A Blissful Marriage Starts with ONE Choice

If you have a partner, if you're married or in a committed partnership, then chances are you went to great lengths, you put in tremendous effort to create that partnership. I mean, people really spend their whole lives, their whole young lives looking for their partner, maybe going through several bad relationships and breakups before they finally find someone, and then finally going through maybe a heart-wrenching process or a confusing process or an up and down process to the point of commitment and finally committing to this partner, getting married, having a lavish wedding perhaps, or moving in together, whatever it was that led us down this path of suddenly being in this, what we call family unit with this other individual, with our romantic partner. And I'm trying to use as inclusive language as possible here. I'm really just talking about two adults who are living together as a family and who have children, right, who are parents together. Now, this applies, of course, even if they don't have children, but specifically around adults who do have children together, co-parents living together in a romantic partnership, whatever the structure of that might be. We take tremendous efforts. We put in tremendous investment, really huge investment into getting to that status, right? And we make big promises to ourselves and to each other. It's till death do us part, right? And to be each other's everything and lifelong partners and commitment and marriage and all the rest of it. And we kind of join forces. We fuse our finances, our home, our gene pool into the next generation. And sometimes we have to ask ourselves why. What is it for? Is it just some old, outdated paradigm? Is it just a biological need or a need for safety or financial security? Or is there something deeper or more spiritual or emotional that we're seeking from this partnership and from organizing ourselves into these family units? Because the truth is that when we look at the state of marriage and this kind of gross overview, and I'm no social scientist, so I don't really know, but what I'm seeing around me is the failure of these big, grand gestures and promises and commitments to ourselves, right? I mean, we say till death do us part, and yet most of us, most of us at this point in America are parted by divorce long before death. And even those who don't make it to divorce, because I know divorce can often be a very healthy thing when the marriages are failing and are miserable, even those who don't get to that point might stay in a kind of stuck, stagnant, emotionally divorced situation for years before ever deciding to part ways for the rest of their lives, in fact. We still have this concept of staying together for the kids, and we also have this concept of it's not bad enough to leave, is it worth it, et cetera. It's very, very rife with stress and with disappointment and with conflict, our marriage world, our partnership world, and I'll use partnership and marriage interchangeably here. Really, I would love to know from you, do you see many deliriously happy couples around you, or even just reasonably happy, reasonably having great friendship and great support system and feeling like they're on the same page and building a life together that they both love? Because I don't, I see a lot of people, and I do see some couples like that, and they are my absolute role models, but I see a lot of people in our culture and certainly in media representation where there's just always this underlying conflict, this humdrum, vanilla quality of just grind, daily grind, a loss of passion, a loss of mojo, a loss of lust, a loss of excitement, but more than just a loss of passion and intimacy and excitement, really kind of a depleted level of love or of liking to this person that we're with. I see represented in marriages on media, and again, around me, this nitpicking, mutual teasing, mutual, not in a flirtatious way, but in a way of bringing each other down. And sometimes I see downright disenfranchisement, just disempowerment, disillusion, disappointment in what marriage has turned out to be. And then I have to ask myself if we put all of this investment and all of this energy and our whole culture and media and stories and narratives and religions are based around finding this one person and committing for life, et cetera, then are we missing something? And what is that thing that we're missing? If there's such a gap and a chasm between the promise and the hope and what we're working towards when we get married in the first place versus the reality of feeling disconnected and misunderstood and resentful, oh my gosh, so resentful, of everything that that person couldn't fulfill for us. So maybe our expectations are sky high and our reality is much, much lower. And if that's the case, why and what can we do about it? If you're feeling stagnant in your marriage, stuck, or like this is not what you signed up for, then I want you to know that you're not alone. And if you're daydreaming about what it could be or about that old high school sweetheart or about a way out of the marriage, then you're not alone. I have this crazy wild vision for what our relationships, our marriages, our homes, and our family life could be. Sure, there are those marriages that need to disintegrate. They need to separate. There is too much toxicity or abuse or illness that cannot survive with the marriage intact. And in that case, divorce can absolutely be a blessing. But in many cases, that's not necessarily the answer. In many cases, it's not something we're even entertaining in our minds because things aren't that bad, right? We just really wish that things were a little better, a little improved. Maybe we're not even looking for such a giant transformation but we are hoping that we can get a bit more meaning, joy, and satisfaction within our