Designing the Marriage You Want

Designing the Marriage You Want

Our marriage, is 100% under our control. We don't control everything that happens to us, but we do fully control how we respond to it and whether it draws us closer to one another or drives us apart.

The faster couples understand the truth of the previous paragraph, the sooner they will begin to feel empowered in their relationship rather than feeling helpless.

Most couples never understand two important facts about marriage:

1. Every marriage has a design.

2. They are the designers.

Unaware of these two truths, most couples end up with a relationship far more influenced by culture, circumstances, and chance than desire and design.

There is a quote from engineering which is relevant to marriage:

It’s true in engineering and it’s true in marriage. Every marriage is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. This is why a couple comes into counseling assuming their relationship is either a complete mystery or beyond repair, while the counselor likely feels like the couple before them is nearly identical to every other couple they have seen that day.

What feels mysterious to us is very predictable to those who are trained to understand relationships.

You aren’t a mystery.

What you are experiencing in your marriage is understandable, predictable, and the only result to be expected from the current design of your relationship.

This is good news. If you like the results you are getting, keep doing what you are doing. But if some of the results in your relationship are not what you desire, change the design.

You aren’t stuck. You aren’t hopeless. This isn’t just how it has to be.

Change is possible. And the only two people who control the outcomes are the very ones in the marriage.

Influence vs. Agency

Unfortunately, individuals do not fully control the relationship. If this were the case, we would only need one engaged spouse to create a successful marriage. Sadly, that’s not the case. No matter how much one spouse cares, tries, and begs for success, they alone cannot guarantee a positive outcome.

Yet individuals are not helpless.

Every husband or wife, has the ability to influence their marriage. While it’s never the full control we desire, it is more power than many understand they have. As individuals we should fully use our power of influence in hopes of steering our marriage toward growth.

While individually we lack the control we desire, together we have complete ownership of our relationship. Every couple has full agency over their marriage. We are in charge.

This is tremendously good news. It means that no outside force has power over us unless we choose to give them that control. It eliminates any limit upon our growth or any hindrance to our success. We are the ones responsible.

Sadly, many couples never take advantage of that agency. Instead, they allow something else to determine their relationship.

What Shapes Most Marriages

Rather than design, most relationships are determined by drift. Instead of choosing the outcomes we desire, we simply allow our circumstances or culture or chance to choose our direction.

Of course, as I wrote in Friends, Partners & Lovers, we never drift into good things. People don’t drift into good shape or strong character or more compassion. Those things happen through intentional formation. In the same way, couples do not drift into strong trust, deep respect, or meaningful vunerability.

So while we fully control the outcomes of our relationships, many fail to take advantage of that control and instead leave to fate what happens to their love. The result is that 40% of most couples divorce. They don’t want that outcome, but they drift into it.

Thankfully, that doesn't have to be us.

A Simple Three Step Process

Since we have full control over the outcomes we experience, couples should continually be designing (and redesigning) the relationship they want. When we experience results we don’t like, we should investigate what we have designed that would lead to those results. Then we can make intentional changes in order to have better outcomes.

To help couples design the marriage they want, I’ve created a simple three step process. It won’t give you every answer. The answers are on you. But it will guide you through a process where you can begin to take concrete steps to create the marriage you want.

Remember, every marriage is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you don’t like your results, change your design.

Over the next three weeks, I will walk you through the process to Design the Marriage You Want. It’s available to Premium Subscribers. Get the free 7 Day trial to see Step 1 in Designing the Marriage You Want.

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