Hi, I'm Paul Friedman founder of The Marriage Foundation and today's topic is
about age differences and whether they actually contribute to marital problems.
And if you've been paying attention to my earlier videos reading my articles
then you know that the approach that I take and so The Marriage Foundation
takes to marriage is spiritual, and what does that mean? That means that it's
truly a soul to soul relationship between husband and wife. So, the question
about age differences comes up and it is essentially a distraction. It's an excuse
for not making your marriage work the way it's supposed to. Let's talk a little
bit about what it's supposed to means. There's only two of you in this little
micro-society called the marriage. Why can't you get along with each other if
there's only two of you? It's because you don't understand. You don't remember
maybe you weren't even conscious of why you got married in the first place. You
got married to be happy and when I first began my journey of helping marriages
don't forget what I was doing before was I was helping people get a divorce. I was
a divorce mediator and all of my clients virtually, all of my clients were
referrals from therapists, couples counselors who couldn't save the
marriage that was now coming to me to be broken off. So I had to really look
at marriage from a different point of view so I could understand why aren't
these marriages surviving. One of the biggest problems
truly is that Western psychology doesn't recognize that we are souls. Some of them
some of the psychologists are there and therapists may even be Christian or
belong to another faith and so they say, "We have a soul." It's not the same thing,
it's not the same thing. You are a soul. What is a soul? A soul, you might say is a
part of God, think of God as the sum total of all and love is the nature of
God. Your soul is love, wisdom. Ultimate wisdom is love. Why aren't you
able to bring love into your marriage just because you're different ages in
this one particular incarnation? I am telling you, I have worked with couples
who are 20, 25 even 30 years apart but you wouldn't know by how they're
connected at that level that there is that age difference. That age difference
only comes up when there's problems and then people are looking for answers and
they're looking outwardly. They're going, "Okay, what's the problem?"
"Maybe it's because I'm 10 years younger than he is or 15 years older
than she is." And I hear things like what we listen to different music
remember, you got married to connect as souls and you can do that
because the soul is ageless. You essentially as a soul are ageless. Your
spouse is ageless. When you are in love the body doesn't even come into play
hardly. It's all about the heart, the soul. It's all about you,
the real you. So if you are starting to look for answers as to why your marriage
is not providing the happiness that you expected when you got married, don't look
for the outer things. Don't look for the age difference. Don't look for the
difference in taste in music or taste in food -- those things don't matter but you
don't know how to connect. That's the problem. You don't know how to infuse
your marriage with love -- that's the problem. Now you may have some ideas now
that you're hearing this, "Oh I can infuse my marriage with love," but you know what
as a professional it took me a long time to figure out the do's and the don'ts
then it took me an even longer time to figure out the nuances of learning how
to control our own mind, learning how it all works, how it's all fit together.
Marriage is an amazing thing -- it's so beautiful in its elegant simplicity but
there's a trillion moving parts so here's what my suggestion to you is.
Forget about the age difference, forget about it
instead learn how to be married. Now if your marriage isn't falling apart and in
many cases people are like, "Wait, things aren't working well. We got to do
something," but the marriage isn't falling apart that's really good.
In those cases, either of my two books are great templates for what a marriage
is supposed to look like and there's chapters on all of these parts that are
critical --you learn so much. If your marriage is falling apart then you might
need to do something a little more radical and for that we have courses
that will show you how to train your mind so that you could become you, get
your emotions under control, get your habits under control. So look, these are
not sales pitches. The people who will respond to you because we have
counselors and you could write to our counselors, it's free of charge. They are
not directed to sell you something. In fact, they're not rewarded for selling
you anything. They're there to help you so you can write to one of the
counselors and you'll get lots of answers but we want to help you with
your marriage but get rid of this notion of age. It's not a factor. All right
hopefully, you like this hopefully you like me and you'll subscribe and learn
so much more about your marriage and you can like this. you can share this. you
could comment YouTube is so cool. Blessings to you, blessings to your
spouse, and blessings to your family. Thank you!