How We Found Health / Happiness / Prosperity

We have a very happy marriage and family but I know so many people who, through no fault of their own, don't.  I recognize that much of what I'll discuss in this post deals with topics that, for many, may be sensitive, and for others may be counter-intuitive  but after decades of observation as well as personal experience I have synthesized some principles that I'd like to share because of how positively they have influenced  my life and the lives of so many people around me.

Culturally and politically the institution of marriage is in an historically unprecedented decline in America and across the developed world resulting in a weakening of marriage and family institutions.  This 50-year decline has had profound negative impacts on individuals and on societies.  The good news is that we need not be the victims of these declines.  Many of these negative impacts can be mitigated on an individual basis by the choices we make.

According to the Pew Research Center the percentage of American adults who are married is at a record low.  In 1960 72% of American adults were married, but 50 years later barely half (51%) of American adults were married.  During the same period the population of those that are unmarried changed in the following ways:

• Widowed - declined from 9% to only 6%
• Divorced - nearly tripled growing from 5% to 14%
• Never Married - nearly doubled from 15% to 28%

Declines in marriage were not limited to the US.  Similar declines have been experienced by most industrialized nations all over the world.

In the United States, the declines have occurred among all age groups, but are most dramatic among young adults. Today, just 20% of adults ages 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59% in 1960. Over the course of the past 50 years, the median age at first marriage has risen by about six years for both men and women.   Marriage is being replaced by other adult living arrangements including cohabitation, single parenthood, and single person households.

Public attitudes about the institution of marriage are mixed. Nearly four-in-ten Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete, according to a Pew Research survey in 2010, yet the same survey found that a majority of people who have never married (61%) would like to do so someday.

Does marriage really matter?

In her paper titled "Does Marriage Matter?" Linda J. Waite, a prestigious demographer from the University of Chicago, statistically documents the following benefits of marriage:

• Healthy Behaviors - married people exhibit much healthier behaviors in areas including problem drinking, anger, stress, and risk-taking behaviors.
• Mortality - married men as well as women show a substantially higher probability of living until age 65.  This is due to lower risk-factors, greater access to medical care, and greater well-being.
• Sexual Satisfaction - married monogamy is more sexually satisfying than any other adult marital status (although sexual frequency is slightly higher among those cohabiting, satisfaction is higher among the married).
• Assets and Wealth - the median wealth of married individual is higher than any other status:
• 815% higher than separated individuals
• 84% higher than divorced individuals
• 47% higher than widowed individuals
• 77% higher than never-married individuals
• Children's Well-Being - children of married couples are better off by most measures including:
• Drop out rate - Twice as many children with unmarried parents drop out compared to those with married parents
• Poverty rates - children of unmarried parents are more than twice as likely to be poor.  They also have limited access to parental help with school-work etc. which perpetuates the problem of poverty generationally.
• Labor Force and Career - Normalizing the data for other variables married people have higher wages, more job security, and more career success than unmarried people.

Why does marriage make for healthier, happier, wealthier people?

In the same paper listed above Linda J. Waite proposes four factors that enable marriage to generate the advantages listed above:

1. Marriage assumes a long-term contract - this allows individuals to make investments (short-term cost with a long-term gain) that bear positive fruits in the future.
2. Co-Insurance - Spouses share economic and social resources that act as a sort of small insurance pool against the uncertainties of life (be they economic, physical, or emotional).
3. Economies of Scale - Married couples share resources such as housing, benefits, insurance, automobiles etc.  A shared household is much more efficient than an individual household.
4. Social Connections - Marriage connects people to social structures and institutions (e.g. extended families, churches, communities etc.) that create obligations.  These obligations to others give life meaning beyond oneself and ultimately result in the benefits that come from living for a higher purpose.

How can individuals buck the trend and find the success they seek?

The roots of nearly all personal and societal problems is selfishness, pride, and impatience. We want health, happiness, and wealth for ourselves, and we want them NOW!  Ironically if we pursue those outcomes for ourselves they will elude us, but when we discipline ourselves so that we transcend our own self-interests and instead find meaning and purpose in the health, happiness, and wealth of someone else (this is what we call "love") the byproduct is that we get those things for ourselves as well.

