Staying together for the kids -- pros and cons. My name is Paul Friedman.
I founded The Marriage Foundation and I'd like to share something with you
right off the bat. And that is that, one -- you're still hopeful
that you can hold the marriage together and that's why you're
looking for, what is basically an excuse to stay together
and that is for the sake of the kids as it turns out
for the sake of the kids is huge. Because virtually, every study done since
the 50s shows decisively, definitively
that when parents get a divorce the kids are tremendously
impacted. Now there are always some minor
differences but for the most part, huge part the kids will not be the
same. And the reason why they won't be the same
is pretty logical if you think about it. Children come into the world 100%
with no capacity to take care of themselves.
None, zero. 100% reliance on the team
which is their mother and father. And I know
that therapists these days say, "Well, it just means separate homes and
it's inconvenient and it's not as good for the kids but..."
Imagine you
and I use this illustration all the time because it's a great one. But a
friend of mine brought it to my attention
many years ago when I was a divorce mediator
and a judge brought it to his attention. He was another divorce mediator
and the judge said, "Imagine going to a planet
with two bodyguards who turn on each other."
And this is the case for the kids, they're a hundred percent dependent on
you -- both. You split up, their whole world falls
apart. It's just two of you
and the battle that you have during a divorce
everyone says, "No, no. We're not going to go through that battle,"
but you do. You end up having tremendous pain,
tremendous anxiety and you know what, the kids aren't the only ones impacted
by your getting a divorce so are you, and so is your spouse.
It's huge. Think about it that you got married
it was the biggest decision of your life. And it was the wrong decision?
So my approach to you in this video is that
the cons are, you can't even quantify them how many negatives there
are. The positives there's so few. I can't
think of one positive other than
there aren't any. There's no positives for the kids.
So what you're really asking is, and I know this is what you meant
is how can I stay together in this marriage? What can we possibly do
to save this marriage? Isn't that the question you want to ask? And for
that and I've done a lot of research on this,
a lot of studying and I had to avoid all of western
psychology's ideas because they don't work.
And I started to discover principles of marriage that
are essential to know and I begin with the principle of
why did you get married in the first place.
And the principle basically is that the reason why you do
something determines how you behave in the process of doing that thing.
You get a boat and you want to go out on the lake
and you want to go to the other side. You got a boat to convey to the other
side.
What do you do? You don't get in the boat without
any training whatsoever but if you do, what's going to happen? You'll pick up the
oars and you'll go crazy. But
if you got trained in how to row a boat or if it's a small sailboat how to sail
a boat, you might struggle a little but because
you know that you want to get to the other side
and you've learned at least some of the basics of boating.
You will get to the other side and by the time you do you'll probably have a
good time of it but you didn't do any of that for
marriage. In fact, you didn't even come up with
why you're getting married. No one does. When I asked people
who would come to me back in the early days, why did you get married?
The best answers that I got were not really answers.
They were answers like I wanted to have kids.
I wanted to be with someone in my old age.
I wanted to be with my soul mate. Okay, but that's a very sort of
not proactive. So I had to discover why people got married.
Don't laugh when I tell you, why you got married?
And by now, you're thinking already why did I get married?
You got married to be happier. Of course that's why people get married.
They don't get married so they could have a wedding day.
They get married, you got married to be happier.
And I'm going to add to that, I'm going to say that you got married
to be happier every single day of your lives.
Didn't you or did you get married so
just to have children? I don't think so. The other reason for getting married
and all this is going back to the pros and cons
because the biggest biggest thing that you should consider is
how do we make our marriage work again or maybe for the first time.
So, you got married to be happier but you also got married for something that
I don't know why it seems to escape us, but we get married so that we could
experience unconditional love. Now, you may say, "Well, love is good enough."
But why settle? You got married to experience
unconditional love because that's the kind that you felt
like during that moment. Everyone has this
experience at a wedding when you just everyone feels this,
"Whoa!" Isn't it true, your heart just bursts open. It's so
tangible. You can't see it, touch it, smell it, taste it so it's not a
physiological tangible. It's a tangible of the soul.
