I need help, my marriage is falling apart. My name is Paul Friedman, I founded The
Marriage Foundation and I'd like to help you with that.
I've helped many marriages that have reached your point and even those that
have been much worse. I actually was in the divorce business
before I got into marriage healing and so because of my connections I used to
speak at Second Saturday which is a support group for women who are going
through a divorce. Now, we're talking how two decades ago but things don't change
much. By the time women are looking for
help with their marriage and they're still in the midst of a divorce and men
too -- we have to really take a look at starting fresh. And so, this is what I did
because the clients that I had when I was doing divorce mediation all came
from therapists and traditional marriage counseling, all of them, all of the
marriage counselors virtually all of them have very poor success rates.
The reason why and this is important for you to understand is they work on
symptoms. When you walk into a marriage counseling session, they'll ask you,
"Tell me what's up, what's wrong?" So they're starting with what's wrong and
then they analyze and they go, "Well, how was your childhood? What was your
relationship with your siblings, etc?" It wastes so much time. My philosophy on the
other hand and it's very different is that you cannot fix your falling apart
marriage by addressing the symptoms. You have to
go to the root causes and you can't get there from here. You can't take the
symptoms and go back to the root causes any more than you could take a broken
glass and put it back together. You need to in effect, recreate your marriage
starting now. You have to recognize that the reason your marriage is falling
apart is because you didn't contribute to it being an amazing marriage. It's
interesting because it's living, think of a plant. A plant doesn't just stay stable
it's either growing and producing beautiful blooms, more leaves getting
healthier all the time or it's going back. It's unstable for whatever reason
and it's deteriorating and it will eventually die. Marriage is the
same way. So with a plant using that analogy, if the leaves are starting to
turn brown or yellow, you don't fix the leaves one at a time. You go, "I wonder
what's wrong with the soil." The foundation that supports the life of the
plant is what you need to deal with and this is true with the marriage. My
advice is very simple. Stop, take a look at what your marriage is supposed to be
and start putting your attention there and you'll turn it around because it's
living so let's look at what it's supposed to be. Interestingly, it's the
same as when you first got married. Why did you get married? You got married to
be happy and you had an expectation for happiness
and you got married so that you would experience unconditional love. The kind
of love that only comes through voluntary expressions of love. Those are
the two guiding principles for The Marriage Foundation for all the work we
do to help marriages. It's very basic and then you use your freewill to make sure
those two things are happening. Well, you could start that right now and you could
start making it unfallen apart. You can do that. You have to stop the things that
you're doing wrong. Let's go back to the plant now. Let's say you have a plant
and you're over-fertilizing it. You got to stop over-fertilizing it or you're
putting it in the sun too much. You got to not put it in the sun so much. There's
things you have to stop doing and then there's things you have to do. You have
to make sure it's getting proper nutrients in the soil, proper water.
Marriage is the same. One of the biggest mistakes that people make
probably the biggest mistake is that people get married as if it were a
destination. Now if you get a new car, you get a new apartment, you buy a new shirt
or a new skirt. You recognize automatically that those things are
going to require maintenance. You have to wash, dry clean, clean, change the oil
whatever it is you get. Whatever it is you get there's maintenance involved but
people get married and you know what it is because we live in a world that
teaches how to maintain things on a material plane but we don't learn about
the spiritual. Love is spiritual. You're a soul, you're married to your soul mate
but you don't nurture that love. You have expectations that they're going to but
you don't and they are the same on the other side. They have expectations that
you're going to nurture the love, the romance, the friendship, all the
components of marriage but you don't for them so the marriage is falling apart.
You want to go and talk about how they're wrong all the time about this or
that, how they mistreat you or, and this works, the or works. You change you, don't
worry about them. Now it's very wonderful when both of you are on the same page
and you both want to work on the marriage. It's not an often time thing
that happens. Usually, it's one or the other and I'll tell you something. When
I've worked with people and one of the spouses dragged the other spouse in -- that
really doesn't work so if it's just you and let's assume it is because 80% of
the time that's the reality. You have the ability all alone to
completely turn your marriage around, to bring back the love, bring back the
harmony, bring back the friendship, the dynamic of connection. You have the
ability to do it. Now I hear all the time. Well, why should I?