The inexorable law of the harvest requires that an inability to defer gratification ensures that we will be denied all of the real joy, pleasure, happiness, prosperity, and peace we seek, since all these are the fruits of sacrifice (invest first, reap rewards later, not the other way around). There are no short-cuts in natural processes.  Tantrums and indignation won't make our gardens grow any faster.  We reap what we sow and nurture.  It may seem enigmatic that we must sacrifice our lives in order to find them, but the concept is very old, and is tried-and-true.  Jesus taught us that whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but that whoever is willing to lose his life for His sake (i.e. to serve and love God's other children) will gain it abundantly.

Many people put off marriage, or destroy the one they have, because of selfishness and pride.  The great social experiment of the last 50 years is failing for one fundamental reason--it has taught us that happiness comes from focusing on what WE want.  That is a simply not true!  Individuals have only ever prospered when they have given themselves over to the collective good.  What's best for mankind turns out to be best for the individual even when it requires enormous sacrifices.  Soldiers willing to die to win back freedom, and mothers willing to live to ensure the success of the rising generation not only ensure the survival of the species, but individually find greater happiness and meaning than had they squandered their lives quibbling over quarters in the marketplace.

That's not to say that we should subsume our individual dignity or self-respect in an effort to be selfless.  Service and love to others is impossible without loving ourselves first (e.g. God's commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" implicitly requires that we love ourselves first).  In my experience that self-love and self-respect come to us either from early experiences with loving parents or, failing that, from a deeply-felt understanding that God loves us (if the King of the universe who knows you better than you know yourself thinks you're great, who are you to contradict Him?).

Our path to marital bliss did not follow most of today's conventional wisdom.  If you think about it being a contrarian makes sense, because if you follow the crowd you'll end up where they're going which, as we've seen from the research, is collectively not to a very good place.  The experiences I share below don't apply to every situation (perhaps not even to most situations), but I'm convinced that there are nuggets of truth in these experiences that can be applied universally.  These ideas may not be politically correct, and they may seem controversial, or even counter-intuitive, but they are not really new or innovative.  Many of them have worked well for our ancestors.  I do have to point out that some traditional approaches to marriage, such as one spouse dominating another, have never worked to bring success or happiness and absolutely need to be changed.

Here they some of the principles that have brought us happiness and success in our marriage.  I share  them in the form of advice that I would pass on to our grandchildren when they're old enough to hear it:

• Maintain sexual fidelity - Reserve your sexuality for marriage only.  No sex before marriage and no extramarital sex after.  If you've already messed up turn it around, change, restore fidelity.  Contrary to popular belief free-sex doesn't make you free or happy.  Sex is like fire.  It can warm and nourish you when it's channeled and controlled, but it can burn and kill you when it rages with no limits.
• Don't wait to get married - Like any sound investment the longer you wait to make it the lower your return.  If you try to become self-actualized all by yourself you may end up wasting precious years--you can become self-actualized together.  It's true that in some ways you begin to limit your options when you get married, but all the adventures you were hoping to have before you "settled down" are nothing compared to the adventures you'll have together when you join forces with someone you love.  Don't wait to finish college, until you get a great job, until you've travelled the world, until you buy a house, until you can "afford it", or until you "are ready".   Look for someone who shares your values and who you can grow to love, and if they feel the same marry them.  We got married when I was 21 and Linda was 20.  Both of us were still in college.  We had no idea how things would work out financially--it was a leap of faith.  But we made things work out by living beneath our means from the very beginning. 
• Don't put off having children - NOTHING gets you correctly focused more quickly than having children.   You become unselfish, productive, hard-working, committed, and responsible.  I was pretty much wasting my time in college taking courses which were not preparing me to support a family.  When we got married I started paying attention...but when we had our first baby I changed my life.  I got laser-focused on being a responsible provider!  My class choices got more serious, my grades improved, and I worked harder than I ever had in my life.  We had three children by the time I finished my bachelor's degree (it took me 6 years), and we were definitely poor students, but we both graduated from college (Linda had to make up her very last final because she was a bit busy delivering our second child).  We finished school with no debt (worked and scrimped our way through school), a wonderful family, and a set of formative experiences that taught us how to live even when we were no longer poor.  Our children grew up spoiled by love--not by stuff (at first we couldn't afford the stuff, and later we knew better than to simulate happiness in that way) and their lives have been better for it.  A corollary to this principle is to have many children--as many as your emotional and physical health can support.  I can't begin to list all the advantages we and our children have received from having a large family.  The children become more responsible, forgiving, and unselfish.  In my experience as both a sibling and as a father relative to family size quantity enables quality. 
• Keep your priorities straight - Love and serve God first, your spouse next, then your children, and finally if you have time leftover focus on yourself.  Again this doesn't mean that you erase or ignore your own needs.  Often the best thing you can do for your family is to take time to recharge your own batteries.  What this does mean it that you will not find happiness by spending most of your time shopping, fishing, golfing, travelling, hunting, and going out with your friends.  Commit yourself to family life.  We men need to be especially solicitous of the needs of the mother of our children.  Share in household chores-even when you're tired too. Be an active listener, resist the urge to say I-told-you-so, play with the kids, be a father.