You got married to experience unconditional love
and it's well within your reach even now. So the thing to do is shift
right now, just shift your thinking. And instead of looking for excuses
to stay together, reasons to stay together
how about this. How about learning how to be married
so you can have that which you originally
wanted. Now I've written a couple of books that
really spell out marriage
and man, we get some amazing feedback from people about this.
I got
so many emails that our counselors send up to me
from people whose lives have been changed.
You can write into our counselors if you need some
extra guidance -- it's a free service at The Marriage Foundation
but we've had people who have been married for 10, 20 ,30,
40, 50 years. Recently, we got an email from a reverend
who said, "I came across your material. I want to be a counselor.
I've never had this experience with my wife before
and I've been married," for I don't remember, it was close to 50 years
and it was a pastor. And so, relying on fundamental principles
to manage your marriage correctly. There's nothing wrong with that idea
because it will help you to achieve the reason you got married.
You got to know how. You got to know how marriage works.
You got to know how you work. You got to know how your spouse works.
You have to know these things in order to have a successful marriage.
You've got the power. You've got the power.
We're not taught this stuff as children because there's this running away from
religion and it turns into running away from all things
spiritual
ignoring the fact that we are spiritual beings. We're souls
who have a body and have a mind. And again, I'm not trying to be religious
it's just the reality. The proof of that is you experience love.
I know the psychologists come up with these preposterous
chemical things but they're putting the
cart before the horse. They're saying it's the chemical thing
that causes the experience of love but it's the
other way around. The experience of love is what releases
the chemicals into the body because the soul predominates.
Ao as a soul, you're literally driven to evolve into
a loving state of consciousness and there's no better vehicle
than marriage to learn how to do that. But if you don't learn how to learn how
you'll be chasing your tail.
So if you're already at this place where you're defining whether you
get a divorce or not, you've gone very far downhill
and it's time to stop the momentum and it's not enough now unfortunately,
just to learn these things. Now you need to have someone or
something and we produce courses, one for men and
one for women, for people who are
in free fall to bring you back and get you on the right path of
marriage. And this is not to save your marriage,
you can do that. You can plow through for the sake of your kids. You can do
that and you want to do that because of who
you are. But I say, don't do that instead work on
the marriage and it's not so hard when you know how.
Get your marriage working and you'll have it all.
Your kids will be safe, secure. They'll turn into wonderful adults
and you and your spouse will be on cloud nine from the joys of marriage.
So the course for men, if you're a man. The
course for women if you're the wife. Course for both of
you if you're both on the same page.
But go there, go there.
You deserve it. Don't become a statistic. Don't become depressed and demoralized
because you failed. Instead learn, get some help
and turn your marriage into what it was meant to be
right from the beginning.
It makes me very happy when we receive emails and we've been doing this for almost
20 years, when we receive emails from people who
whose lives have changed so much. One of my first clients
I'm going to call her Joy, I invented that name.
I used to get a card from her every six months and her husband
came to me two years after she did but they turned their marriage around. And I
met her at Second Saturday support group
for divorce, I used to speak at those and she was
so grateful and still is. I recently got another
letter from her, three or four page letter
and she and her husband are doing great still.
And most importantly, they do better every day which is what it's all about.
You have no idea. Do you remember when you first
fell in love and you couldn't wait to see each other?
That feeling is supposed to get stronger, supposed to be hard to be apart from one
another.
You're supposed to have that and in our world they call that romantic,
I call it realistic. You deserve it. You can have it.
You should have it. Go for it I'm going to leave you with those
thoughts. The last word on this pros and cons for
the children is there's no pros. There's no pros.
Of course in the event of someone being
incredibly abusive
there might be some pro but those cases are much more rare
than you have been led to believe. The news is all about
exploiting the weird so that we think it's the normal.
I'm sure in your case it's not like that and so don't go there.
Instead go to make your marriage what it's meant to be. Share this video.
Subscribe to the channel so you get more of them
and have a positive view of what is possible.
I mentioned we're souls. Think about what that means.
We're these infinite beings and we only limit ourselves.
But when you learn how to love unconditionally then you're living
in that space that you are meant to live in
and it's wonderful. All right. God bless! Thank you for spending time
with me and take care.