marriages. And we're wondering if that's too much to ask for. I believe that the truth is that most of our relationships are limited only by one thing, and that is our imaginations. It's us, ourselves, our mindset, our belief of what is possible, of how we could be living that limits our joy and bliss within our family lives. We tend to live out our cultural prophecies. There are these prophecies that, you know, passion and intimacy just disintegrate over time, that you lose your interest, that you lose your connection, that you just kind of settle into this power struggle. And so when we hear that enough times and see it around us in other couples, then we too fall into that pattern. They say that we are the sum total of the five people that we hang out with the most. And if that's the case, and divorce is so prevalent, and emotional divorce is so prevalent too, where the couple are technically married, but emotionally not together, then we have to look at what's going on around us and what's influencing our perception of what is possible within our homes. I've been incredibly lucky to be exposed to some amazing marriages, some partnerships that are just dynamite. They are so supportive and unconditionally loving and growing from year to year rather than depleting. They're actually getting better like a fine wine with time. And when you see that, it opens up your eyes to what is possible. We suddenly don't believe that passion has to die or that marriages are full of conflict and they just have to be. I mean, sure, some conflict is always inevitable in every relationship. But what we do with that conflict, how we handle it, how it feels to be within it, how big or small it stays, is entirely up to our imaginations. If we believe that marriage has to be a sacrifice, that marriage is full of victimhood, and that inevitably resentment is going to build up over the years, then that's what we'll get. Often, when I talk about having a blissful family experience, when I say that your marriage can be the most incredible, healing, joyful place of your life, I get met with a lot of resistance. People saying that that is a privileged mindset. People saying that not everybody can have that. Or people saying that if you knew my husband or my wife, you'd know that that wasn't possible. And that's true. It may not be possible for absolutely everyone. But the thing is that when we argue for our limits, when we say, no, I'm limited because of this or because of that, then we get to keep those limits. I've heard that phrase often. You argue for your limits, you get to keep them. And it's true. If we argue for how bad our marriage should be or how difficult our partner is or how it can't work for us, then we get stuck and stay stagnant in that place of dissatisfaction. So if we think that marriage is just a tit-for-tat transaction and that it just kind of plods along and that we're lucky if there isn't some crazy dynamite conflict, then that's where we stay. Albert Einstein said, In other words, if we are creating a problem within our marriage, if we're finding a lot of friction, conflict, tension, lackluster feelings, just kind of a humdrum, gray, boring, or even really disconnected and unhappy feeling within our marriage, we're not gonna be able to solve that problem staying in that mindset. We're going to need to up-level ourselves and reframe the way we see our marriage and our partner, and most importantly, ourselves. In our culture, there is the Disney princess syndrome, right? We've all been told this story of the Disney princess who gets herself into some kind of trouble. She pricks herself on a needle. She falls asleep. She eats a poisonous apple, whatever. And she's basically asleep, i.e. unconscious, right, to the world. And the only thing that can awaken her from her unconscious state is, you guessed it, the prince on a white horse, the knight in shining armor who comes to save this damsel in distress. And so she waits, completely passive, completely asleep to her innate powers until she gets this kiss, this magical kiss, this unconditional loving kiss from a guy who's just seen her and fallen in love with her, and he will awaken her from her slumber. How many of us are staying in this slumber, pointing to our partner and waiting for him or her to give us that magical kiss and wake us up? How many of us are staying passive to the life that we want to live, the relationship that we want to experience, the way that we want our families to feel, the bliss that is our birthright to claim because we just don't know what to do because we are asleep. But if we're asleep and if we're unconscious to what we can create and what we can do, then we're staying stuck at that level. And like Einstein said, we've got to get to a different level and see ourselves with a bit of perspective in order to realize that we don't have to stay stuck there. That feeling of, is this all there is? That feeling is on point. This isn't all there is. There is so much more that you can create. That's at least been my experience and the experience of many hundreds of clients that I work with in understanding that we get to create family bliss. We get to create the feelings that we want in our family. We get to create the marriage that we want. But our limiting beliefs, that unconscious sleepy state is the biggest limit in our marriage to creating that. Often we have this kind of eat, pray, love, Liz Gilbert moment, right? When we realize that we want a bigger life, that we want to live fully, that we want to be passionate and creative and artistic. And for many of us, the conclusion that goes hand in hand with that is that we have to leave everything behind. That we have to leave our partner or our life as we know it, sell the house, world school, move to Italy, do as Liz did. And her story is incredible and it was right for her. But it's not right for everyone. And you