and were considered by many to have it all—big jobs, big house, big lives. But, in the first couple of years together, they were drifting apart. They were focused on consumption, not each other. They admitted to us they were headed for divorce if for no other reason than they had lost meaningful connection with each other. If you’ve been married for any length of time, does that sound familiar?
After the sudden life-threatening health issues of two loved ones, they came to the realization that, yes, life is short. What were they doing with their life? Just because they were childfree didn’t mean that they were truly free. When they examined their choices, they saw they were chained to their careers, home, and possessions. They decided to make their relationship a priority, and they set out to create the life they really wanted. What they longed for was to be travel companions. So with a clear vision and a shared goal, they sold everything and have been traveling around the globe since 2010 and writing about their adventures online at Married With Luggage and in books.
They admitted to us that it’s hard to live so unconventionally. Not having children and not making other family members a priority was a double strike against them. But they have re-created a marriage that started off for financial reasons and turned into one based on fun and companionship. And one that keeps evolving.
“We came upon the idea of treating our relationship more like a performance contract between partners, one where you can choose to renew, renegotiate, or cancel on an annual basis. We weren’t sure if we were brilliant or insane,” Betsey Talbot writes.
They continue to reinvent their marriage every year on their anniversary, when they review all that’s happened in the past twelve months, personally and as a couple. Then they take turns talking about what they’d like to see get better, after some hugs for reassurance. Finally, they ask each other if they want to renew—which each has so far—and then agree out loud to the changes they are going to make and why.
“Anytime you’re willing to enter into negotiation it means you find value in the relationship. And knowing we have a yearly renewal keeps us both on our toes. There is nothing more frustrating than exchanging vows and then forgetting them. This is an ongoing enterprise, and we want to keep it sustainable,” she says.
“Most people think the best thing we’ve ever done is to travel the world. But we’ll tell you without a doubt that the best thing we’ve ever done is create a partnership so strong we think we can do anything together,” they state on their website.
It’s hard to argue with that.
KEEP THE MARRIAGE, CHANGE THE RULES
Michelle consciously made the decision to marry her husband, Craig, fifteen years ago because they were great companions if not sexual partners. “We are compatible in so many ways it feels wasteful to throw out our marriage because we don’t work sexually. We still love each other, enjoy each other’s company, and co-parent beautifully. We like our life together,” she wrote us.
After the frenetic early years of childrearing, when few couples are having much sex anyway, Michelle was suddenly struck by how much she missed passion. She and her husband are bravely exploring an Open Marriage, which she talks about so candidly in Chapter 9.
What the Talbots and Michelle and Craig have done is renegotiate the terms of their marital contract—they started off one way and rather than divorce, they turned their marriage into something else. Their stories are a valuable lesson for anyone who regrets marrying for companionship versus romantic love. If your marriage isn’t working, do something different. Change your attitude, change your behavior, change your actions, switch to one of the other marital models we offer in this book. After all, half of the success (or not) of your marriage is in your hands.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT A COMPANIONSHIP MARRIAGE
• It’s easier finding someone who meets your needs for companionship than someone you consider The One.
• Utilitarian love is less fragile than romantic love, which tends to fade early in a marriage.
• Your marriage will be based on common goals and, if you choose, interests.
• It offers a good foundation for connection if you don’t plan to have children.
• Relationships tend to become companionate in the later years anyway.
• Your marriage will be focused on what you and your spouse do well together.
• Expectations of your marriage and spouse may be more realistic, so there’s less of a chance of being disappointed and frustrated.
• There’s no ambiguity about what’s expected.
• It offers a different way to experience intimacy.
• It’s less tumultuous than a marriage based on romantic love.
• Friendship offers a solid foundation for a partnership.
• Marrying a good companion may be better than being alone.
• You will have a partner aligned with your values.
• You will have a partner to do things with.
• You will have someone to help with caregiving, especially if you’re older.
• You will have someone to support you emotionally, if not necessarily financially.
• You will be a couple in a coupled world.
• You will have a partner with whom you can share personal growth.
