This is a follow-up post from this earlier post, so if you haven’t read that, check it out before reading on!

In short, our culture is very pessimistic about marriage, and this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy when we expect marriages to fail. But, marriages don’t spontaneously end, which means that we can learn from marriages that fail and work to prevent the same failings in our own marriages.

So, to continue on, here are three possible options why marriages in our culture struggle to last more so than most.

1.     1. We view marriage as a contractual relationship rather than unconditional.

The question people often ask of their marriage is “What is this marriage giving me?” rather than “What can I give to/through my marriage?” While it is perfectly healthy to view your relationship with your employer, your landlord, or a local business as a contractual “give-and-take” relationship, it’s pretty damaging to do so to your spouse. Let’s get honest here: Do you always want to be auditioning for your spouse’s approval? Do you always want to have to win your spouse’s approval with every meal with you cook, or every time you have sex? I believe that deep down, we all want a spouse who values us unconditionally rather than conditionally.

2.     2. We have short-term romantic relationships and struggle to make long-term ones.

For many people, their first romantic relationships were never intended to result in marriage, they were just something fun to do at the time. So, if you go through middle school, high school, and college dating around, you’re going to get really good at short-term dating and you’re not going to learn how to fix a relationship. Why would you need to fix a relationship with someone who you don’t want to marry? It’s easier to break up and move on. Sadly, this doesn’t prepare you very well for marriage, and it means you have to relearn what a romantic relationship is.

3.     3. We don’t know when to act on duty rather than desire.

If you have a baby, do you want to get up at 3 A.M. and change its diaper? Of course not, but you know that it’s the right thing to do, so you make yourself do it. And while I hope time with your spouse is more enjoyable than that, is there any overlap in these two relationships? If you only invest your time and energy in your relationship when you feel like it, your relationship will flounder as a result. Too often, we think that we should want to spend time with our spouse all the time, and if we ever don’t feel like it then we assume that something is fundamentally wrong with the relationship. Hopefully, you do want to spend time with your spouse most of the time, but even when you don’t, it’s worth it to do so just because you know it’s the right thing to do.

Lastly, here’s my disclaimer: These three points are just my opinion, and I would love to talk about which of these points you agree or disagree with. But, here’s the good news: Just because these trends and habits are prevalent in our culture, you get to decide how you live and how you love your spouse. Don’t let anyone scare you with statistics, because to every statistic there are outliers. Wherever you are in life, I hope that if you do pursue a marriage that you’ll be living proof that the institution of marriage is working quite well for most people.

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