From Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After

Making a success story of your marriage by creating a strong, shared narrative.

We pretty much all agree that a marriage will either succeed or fail based on the support and kindness that partners provide each other. Positive interactions increase feelings of love and solidify the marriage. Negative interactions destroy feelings of love and hurt a marriage. But what I have realized recently is that there is a very different way to look at marriages and to predict whether or not they will succeed.

Let me obliquely relate the outcome of two couples. They both had rather tumultuous dating relationships. Their issues involved trust and stemmed from their childhoods. They married anyways. One relationship ended in divorce. The other continues to grow...

Why the difference between the two couples? I would like to propose an idea that I've borrowed from a different context. However, I think that it really illuminates a key feature of why some marriages succeed but other ones do not.