WHAT’S NOT SO GOOD ABOUT A COMPANIONSHIP MARRIAGE
• It may feel like settling.
• You may face judgment and misunderstanding from others.
• You may feel something is missing in your love life.
• You might get bored more easily or quickly.
• You may become unhappy with your choice.
• You may be sexually tempted.
• You may be jealous of others who appear to have passionate love.
• You may feel resentment that you didn’t get what you really wanted.
• You may get frustrated with your partner for not being able to give you more.
• You may have a lingering sense of self-doubt.
• You may have to work harder to create your own happiness.
HOW TO MAKE A COMPANIONSHIP MARRIAGE WORK
This marriage is probably one of the easier marriages to design (whether you are going into a marriage or redefining your existing matrimony) because it is based on the simple concept of friendship. Of course, couples can always incorporate passionate love into this marriage, but the primary reason for having a Companionship Marriage is to have a mate who is a really good friend; a really good partner for work, travel, and fun; and someone who will keep you from being alone.
Here are the qualities or attitudes we think you’d need to possess in order to have this marriage be successful:
• You are not a hopeless romantic at heart.
• You don’t believe one person can or should fulfill all your needs.
• You are emotionally secure.
• You have good self-esteem.
• You believe the day-to-day activities of life are easier if shared.
• You are willing to work things through with each other. Friendship matters to you, and you know how to be a good friend.
• You don’t have a strong need for sexual passion.
• You and your partner are compatible in many ways.
• You value stability over risk.
• You accept people as they are.
• You are comfortable having your spouse be the extent of your family and having your relationship be the main focus of your life.
• You are more comfortable as part of a couple than as a single.
• You both want to get married, but you don’t have to get married.
• You make a conscious choice to be companions rather than companions by default.
• You agree to continue to work on your primary relationship and not take the other for granted.
• You are satisfied with having a sweet, easy love for your partner and you don’t have to feel “in love.”
• You’re not a perfectionist, and you don’t expect your spouse to meet all of your needs and wants.
• You have goals and interests that you already share with your mate or want to share with a mate.
IS A COMPANIONSHIP MARRIAGE RIGHT FOR ME?
Wondering if you’re cut out for a Companionship Marriage? Here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself:
• What does companionship mean to me?
• What about having a Companionship Marriage excites me?
• What scares me?
• What would I miss?
• What qualities make a good companion?
• Am I a romantic at heart?
• How important is romantic love to me?
• How important is friendship in a marriage to me?
• Should I marry my best friend?
• How do I feel about the word “settling” as it relates to relationships?
• What would I want to accomplish in a Companionship Marriage that I couldn’t have in any other marital model?
• Would I be sexually tempted by others?
• How would I manage those temptations?
• Do I believe it’s okay for people to marry so they’re not alone?
READ MORE
Curious about how to make this marital model work? Here are some books to read for insight and guidance:
• The Business of Love: 9 Best Practices for Improving the Bottom Line of Your Relationship by John Curtis (IOD Press, 2006).
• First Comes Marriage: Modern Relationship Advice from the Wisdom of Arranged Marriages by Reva Seth (Touchstone, 2008).
• Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb (Dutton Adult, 2010).
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert by John Gottman and Nan Scott (Crown, 1999).
• Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice by Laura Scott (Seal Press, 2009).
• Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Helen Fisher (Holt Paperbacks, 2004).
COMPANIONSHIP MARRIAGE TAKEAWAYS
• A Companionship Marriage is less about passion-filled romantic love and more about practical love.
• A Companionship Marriage is one in which your mate is a friend and someone to do things with.
• A Companionship Marriage is not centered around having children. Some couples are childfree by choice, others have grown children who are out of the house when they marry.
• A Companionship Marriage is an attractive alternative for people who do not want to grow old alone.
• The standard for a Companionship Marriage is that your spouse is “good enough.”
• Companionship is the basis of all good marriages.
• A Companionship Marriage is often what empty-nesters create once their parenting role reverts back to their mate role.