Lessons for a happy marriage. My name is Paul Friedman, I founded The Marriage
Foundation and in fact around 2003 I wrote a book called Lessons for a Happy
Marriage but that's not what this video is about. I would like to help you get
back on track with your marriage and I want to give you a few lessons that will
get you there. A lot of people miss the point of what marriages -- they don't
understand it. It's kind of a weird ironic thing if you will because we all
get married for the same reason, believe it or not. We all get married for exactly
the same reason. What do you think that is? It's so that we could be happier
and what do we do when we're married. We don't do that which will make
ourselves and our partner happier so think of your marriage as a closed
container. I call it the sacred space of marriage and in this container, there's
this huge community of only two people just two of you and why can't you get
along famously. Well, one of the big problems is there's
a misunderstanding. A primary misunderstanding most people, believe it
or not, and it could include you. Most people get married thinking that is the
goal. Let's get married and then we'll be happy again
and that's sort of the attitude that misses the point of marriage. We don't
get married as a destination. We get married as the beginning of our
individual spiritual path. It's an individual path even though you're doing
it together but you're doing your end without interfering with your spouse's
and of the marriage. You don't collectively
get married individually you got married, and why do
I call it a spiritual path? I call it a spiritual path because love is a
spiritual thing. There are only two worlds you might say. One is the material
world which we perceive and operate with through our five senses but love, our
five senses are far below love so you might say that love is the guiding star.
It should be the guiding principle of your marriage, love for the purpose of
being happy. Remember, you got married to be happy and what produces happiness.
What produces happiness universally? I mean everybody wants a bigger bank
account. Everybody wants to drive a shiny car or get a new TV or a new phone.
Everyone gets happy when they have those material increases in their life but
those increases produce happiness like a blip, here today, gone tomorrow. Ask anyone
from a worker bee to a wealthy person. Ask them if they're happy with what they
have. Most people will say, "Well, if I just had a little bit more." And this is the
realm of materialism, "I need a little more. I need it a little better." And so it
becomes a pursuit of more and better. There is no place where someone feels
materially that they have made it, very rare. You hear about it but it's so rare.
On the other hand, if you speak to someone who is a spiritual aspirant and
don't worry I'm not getting you into some religion, but you speak with
who has put themselves on a spiritual path and I'm not talking about marriage
at the moment. Pretty quickly, they go, "I'm really happy. I feel contentment.
I feel peace." And ironically, you in your marriage are on a spiritual path but no
one bothered to tell you. No one bothered to explain to you how that works and
what are the benefits and how to tap into those benefits and that's what I
want to do for you. I want you to see it. There's a few principles that are
pretty important for you to get. Number one, the number one principle is
you got married in order to be happy -- very very important to keep that in mind
because when you lose sight of that reality, what are you working for
anymore? What are you working towards? What are you trying to achieve?
In anything in life that we do we need to have a vision of where we're going of
what we're doing. If you're building a house you slowly watch it go up. If
you're doing a drawing you slowly watch it take shape even if you're coloring in
a coloring book. You're becoming fulfilled as you move towards a goal.
The goal in marriage is to be happy and there's an unspoken unthought-of goal
that ties right with that and that is to be continuously more happy as the years
go on. Isn't this so? Isn't that why you got married? Let's stop here and take a
look at this. Of course, everyone says, "No, I got married
because I found my soulmate." He or she was the perfect person but I'm not talking
about that. I'm telling about why you got married at all. You got married in
order to be happy. Okay, that's principle number one, A and B.
A) I got married to be happy. B) I want that happiness to grow continuously
through the years so that's principle number one, parts A and B. Principle
number two is very important. It starts with a question, what makes you happy?
Again, is it the material stuff? No, you can
chase that. It's like a dog chasing its tail. You never catch it but what does
make you happy, what makes everybody -- every single human being unless they're
mentally deranged. Love will make anybody happy. We hear all these
anecdotal stories about people who are very wealthy, very successful in life but
they acknowledge they missed the point of life. They chased money, they chased
power, they chased all these material things and neglected the pursuit of the
one thing that they acknowledge in one form or another and that is love. Many of
them just see it as I didn't connect well with my children or I should have
done more for other people but we're all always talking about the same thing
which is love. We need love. Why? It's very critical question. We need love because
of what we are. We are souls and I'm not getting you again, I'm not getting you on
a religious trip. I'm not tripping out with God or Jesus or Moses or Mohammed
or anything like that. I'm merely stating a fact. You are a soul.
You are a soul, you have a mind, you have a body -- you're
a soul. You're a soul, and how do I know that? Well, I know that because I've
experienced it through meditation but we all can know that by asking ourselves
one question. Can you control your mind? Now, the truth is you can't control it to
the same degree that some others can and you can control it to a greater degree
than others can but you can't control your mind
so you're not your mind. This is where the whole psychology, Western psychology
gets confused so they've created all these things, the ego blah blah
blah because they're afraid if they say soul then it defies their atheism
because they don't know God, they can't prove God so there's no God. I'm not even
talking about God because there's a lot of discussion about what's
God. It doesn't matter. What matters is that there's this you. When I work with
atheists I always use the word consciousness, you're a consciousness.
What's a consciousness? You have this self-awareness. You are aware of your
self and yourself and let's just call you for what you are. You're a soul. You
can control your mind. You can control your body. What is the nature of yourself?
It's love. Where do you think the term soulmate comes from? It didn't come from
a card company. It's a real thing. You're a soul. You're married to your
soulmate but, do you behave like a soul or not? So, what is the not? Where
are the differences and this is important to realize. This is sort of you
might say one of the most important lessons for a happy marriage.
Now, you have a mind and you have a body and the body is composed of a trillion
cells. What do you know? Go back to your earliest biology classes
and what do you know about living things. What defines something, material thing as
living? It's not always self-awareness. It's rarely self-awareness in fact until
you're a human being you don't have self-awareness. No, a living thing is
going to survive, the drive to survive and the subordinate drive to survive is
the drive to procreate -- that's what defines life. It also defines the life of
your body which is an animal body which you as a soul are in competition with
the body for dominance over your mind. Now, I could put this into a religious
context. I could call these temptations, these are the temptations of the devil
and all of that stuff but let's keep it more simple. The body is striving to
survive and it has control over your mind until you do. And so, lesson number
one -- maybe a lot of lesson number ones is you want to align and
this is really cool. You want to align your actions. You want to align your
thoughts, your feelings -- those are actions. You want to align those with the nature
of your soul. It's so beautiful. The soul is nothing but
pure unadulterated love. If you want to put it into religious terms I don't mind.
God created man in His image and His image, God created he, him. I could even
say that in Hebrew for you. The point is, who did he create in his
image? Did he give you his nose, his ears, his skin color? No, we're talking about
you, the soul. What is the nature of God? Love. Let's just boil it down to simple
love. Now, you can include wisdom but isn't that love too? So you the soul are
pure love. If you align your actions with your soul and you infuse those actions
into your marriage, how could you miss? This is a very positive approach to
marriage that I'm bringing up here. We don't go after what did you do wrong.
What did she do wrong? What did he do wrong? Who cares? Let's make that the past.
Let's start fresh. Let's pretend you're just getting married. How are you going to
behave? All right. I can tell because we're running into -- we
need more time so let's do a part two on this. Shall we? Okay, so in the meantime
like this and then go to part two. Okay. God bless you!