Whose fault is the marriage problem? My name is Paul Friedman. I founded The
Marriage Foundation and I have to tell you
that I hate this question because it literally defines
how marriages are approached. When there's difficulties in a marriage
how they're approached by traditional marriage counselors and I
can't stand it because it's neither of your fault.
Now that's not universally correct obviously, if for instance
one of you is a pedophile or one of you is gay and you got married without
telling the other or there was some history that
really will impact the marriage and you fail to say
something maybe an acute mental illness or something.
Okay. In those cases, it is the fault of the individual who
held back information. But in
most cases, well over 90% of the cases
you can't really put the blame on either of you
and I'm going to explain to you why. This is a really simple explanation
and I'm going to prove to you that the explanation I'm going to give you
is the correct one. Here's an umbrella problem, a universal problem
that really is neither of your fault. The problem is in our society,
no one has any idea of what marriage is or
how to achieve the benefits so there's two of you who want to learn how to swim.
You both jump into the pool and you're thrashing
about. You don't know how to swim it's amazing
that anyone survives. Let's begin, now the
proof. Okay, so the answer is neither of you
knew how to be married. Now here's my proof.
Why did you get married? Take a second. I'm going to tell you why. I'm not here
to torture you. I'm here to help you but you didn't know why not really
when you got married. Usually, when I ask people why did you get married? The
default answer is, I fell in love with this other person. They
were blah blah blah. The other default answers are wanted to
have children, wanted to be with my soul mate. Remember
this soul mate, wanted to have a companion,
didn't want to get old by myself. I wanted family etcetera etcetera
etcetera. Those are valid answers
but those are sub answers. The big answer is obvious. You want it to be
happier that's number one. There's two. Number one -- you wanted to be
happier and so you got happier and it was
probably subconscious. You probably never even thought, "Oh, I'm
getting married because I want to be happier."
Because if that was in front of you it would have been like you're standing
in front of a small mountain. You go, "I want to climb
to the top."
It's a destination. It's clear-cut and so you would know what you needed to
know to get to the top.
But because you never said to yourself or each other, "I'm getting married in
order to be happier.' There was no plan.
You just got married. The second
more important but it's the second reason for getting married
is you want to experience unconditional love.
Who doesn't? Why do you? And what happens in our world of western
psychology is they've taken love away.
They talk about it as if it's only an emotion
and love is not just an emotion. Sure. It expresses itself emotionally
but it's not an emotion. It is literally your
essence. Remember when I said soulmate a few minutes ago,
you wanted to marry your soul mate that makes you a soul and it makes them
a soul. You are a soul. You have a mind
but you're not the mind. You have a body. You're not a body. You have those
and you use them as instruments but that's not what you are. What you
want to do in your marriage is connect on a very
deep level, the level of the soul and you use the instrumentality
of your body and your mind in order to do so.
But no one ever told you that so you jumped into marriage
imagining it'll somehow work. I don't even know why people imagine it'll work
anymore. The divorce rate is over 50% and
how many people beyond that 50% do you think are
happy. I don't know that there's any
statistics that you could rely on but I bet you most are unhappy even though
they don't get a divorce. And now, you're probably heading for a
divorce and you're going, "Whose fault is it?"
Whose fault is it?" When you should be going, how come there's only
two of us? We have this problem that we're not happy. We're not
experiencing unconditional love. How come the two of us can't solve this?
The reason why -- it's not your fault. The reason why is because this
information is not at our fingertips in society
and worse, the information about marriage that is out there is
misinformation. It misguides you. You go to a
psychotherapist for your marriage problems which I
really recommend against doing and they always invariably ask, how's
your sex life? Well, I don't care how your sex life is.
I've healed thousands of marriages through The Marriage Foundation using
our courses. We don't care about the sex life. Sex
is a small component. Believe it or not, it's a small component because what do
you want. You want happiness. You want to
experience love. Now you should
learn how to use sex in order to experience
love. It's definitely a great vehicle for it for creating the connection
because that's what you want is that connection.
It's not your fault. It's not your spouse's fault
but you got to shift your thinking. You got to get into the place of,
okay, here we are. It isn't working. Put aside the false stuff. "Our marriage
is not working. We're moving towards divorce."
Admit it. You're moving towards divorce and
worse than that, the trend is picking up momentum.
That's what happens so you're moving towards a divorce
and you may say, "Oh no, we're not really talking about divorce.
It's just this is not working and that is not working."
Bull ticky! You are moving towards divorce
because you got to be moving in one direction or the other.
You're either moving towards happiness and unconditional love and
floating or you going in the other direction?