If they're not into it, why should I be into it?
That's therapeutic nonsense. There's a bridge between two of you. Yeah, that's
how it's supposed to be. Let's call the bridge of love. Why not?
Well, let's say one of you is on one bank of a river and the others on the other.
You're not the same person and you want to build a physical bridge. One of you is
going to be more adept at doing so, the other may be lazy about it but you both
want to have that bridge but one's going they're being a little coy. Well, you know
I don't know if I really want to build a bridge but you want the bridge and you
know that once you build the bridge that's what you want is you want to
connect. You don't have to both work on the bridge. One side can work on it 100%
and then the other person will have a bridge to connect with you on. So, we're
all about at The Marriage Foundation, we're all about happiness and
unconditional love. We're all about the philosophy of you deserve it, you
have the right to it. You have the right to expect it and you need the tools to
create what you have the right to have. It doesn't come to you automatically. It's
not how things anything works in the world but when you know the simple steps
you need to take it works all the time. So if your marriage is falling apart
don't give up. Don't be discouraged. We hear all the time about marriage
counselors telling literally, I cannot believe when we get this we get it all
the time. My husband and I, or my wife and I are having difficulties but my
husband or my wife and it really it's both the same way is seeing a therapist
and they're saying, "Your marriage is over." And I'm going, "Oh my God!
What a crappy therapist." So don't buy into that. Your marriage may be falling
apart but like that plant, you can start again
and you can make it work. You can't -- don't try doing it on your own, maybe you can
maybe you can't. We learn in two ways, don't we? We either learn through
experience which really is trial and error or we learn vicariously, meaning
we've learned from another who has laid it out for us.
Do you want to go to a doctor who has only learned by their own experience or
do you want a doctor who has learned vicariously from all the experiences of
other doctors? So The Marriage Foundation, we've built up a body of knowledge. You
should draw from that so that you can have not just a fixed marriage, not just
one that's not falling apart but an amazing marriage. It's not just possible.
I've been doing this for 20 years, thousands of people. We see it all the time
very very compared to other solutions for marriages, unbelievable success rate
so much so that we guarantee our courses, unconditionally for 90 days because we
know that what we have put together works. Now, does that mean we're the only
ones who have something that works? No, but we know ours works so use someone's
process that you know works. Don't experiment at this point if it's falling
apart. Why would you experiment? Have the determination that you will have, not
that you want but you will have what you wanted when you first got married. Ever
increasing happiness every single day, you should be happier, ever
increasing love. Those are the blooms on the plant. You should be in a marriage
where you're walking on cloud nine, that you're singing in the rain, that you're
just loving life and you can't even believe it.
This is what I promote. I don't go along with waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I go along with expecting that you will have amazing but you need to know what
you have to do to have that. So don't be discouraged, be encouraged. Feel like, "Yeah,
I can do this," and I'm telling you, you can. We've seen marriages where the
couples already separated and it's able to come back together. We have a free
service at The Marriage Foundation, we're nonprofit organization. We have a free
service where you could write into our counselors. Now the truth is that they
will guide you either to the book, one of our books or to one of the courses but
they'll also tell you if you ask, what are the odds of my making this happen?
99% of the time you're going to get almost 100%
chance of having success if you follow their suggestion so you have nothing to
lose by doing that. You could write into the counselors. Again, it's a free
service. At least test the waters, look around. Listen to some of the other
videos that we've produced. Subscribe to the channel, look at the
articles, see what our philosophy is, see our approach -- it's very positive and it's
always successful.
That's what counts, isn't it? So like this video, share it with other people and
blessings to you, blessings to your spouse and blessings to your family and
don't give up. Now's not the time to give up
it's the time to turn your attention to recreating your marriage the way it's
supposed to be so that you could have unconditional love ever-increasing and
ever-increasing happiness. Okay, thank you. God bless!