Lessons for a happy marriage part three and my name is Paul Friedman. I founded
The Marriage Foundation and you could just watch this video if you don't want
to go back to parts 1 and 2, but I think you would find them very interesting.
The Lessons for a Happy Marriage is a book that I wrote but this is not what
the book is. I wrote the book a long time ago and it was when I had first started
helping couples with their marriages but after I had already had enough
experience to know that what I was sharing was realistic and helpful.
In the last two videos in the first one, we talked about the fact that you're a
soul that your marriage is a spiritual path because you're a soul, it's an
individual spiritual path where you learn how to align your mind which is a
possession with your soul so that you could express love for the purpose of
happiness. We get married to be happy and this is a theme I go over all the time.
We want to be happy as a result of being married and we want that happiness to be
ever-expanding, ever growing as we go through the years. Isn't it so? And in the
second video on this topic, I talked about the killers of marriage because
it's very difficult to make humongous mistakes and imagine that the good
things that you do are going to offset those mistakes. Occasionally,
we'll get an email from someone because The Marriage Foundation, you could write
in and get help from counselors -- it's free, free service and people will say
something like, "I cheated on my wife but in all other
areas I'm a great husband." What? Are you kidding me? It doesn't work that way or
we hear from women and they go, "I don't understand, I do everything for my
husband. I cook, I clean, I watch the kids, I have sex with him 17 times a year
and I think he's on dating sites." Well, maybe it didn't do everything, maybe
you're missing certain things and you're unaware of it.
Those missing things are the positive things that you can do in your marriage
and this is really important. I mean this is going to be one of the most important
things you'll ever hear from me. You cannot just do the things you think you
should do in order to please your spouse. It won't work. If I told you, do this, do
this, do that works every time I would be lying to you
because one of the great elements in a happy marriage is sincerity. If you're
not sincere but your behavior is like way off the charts
positive. Well, if you're the husband your wife has intuition she's going to see
through you like you're a piece of glass. And if you're a wife and you're doing
all these things he's not going to feel it because men marry women for true
unconditional love and behaving in a particular way instead of from your
heart doesn't cut it. I'm going to tell you what you actually
need to do rather than giving you a list of things to do. In the first
couple, I had I started with a list of things to do and a list of things to not
do and we all thought it was going well. I wasn't charging them for this. We
were all learning and it didn't work. They came back to me. Well, the husband
did and he said, "Paul this stuff is amazing. It's like math of course
but I can't I run into these things that I know I shouldn't do and I do them
anyway, and I say things I shouldn't say even though it's right there in black
and white that I shouldn't say it." And his biggest issue was anger and
I thought, "Oh, my God. This is going to be hard." Why was it going to be hard? Because in
the 90s, I wanted to deal with my anger and for years all I could do was stuff
it which was not enough. It's like anger management. I developed my own anger.
I looked at anger management courses, I couldn't do it. But now, I had no
incentive, I really wanted these guys to succeed so I took a look at anger and I
started getting deeper on it doing a little bit of research. One of the things
that I found was very interesting and that is that anger is the result of
forted desires so I thought, "Okay, you got a deal with your desires." But then I
thought, "Wait a minute. That may be true but anger is more visceral." It's a
deeper its reactionary and I started looking at it and
I recognize something that blew my mind. Anger is like the first spark from the
physiological drive to survive that gets men set to attack, to defend aggressively.
Puts a man into action. Women differently similar but not quite the same but men
with anger, "Wow" and I started to have realizations of
how this sucker anger suckered us. Why? Because we saw things through twisted
vision, we took things that were happening to us as attacks instead of
just as things that were happening. It was a flaw in our perception and
that's where I began, I'm going to call him John, I said, "John, before you let
the anger have total control over you stop and take a look at this. Evaluate
and then with a different perspective because you'll see that you weren't
being attacked. Your life is not in danger. You can act with wisdom." And that
was the birth of a technique that I created called the SEW technique. Stop
evaluate and act with wisdom which was a marvelous technique.
I used it and my anger was conquered so the first step
way more important than the do's and the don'ts is learning how to control your
mind and it's got a dual purpose. The first purpose is to stop the insanity
and you reach a point when you start looking at the internal stuff that's
going on in your head, the reactionary things, the habitual
reactions. You realize, I'm insane and you stop and you're able to control it but
the next thing is beautiful. You start to learn how to bring your love into your
mind infusing your mind with love and I show you how to do with leverage, how to
move it over and pretty soon you're behaving in a way that is not contrived.
It's not manipulative. You're becoming the better you, the you that your spouse
fell in love within the first place and then the magic happens -- it's so beautiful.
Now, I've taught a number of counselors, my methods.
I had one counselor who attended my first group class of counselors and his
name happened to be Paul too and he passed away. But when he told me about
his perspective I said, "Paul, you don't need The Marriage Foundation." And he said
"I know but I want to be part of this. This is the first organized reality in
marriage counseling that I've ever seen and he'd been a counselor for
35 to 40 years. The guy was awesome. Now, he said everything is about education and I
agree with that but it's a high level of education. Not high like you can't do it
high. High like it's a very spiritual beautiful thing that you learn because
your marriage is an amazingly beautiful thing when you know how to operate it.
You got to learn how to operate your marriage. Just because you have a license to
get married it's not like a driver's license where you have to take a test
and you got to prove your skills. Marriage license, you just gotta have $35.
You don't know how to be married. Therapists don't know how to be married.
They have the worst divorce rate of any of us and it's so simple. Now, there's a
lot of moving parts but its simplicity and it's based on very deep, very lofty
ideals of love. Love is everything in your marriage but you're not infusing
it into your marriage. You're not giving your love to your spouse unconditionally
and when you do it's tainted with desires, expectations, anger, all these
bizarre things that don't belong in your marriage.
All right. I think I'm going to close and ask you to subscribe, ask you to share
this, like it, leave a comment if you will and I wish you the greatest success in
your marriage. If we can help you, write into our counselors -- it's free. Blessings to
you, blessings to your spouse, blessings to your family.
God bless you!