There's no middle ground here and it can't just be.
"Well, we just have this one little problem." No, it can't be that way
because if you were really moving in the right direction that one little problem
would be like a fly on the windshield. It just
wouldn't matter. You wouldn't be reviewing videos
and seeking help so get realistic about this. You're moving
towards divorce. There's just two of you. I call it the sacred space of marriage
where you're not supposed to let anyone else in.
It's just your marriage. Well, if you know, "Wait, we want happiness.
We want to experience unconditional love." Unfortunately, because those are truisms
for sure. You have to acknowledge that but they're
truisms like in the ten commandments "Thou shalt
have no other God before me." Got it! What do you do with it?
There's so much more to learn. Now I used to be a divorce mediator and
I shifted my practice over 20 years ago because I realized
I can help people by developing specific principles. I did my research. I
studied this thing like crazy and some of it was really
difficult to get it. For instance, why do people get married?
You would think it would be an easy answer but as I was asking people,
why do you get married? I always got these mundane responses.
I had to look at it differently and there's a lot
of things that go into marriage. There's three main parts of marriage.
Let me give you a hint. Now I'm giving you all this
but I'm telling you right now. You should probably get the courses.
One is for men and one is for women and the first thing you have to address.
Well, you got to understand that there's three principal parts to a
marriage. One is you. One is your spouse who's a
different gender and the other is marriage itself.
To be really successful in marriage, you need to have
a deep and fairly complete understanding of each of those and you don't know
yourself. You don't know yourself because you need
to learn enough about yourself to understand
how the biology of your gender affects your mind, how the drive to survive
is different for a man and different for a woman
from a biological perspective. You have to understand
how the mind operates. In our courses very first thing we discuss, what we
learn. Now I started teaching therapists,
was it 2010, I think it was or 2011. And my first batch of therapists and
they were hand selected
were the best of the best in San Diego County -- that's where we started out.
And the first thing I did was I started teaching them about the mind and I
thought easy peasy. How could a psychologist not
know about the mind? Duh, they didn't. I don't know
what they knew. They learned things that were incorrect like
Maslow's theory on... I can't remember the term right now but
requirements that we have and Maslow had the right idea but he was
all wrong. He didn't put it together correctly so
they have all this disinformation. It took them not weeks but months
before they really understood the mind and I created this cool technique called
the SEW technique. Stop, Evaluate and act with Wisdom so you can
control the mind. It opened up vistas to them. It changed
their marriages. All of them were married and it changed
their marriages. Psychologists, the best of the best
because they don't know. Our society is lacking, why?
There's some reasons. I don't want to get into it too much because it's kind of
not what you came to this video for but simply
put because western psychology cannot acknowledge the spiritual
other than to call it abstract thinking so they miss the whole point of marriage
because marriage is based on love. What could be more spiritual than love?
It is the most tangible, intangible there is. It's totally intangible.
You can't touch it. See it, feel it, smell it, taste it.
But man, how could you deny its existence? It's the one thing that you feel not as
an emotion but you feel it here -- it's powerful
so you can't deny its existence and you especially
can't overlook it as being a critical component in your marriage and that's
the marriage so there's a lot to know. You should not
be looking at whose fault the marriage problems are
now falling on whose shoulders.
You should be saying, how do we get into the place that Paul's talking about?
This place of unbelievable feelings of love, harmony,
joy which is happiness. How do we achieve that?
Okay. Let's forget it. Let's forget the past. let's forget blaming.
How do we go forward? How do you go forward? You got to have
the right information. You can't ignore this. You got to have the
right information so I've already shared with you where
that information lies. I also wrote two books but
I could tell you right now. If you're asking this question
chances are that you're moving towards divorce
too rapidly and you need to take the courses.
If not, if you're just having some difficulties the books will be fine. Get
one of them and read it to each other at night
before you go to bed. I promise you. You'll be blown away. It'll
open your eyes. You deserve to have an amazing
marriage that is literally better every single day of your life
to where you're so in love. It's better than when you were dating --
that's what you're supposed to have.
All right. Hopefully, this was helpful for you.
I really hope you're going to get out of this blaming thing
and get into the redoing your marriage thing.
And please like this video, leave a comment if you want. Share it if you want
and you can subscribe to other videos. I do a lot of these and we really want
to be helpful. All right. Blessings to you! Blessings to
your spouse! It's not their fault. It's not your fault and blessings to
your family. And thank you for spending time with me,
i really appreciate that. I really do. I enjoy helping people with their
marriages. God bless you! Take care!