don't have to go down that path in order to create that level of transformation. You don't have to go down the path of disintegrating your family life or giving up on your marriage because you want to feel alive. Sometimes that might be the right decision. For some of us, that is absolutely the right decision. But the rest of us aren't just stuck and stagnant in a marriage that was never meant to actualize and that can't ever give you that passionate, alive, joy de vivre feeling because you can actually create it within your marriage. It's my belief that as long as you're married to someone healthy and stable and kind, you can create that level of healing, of empowerment and of joyful, passionate, blissful living within your marriage, through your marriage. In fact, your marriage and your parenting could be the deepest catalystic tools for your self-actualization and for living a life of meaning and joy and vibrancy. I know this might sound naive or preachy or highbrow or I don't know what, whatever words of resistance are coming up for you. That's not for me. That sounds ridiculous. She's just, I don't know, trying to sell me something. We come up with all sorts of excuses why this couldn't work for me. But I'm here to tell you that it can work for you if you put your mind to it. If you put your energy to it, it can. It can work for you in your home with your partner. You can create that level of bliss and connection that you never thought could happen that maybe you've even given up on in some ways. Don't let your limiting beliefs limit what is possible within your relationship, within your parenting and your partnering. Don't let your stories, your cultural stories tell you and dictate for you what can and cannot be felt within your holistic family unit. You know, another good example of how this happens is the birthing world, right? And many of us have had our eyes opened to the way that women are disempowered and actually robbed of the birthing experience that could have been their birthright. Many women could birth naturally, pain-free, even orgasmically without medical interventions and without being probed and prodded and all of that stuff, they could. It might have happened for them, but they didn't even know that it was a possibility. In this industrialized, medicalized, emergency-ized birthing world, we are treated like factory-line products. And the point is just to get the baby out at the end. And sometimes that saves lives and sometimes that is necessary. But much of the time, it isn't. Much of the time, it meant that we were disempowered and disconnected from what was possible within our bodies and what kind of experience we could have had. As someone who went from having a medical birth through to having three hypnobirths after that, I am one example of how that transformation can happen. But I want to tell you, it is not just within the field of health and wellness that that kind of disenfranchisement happens, that that kind of disempowerment happens. It happens to our relationships as well. In the industrialized model of family, as I call it, we look at just ticking boxes. We look at protocols and checklists as if our family is a product. And it is, it's a product of our culture, right? Get married, check. Have babies, check. Graduate kids from college, check. Save for retirement, check, check, check. But if we can break free of that industrialized model and actually reconnect to our wild roots, to our inner voices, to what we most want to live in this precious one wild life, we can find ways that our relationships could be juicy and vibrant and interesting and deep to the point of bliss on a day-to-day basis. You'll still have the tantrums. You'll still have the conflicts. You'll still have the arguments. You'll still have to save for retirement. But the whole frame of reference, the whole feeling, the whole emotional experience within our marriage, within our relationship, within our parenting could be radically different. So radically different that it can become our greatest source of energy and healing, our greatest source of meaning within our lives. How we resolve conflicts, how we connect, what we offer each other, the energy that we bring to our families, the way that we live can become the project of our life, the most meaningful, joyful, and spiritual even, manifestation of who we are, our inner truth, our most authentic selves. Doesn't that sound good? It does to me. And that's why I wanna encourage us to dream big for our families, to dream big for what we want to feel. And feeling good is one indicator that we're on the right path. Does it feel good to yell at your kids? Usually not. And we all have that inner guidance system that when we rest our head on the pillow at night, we know if we felt good with the way that we, you know, showed up to life that day. With the energy that we brought, with the momentum that we created, we know what feels good in a marriage. Nitpicking, criticizing, competition, conflict, cold shoulders, slam doors, lecturing, ultimatums, none of those things feel good. They don't feel like self-actualization, like higher vibrations, like high-frequency joy. They don't feel like bliss. But they could. They could. We could create those feelings. We can conjure them up. We can invite them in. It takes tremendous effort. But guess what? We're already putting in tremendous effort. We already put in tremendous effort to organize as a couple, as a family, as a unit in the first place. Why stop there? Why not put in the next level of tremendous effort to take it, to up-level it, to go to the next level where we're not stuck at the power struggle? We're actually elevating ourselves to a place of true joy, meaning, and connection within our adult partnerships. And that is the foundation for our parenting as well. So why not make it as joyful as we can? Why not create family bliss?