• Keep your promises - Commitment is the key to success in marriage.  Decide up front that you will not quit for anything short of protecting your own safety or the safety of your children.  When I was 21 and dating Linda my wise mother sat with me one day and asked how things were going in our blossoming romance.  I said they were going well but (and here I was hoping to be contradicted) that I didn't think I was ready for marriage.  To my disappointment she agreed with me!  I asked her why she thought I wasn't ready for marriage, and her response was that I wasn't yet sufficiently committed.  She asked if I was ready to stick with my marriage covenants if things got hard (e.g. my wife turned into a screamer, was disfigured and no longer beautiful, became sullen and impossible to please, was unfaithful to me etc.), and suggested that if I wasn't then I had better not make the covenants in the first place.  However, she encouraged me to search within myself to find that level of commitment, because that was what was required to successfully make and keep the marriage investment that would bear such great dividends over time.   Several months later, through a lot of soul searching, I found that level of commitment.  I must say that I began marriage with grim expectations (i.e. "this will be hard but it will be worth it"), so I ended up being pleasantly surprised at how much nicer it was than I anticipated.
• Unanimity requires compromise - I, like most human beings, have definite opinions and like things done my way.  Marriage is a partnership of equals and as such requires both of us to find agreement on nearly everything before we proceed or we end up being "a house divided against itself".  Finding agreement means a healthy give and take, and means that you're often going to let go of what you want when you see that what your spouse wants is really important to her.  That spirit of collaboration requires the crowning skill of living--active listening.  When you have significant differences of opinion you need to follow the principle of communication that Steven R. Covey's calls "seek first to understand and then to be understood".  That involves:

• Listening to your spouse's perspective
• Saying "let me be sure I'm understanding you" and express their position and why they feel strongly about it
• Getting a confirmation that you have understood
• After all that, expressing your perspective and your reasons for it

Many years ago I worked with a talented and successful young woman.  She was determined to succeed in her career and was progressing well.  We became friends and were able to speak frankly with each other.  She told me that she and her husband decided that they didn't want to have children (we had four small children at the time).  I've thought about Jenny and that conversation many times as we've gone through the agony and the ecstasy of bearing (losing one) and raising children, and then as our lives have been enriched with a growing cadre of grandchildren.  Is Jenny happy with her boat and cabin and successful career?  Maybe--we each get to define success in our own way--but I wonder whether, after climbing the ladder of success she has found herself lonely and unfulfilled.  I know many who have discovered too late that they leaned their ladder against the wrong wall.

I'm certain there are many more principles for success in life and marriage, but these are some of the key ones that worked for us (I should say me--Linda's list may be very different).  We have taken the less travelled road, and that truly has made all the difference.  I hope you find some of it useful in finding your own happiness and success.