Learn how to make a marriage happy

To make a marriage last, make it happy. It's much easier to make a marriage happy when you learn the simple steps summarized on this page.

Start Your Marriage With Lots Of Love

You make a marriage happy when it's filled with love. Most marriages begin with each person having a big bundle of good feelings toward the other. Attraction, infatuation, and romance are not love, but they all play a part in building the collection of good feelings that is real love. (This is all explained in "What is love.")

The success of some arranged marriages proves that you don't have to start with a big bundle of love. However, to make a marriage happy you need to build love as you go.

Our advice would be to start the marriage with as big a bundle of real love as you can.

Actively Grow Your Love Continually

Love is a collection of positive memories of shared experiences. You grow your love by remembering, re-experiencing, marking, or talking about those loving memories.

Diaries, photos, blogs, love letters all help to keep growing your bundle.

You grow your love by continuing to have more positive shared experiences with your partner.

You grow your love by keeping some romance alive in your lives.

Avoid fights or harsh words that could erode your love bundle

Identify the irresolvable issues in your marriage and agree to never, ever, fight about any of those. Treat those issues with humor, acceptance, and grace. This will eliminate 70 to 90 percent of the fights you might otherwise have.

You'll still have your fights, spats, and tiffs. Research proves you can make a marriage happy — even with lots of disagreements — if you begin and end each 'issue' discussion in a positive and respectful way.

Hurtful fights, expressions of distain, disgust, or contempt, all erode your love bundle and hurt your efforts to make a marriage happy.

Cope Immediately With Bad Feelings About Your Partner

As quickly as you realize you're experiencing bad feelings toward your partner, shift to an easy coping strategy that will limit the damage that bad feelings about your partner can do to your happiness and your love bundle.

You protect your loving feelings and make a marriage happy, by coping to minimize the damage that bad shared experiences can do.

Practice Accepting, Forgiving, and Forgetting

Accepting, forgiving, and forgetting are powerful tools you need to make a marriage happy.

Failing to accept or forgive — and never forgetting — will damage and can even destroy your bundle of loving feelings. They are the perfect recipe for unhappiness for you, your partner, and your marriage.

You accept, forgive, and forget, not because your partner deserves it, but because you want to make a marriage happy, and as Ruth Bell Graham said, "a good marriage is the union of two good forgivers."

You accept what you can't or won't change, otherwise you make yourself miserable.

You forgive because you want to maintain your love for your partner and make a marriage happy.

You forget because the happiest person is the person with the happiest memories.

This Website Explores Each Step

This page has been an overview of the secrets to make a marriage happy. Each of the steps discussed above are explored in far greater depth on this web site.

Our mission is to help couples build happy marriages that last. We encourage you to make that part of your personal mission: to have a happy marriage that lasts.

If you do make "having a happy marriage that lasts" a part of your personal mission, we're delighted you found us. We should team up.

There is too much information in this site to absorb in one visit, so if you like where we're headed, you might bookmark the site, so you can find us again easily.

To continue with the next section "What is Love?"
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To join other couples who are committed to making their marriage last, click on: Join the Team

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