It's a reasonable question, why get married when most marriages end in divorce? And if you came to
this video believing that this was true, you're in the right place, because in the next few minutes,
I'm going to drop some knowledge on you and show you that, A, most marriages don't end in divorce.
And B, you actually do want to get married even if you don't think you do, seriously.
Stick around if you have a block around marriage but want to be loved for the rest of your life.
I'm Evan Marc Katz, dating coach for smart, strong, successful women and your personal trainer
for love. Welcome to the Love U podcast. Keep listening to learn why there are good marriages
and how you could have one, too. When we're done, I'll let you know how you could apply
to Love U to create a passionate relationship that makes you feel safe, heard, and understood.
True story, just happened this week. I got a new client; a new woman enrolled in Love U. Her
name is Melanie. She's forty-four. She's fresh out of a break up with a long-term boyfriend
and she is reeling from the pain. And so, we get on the phone and I do my thing and I ask
her to tell me her story. And her dream, and this is true, like what she wants, what would
a win look like for her when she signs up for coaching? Her dream, unlike most of my clients,
is not to be married. So, curious. I ask Melanie “why?” Turns out her parents had a
terrible marriage and quite reasonably, Melanie associated marriage with a source of
pain and a source of conflict as opposed to what I associate marriage with, which is fun and comfort.
So, Melanie, upon watching her parents massacre each other, not literally, figuratively, for many
years as a child and still as an adult, they never got divorced. They've been together for sixty
years, she's gotten to witness this entire thing and she made a vow when she was younger that she
would never be married or be like her parents. However, Melanie also wanted to have a lifelong
relationship that was essentially no different than a marriage. I asked Melanie if she saw a
contradiction, she did not. By declaring herself against marriage and exclusively dating men who
also didn't want marriage, quite possibly because they too have negative childhood associations with
it, Melanie's creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. She's only dating men who are afraid of the word
marriage and don't want long-term commitment and simultaneously wondering why it's so hard
to find a man who wants to commit. That does not add up. So, Melanie's trying to thread the needle
to find a guy who is against marriage but would make for a great husband theoretically.
I'm no psychologist, but she's been to therapy. She's been through this whole thing.
We have this short conversation and I introduced this idea to her
and I'm introducing this to you here as well. I told her that she might want to
just think about it, who would make a better long-term partner in theory?
Men who do want to marry or men who make it clear that they don't want to marry?
Who would make for a better long-term relationship partner? You know the answer to that question. So
Melanie has been fishing intentionally in the wrong dating pool for her entire life
and didn't realize it until we had a free one-hour strategy session before she enrolled in Love U.
I know I'm pushing back pretty hard, especially if you are in the anti-marriage camp.
I want to honor the fact that there's a, as I say, there's a million ways of doing things if
you don't want to get married. I'm not your boss. I'm just a guy with an opinion and an
informed opinion. But I'm not your boss. You can do whatever you want. You can
join Love U and not get married. But I do want to challenge your deep-seated belief
the same way that I challenge Melanie’s. If I were God, if I were omniscient, omnipotent, and I
were to send you a man who I promised because I'm God would make you happy and be there for you in
sickness and in health, to death do you part and this man wanted to be your husband, I can promise
you that the next 30, 40 years would be a peach, you'd say no to that because it involves marriage?
Framed that way, I've done this a bunch of times, virtually no woman is going to say no to
that proposition. Which makes me ask the question again, are you sure you don't want to get married?
Or is it, as I suspect, that you don't want your parents’ marriage or that you don't want your
first marriage or your friend's marriage? It’s not marriage that you are against, it’s bad
marriage that you're against. My point is there's nothing wrong with marriage as an institution.
Studies show happily married people are the happiest people on earth.
But that doesn't make the marriage itself a panacea. Getting married doesn't
ensure your happiness. Marrying the right person ensures your happiness.
Here's the statistics to go with this speech here: thirty-five to forty percent of marriages
end in divorce. Not almost all of them. Not most of them, 35 to 40 percent. But even that
number is skewed because the divorce rate among people who marry before the age of twenty-five
is seventy five percent. It highly skews the 40 percent divorce rate because it's
affected by the people who got married too young and ended up splitting up.
If you're a college educated woman over the age of 30 who's getting married for the first time,
your divorce rate is closer to 20 percent. And
stay married, you have an 80 percent chance of doing it, but then that begs the question,
what about those unhappily married people, the people who stay together forever
but never divorce? Doesn't that affect things? Absolutely. It's a totally fair point.
I once read and I repeat this, even though it doesn't sound good. Two thirds of marriages
might be considered unhappy. And that's not really a surprise to me, since most people
don't ask these questions and really think about what it takes to build a happy, compatible
marriage before they get engaged. They get married at the peak of their excitement and then they
spend the rest of their life fitting a square peg in a round hole, forcing their foot into the shoe,
metaphorically. Hanging on for dear life because they made a commitment and they have kids. So
that's not what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to get this right and get this right once.
Long story short, if you're afraid of marriage and have negative associations with it, don't be.
The reason you don't see many Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, 40 years, never married couples,
it's because there aren't many of them. The most commitment-oriented men and the best partners tend
to want to get married. So instead of giving up on marriage as a flawed and failed institution,
remember, there are millions of happily married people
who can justify why you should hold out for the ultimate in commitment
instead of continuing to tell yourself this lie that you don't want to be married. I got you.
My name is Evan Marc Katz, thank you for tuning in to the Love U
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look for the link below. Apply for coaching with me in Love U. Talk to you soon.