Marriage—your marriage—can be a source of lasting joy unlike anything else that life offers, an experience of happiness available nowhere else, in no other way. Even in this age of pre-nuptial agreements, marriage is still more than a legal contract, more than a financial agreement, more than mere living arrangements.
By any definition of spirituality that you choose, marriage is the key spiritual experience of most humans, the context in which most of us discover and live out the values that are most important to a full human life: love, fidelity, generosity, and honesty. Marriage lifts us, more than any other experience, beyond our own self-interest.
This is why working for a long-lasting marriage is worth it.
We don’t get married to have a spiritual experience—it comes with the territory. We get married because we are in love. We choose not to go through life alone. We want another person in our life with whom we can share our thoughts, dreams, and aspirations—someone with whom we can share not just sorrows but a good laugh.
We want someone to have fun with.
In fact, all those decades ago, and much to the horror of our relatives, we got married to have fun together. (“Don’t they know marriage is a serious business?”) And we have stayed together because for the most part it’s still fun to be with each other.
What more could we wish you?
So have fun together. That’s the first piece of advice you’ll find in this book . . . but there are other secrets and ground rules that we have discovered over these many years which we hope will help you to be as happy as we have been. Read on.
From Fun? But We’re Married! by Lois Leiderman Davitz, PhD and Joel R. Davitz, PhD. Copyright (c) 1999 by SORIN BOOKS, an imprint of Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN, 1-800-282-1865. Used by permission.
