#239： Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
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Summary
Les Parrott and his wife, Leslie, have written a book to help couples prepare themselves for a matrimonial commitment. It s called Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: 7 Questions to Ask Before and After You Marry. And today on the show, Dr. Les and I discuss how a man can know if he s personally ready for marriage.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're
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a man on the precipice of marriage or have marriage as a life goal, one worry you likely
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have is, will my marriage even last? While divorce rates have been decreasing since they
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reached their peaks in the late 1970s and early 80s, there's still a perception out there
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that marriage is just a crapshoot, a game of Russian roulette, and that the odds favor
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you ending up in a family court or at best in a sad and loveless relationship. Well, my
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guest today on the show argues that that doesn't have to be your fate so long as you take a
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proactive approach to marriage. With some thought and intentionality, you can help ensure that
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you have a happy, loving, fulfilling relationship that lasts until death do you part. His name
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is Les Parrott and he's a clinical psychologist specializing in marriage and family. He, along
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with his wife, Leslie, who's also a marriage therapist, have written a book to help couples
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prepare themselves for a matrimonial commitment. It's called Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts,
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Seven Questions to Ask Before and After You Marry. And today on the show, Les and I discuss
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how a man can know if he's personally ready for marriage, the myths that people have about
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marriage that set them up for disappointment, the mindsets people have about marriage, particularly
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millennials, and the conversations you should be having with your future spouse to help ensure
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that you have a happy life together. While the conversation day is geared towards soon-to-be
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marrieds and newlyweds, even if you've been married for a couple decades, you're going to find some
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useful advice and insights in this show. After the show, make sure to check out the show notes at
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aom.is slash Parrott. So that's P-A-R-R-O-T, just like the bird, for links to resources where you can
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delve deeper into this topic. Dr. Les Parrott, welcome to the show.
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Thanks. Good to be with you. I appreciate being on.
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So you're a clinical psychologist that specializes in marriage and relationships, and you work with
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your wife, Leslie, who's also a marriage and family therapist. You work on helping other people
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have good, strong families and marriages. You've written several books. And the book we're going
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to talk about today is Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, which is all about helping people get on
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the right path towards a strong and happy marriage. But before we get into specifics of what engaged
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couples can do, people who are about to get married to have a good, strong marriage, let's talk about
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the individual first. Because I've gotten questions over the years from guys who they want to get
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married. They're dating a girl and they're like, I think this is the woman I want to ask to be my
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wife. But they're not sure if they're ready individually to make that commitment to marriage.
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And they've wondered if like, how do they know they're ready for marriage? So based on your experience
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and your research, are there things people can look for in themselves to know that they're ready
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to be married? Yeah, I love that question. It's a great place to start. And by the way,
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I should say, related to that introduction, my wife and I do have the exact same name if people
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are confused. So I'm Leslie, and she's Leslie. We're both psychologists. And it does get confusing,
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but that's why I go by Les. And it's also why we named our first son, John. So no more confusion
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there. But I love your question, because it really does begin with the individual. In fact,
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Wesley and I, man, this had to be 18 years ago, sitting around a dining room table in Los Angeles
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with a fella named Neil Clark Warren. And if his name sounds familiar, it's because he's the guy in
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the eHarmony commercials. And we were sitting around this dining room table when the idea for eHarmony
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first was being explored. And we ended up working with that company for 10 years and working on that
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matching mechanism and all that kind of thing with folks, a fantastic team there. But I remember
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asking Neil that night in the midst of that conversation, hey, if you could only give one
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word of advice to a person about to be married, what would it be? And I remember the answer was just
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like on the tip of his tongue. He didn't have to think for a split second. He said, get yourself
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healthy before you'd get yourself married. And that is such an essential thing and such a kind
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of a quippy little thing to say, but it has such profound depth. Get yourself healthy before you get
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yourself married. Why is that? Because your marriage can only be as healthy as you are. In fact,
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your relationships can only be as healthy as you are, whether it's marriage or anything else.
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And so we've spent a lot of time in our own research and writing, looking at how do you have
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relationship readiness? In fact, my wife and I even teach a class at our university here in Seattle
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where we live. And it's just Relationships 101. And it's a class that is offered at six, six o'clock in
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the evening on Mondays, not prime time for undergrads. And yet it's the largest class on our campus.
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And we start off that first lecture telling these students, it doesn't matter to me where you take
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any notes. That's up to you and how you want to function. Except tonight, I want you to write down
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one single sentence. And I build this sentence up and I finally give it to them. And it is so relevant
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to your question. I want to give it to you and our listeners. And here's the sentence. If you try to
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build intimacy with another person, before you've done the difficult work of getting whole or healthy
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on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself. In other words,
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we start to treat others as a shortcut towards our well-being. And that's a lot of pressure to put on
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somebody else. So that's the big answer. We can drill down on that if you want a little bit.
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How do you get healthy? But that's fundamental to any relationship because your relationship
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Well, so yeah, let's drill down a bit. I mean, how do you get healthy for a relationship or whole?
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Well, there's several things. You know, one of the hallmarks of psychological well-being and health
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is self-awareness. You're aware of, you know, issues in your life that you need to be working on.
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You know, the unhealthy person just goes around without any sense of their jaggedness, how they're
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rubbing people the wrong way and how they're interfacing with people in a nonproductive fashion and so
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forth. So self-awareness is paramount. And that's why I always suggest if somebody wants to get
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serious about working on this, that they invite a mentor into their life, somebody that's objective,
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that has their best interest in mind, that will serve as kind of a proverbial mirror in front of
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them. So that's just one practical step. But here's some hallmarks of psychological health.
