Enduring, Healthy, and Stable Marriage Relationships

By Richard K. Harder, Contributing Author

When I was seventeen years old, my parents divorced. At that time, high school baseball and longboard surfing were my favorite recreational pastimes, which instantly became needed therapy for a now emotionally distraught teenager without parents in an intact marriage relationship.

The divorce of my parents left me and my three siblings confused about our futures and uncertain about such things as post high school education, marriage, and family relationships.

Thanks to a caring father-figure baseball coach, an empathetic high school counselor, and my best friend and scholar/athlete, I was encouraged to further my education by going to college. My older brother joined the military, and my younger sister married soon after high school graduation.

My mother became a single parent, underemployed and nearing financial ruin. Soon thereafter, my father was killed in an auto accident along with another adult and two children who were in the vehicle.

So much for the traditional civil marriage vow and mantra: “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health until death do us part.”

Some sources indicate that most stable marriage relationships protect children from mental, physical, educational, and emotional problems. Further research on marriage reveals that children who are raised by their married biological parents enjoy better physical, cognitive, and emotional outcomes on average than children who are raised in other circumstances.

Considering this personal family scenario just outlined, one could say that my wife and I are statistical outliers who, like many married couples, have been in a stable, healthy marriage relationship for over fifty years.

Couples in a stable, healthy marriage relationship can expect and enjoy levels of emotional as well as physical and spiritual fulfillment that can be experienced in no other way.

Such healthy marriage relationships also include but are not limited to disagreement, disappointment, unmet expectations, arguments fueled by negative emotion, open expressions of anger, and navigating the complexities related to sexual intimacy. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I am not a marriage counselor (though I have been asked by some if I am) nor am I a relationship therapist. Simply put, I, like so many other committed individuals, decided a long time ago to get married and to stay married despite the inevitable disappointments and pitfalls associated with close loving relationships. Why? For the benefit of my posterity and to further the quality of life for the one whom I have always loved. There is no magic here, simply a firm commitment to perseverance and hard work in the most important of all relationships.

Here are some practical bottom-line tips for maintaining an enduring, healthy, and stable marriage relationship:

• Always put your marriage partner first and never react on negative emotion. \

• Seek to understand and respect differences in physical intimacy and always maintain or enhance your spouse’s self-esteem.

• Never go to bed mad at each other.

• Allow deity to prevail in your marriage relationship.

• If you must, argue in private, preferably in a sound-proof room so the children cannot hear you.

• Avoid consumer credit debt. It is the ruin of too many otherwise stable marriages.

• Do something alone together like you did when you were courting each other. It does not have to be expensive.

• Be kind to one another.

Add these relationship tips to what you are already doing so well to stabilize your enduring, healthy, and stable marriage and continue looking forward to celebrating each year’s wedding anniversary.

Be well.

About the Author

Richard K. Harder is founder and owner of Lead Smart Consulting LLC (formerly Richard Harder & Associates), a management consulting firm that specializes in leadership and organizational development. He is also an adjunct instructor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dixie State University, St. George, Utah and senior adjunct instructor in the College of Business and Public Management at the University of LaVerne, LaVerne, California. He earned a master’s degree in healthcare management from California State University at Los Angeles and degrees in business and hospitality management from San Francisco State University and the City College of San Francisco respectively. His professional mission is to assist leaders in both domestic and professional settings in their effectiveness at leading highly productive teams as well as improving the quality of life for themselves and others. Richard can be reached by email at richard@ leadsmartconsulting.org.