Why Marriages Fail #3: When Bad Things Happen To Good People
When we love someone, we sometimes make promises.
“No matter what life throws at us, I’ll be there for you.”
“You can count on me through thick and thin.”
“I’ll never desert you.”
And we mean it when we say these things.
But the problem is that life is unpredictable. As much as we would like to control the future and prevent anything disastrous from happening, we can’t. We can do our best, but there are no guarantees.
Dan and Teri had just celebrated their first anniversary when Teri was in a car accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. After several surgeries and months of physical therapy, her condition remained unchanged. Unfortunately, Dan’s love for her didn’t. He decided to end the marriage. Teri now lives with her parents.
Robert and Hilda were high school sweethearts. They married back in the 1950s. Ten months after their wedding day, while on their way to church, an ambulance ran a stop sign and T-boned their car. Hilda was thrown from the car, leaving her a quadriplegic, legally blind, and unable to speak. A few years ago Robert and Hilda celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
When we marry, none of us is marrying the person who will prevent bad things from happening. There is no such person.
The goal is to marry someone who will stick with us through thick and thin, someone who will stand with us arm-in-arm against the sometimes vicious things that life can throw at us.
As many married couples have come to understand, success in marriage is often less a matter of having everything go right, and more a matter of how we handle the things that go wrong.
What about our capacity as men and women to persist through thick and thin? Are we getting better (or worse) at being able to bear down and work even harder when things get tough? When it comes to persevering through difficult circumstances, how do we compare with previous generations?
It has been confirmed repeatedly that young men and women today are less persistent and less persevering than the previous generation of Americans And that generation was less persevering than the generation before them.
In fact, one study revealed that 80% of young men and women today give up more easily in the face of struggles than did comparable young people in the 1960s.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
This may be in no place more true than When Bad Things Happen To Good People.