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One is what I call unswerving authenticity. Now, this has to do with being true to you. I can't tell
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you as a psychologist how many times I've had somebody come into my counseling office suffering
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from that proverbial disease to please. You know what I mean? And they're thinking, oh man,
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maybe if I accomplish this goal over here, I'll get the respect of this group. Or maybe if I get onto this
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team, you know, so-and-so will be impressed. Or maybe if I do this, you know, my parents will give me
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their blessing or I'll win the heart of this young lady or whatever it might be. And so they end up
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doing things that aren't authentic. And the healthy person knows, hey, this is the path I'm traveling
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and nobody can sway me from that because I got to be true to who I am in spite of what anybody else
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might say, think, or do. So that's foundational. And that leads to a second one. And that is
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what I call self-giving love. The most mature, the most healthy among us are people that can
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transcend their own boundaries and recognize other people's needs and put empathy into practice
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and see, you know, needs that are unique to that person. Because most of us, you know,
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if we're not intentional, we kind of project our own neediness onto other people and then kind of meet
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those needs, uh, thinking we're really being a loving person, all we're really doing is loving
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ourselves. Does that make sense? It's kind of convoluted, but it happens so frequently.
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And so those are a few things. Self-awareness is paramount. It begins the process. You know,
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you can only change something. You can only work on something once you're aware of it.
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And then you got to be true to you. And then you got to give yourself away. The more you give
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yourself away, the more loving you are to other people, um, in an altruistic sense, uh, you know,
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the higher, uh, marks you will get in psychological wellbeing.
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Okay. Well, let's talk about, let's say you're, you mentioned earlier when, before we got on the
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interview, um, this assessment that you did about, uh, young people's attitudes towards marriage,
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um, as big survey you did, I mean, and you mentioned there's five attitudes that a lot of
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young people these days have about marriage. What are those five attitudes that people have about
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Yeah. I appreciate you asking this because, um, you know, my wife and I wrote this book,
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saving your marriage before it starts. We wrote this years ago. Um, and really out of our own
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desire to help our own university students here in Seattle had no idea that the book would be used
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by more than a million couples at Oprah would have us on and Barbara Walters and all the rest.
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It's been a phenomenal ride with that book. But, um, a few years ago, our publisher called us Harper
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Collins and said, Hey, you know, this book just seems to keep going and going. Let's revise it.
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Let's update it. And that's kind of publisher speak for let's put a new cover on it. And we said,
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no, let's do it the right way. And so we began to, um, do a lot of research around what does it take
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for lifelong love? And, uh, it was out of that, that we devised this, uh, assessment that we can come
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back to called the Simbas assessment. But in the context of, of building that, um, we did this
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massive study through the university of Chicago, looking at single adults between the ages of 18
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and 35 and, uh, trying to understand what is their attitude toward marriage, what we call their marriage
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mindset. So this isn't about any particular relationship. It's just about what do they,
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how do they feel about marriage in general, just the enterprise of marriage. And what we discovered
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is they fall into one of five categories and they're pretty predictable. And it's, it's actually
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quite fascinating. So let me list these, these five off and give you a little, little sense for each
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one of them. The first is what, and I'll start with R the first is the resolute mindset. Now, these are
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people, anybody that's listening to us right now that is thinking, you know, uh, marriage is for life
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for me, uh, like divorce is not even in my vocabulary. Uh, I can't imagine not being married
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because it's always been a part of my life plan. That's the resolute mindset. These people are gung ho
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on marriage. Okay. The next category is what we call, uh, after resolute is rational and the rational
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mindset and feel free to interrupt me along the way on any of these, but the rational mindset is the
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person that, yeah, I believe in marriage, but I know it's going to be really hard work. In fact,
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I've probably grown up in a home where I saw how not to be married and I don't want to go through
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that, but I still believe in marriage. So these people will tend to get married later. There's more
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men in this category than women, by the way, uh, the, the rational approach, the third category after
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resolute and rational is romantic. And these people, and this tends to be populated more by
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women than men, just the opposite of rational. And the rash, the, the romantic approach has an
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attitude of kind of wanting to write this incredible love story because nobody's ever experienced this
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kind of love with, you know, in the, on the planet before, and they'd love words like soulmate and
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finding the one and so forth. And so if, if it doesn't work out for them, they tend to think,
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well, I, it wasn't the one I got duped somehow. And so they, they tend to have a higher divorce rate
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than others. After that category, there's two more and that's restless. This is an interesting
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category because you ask these folks, Hey, you know, you plan on getting married someday? Yeah,
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maybe, you know, uh, but, uh, really not on my list right now because I'm having too much fun.
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These are people that love to party. These are people that love just, uh, they're just having a
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blast. They're just, uh, thinking like marriage is the last thing on their list of considerations. So
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the only way you find these people in a counselor's office, you know, doing some pre-marriage work
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is when there's some kind of crisis. Maybe there's been a unexpected pregnancy or there's financial
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pressure or there's something else going on. And then the last category after, uh, resolute,
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rational, romantic, restless, the last category is reluctant. And these are people that don't believe
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in marriage at all. It's just a piece of paper. Why would I, why would I ever get married? Um,
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and so they're very cynical just about the whole enterprise. So every, every young adult between
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the ages of 18 and 35 will fall into one of those five categories. And that's helpful
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information, especially if you're preparing for lifelong love, uh, with another person,
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because you want to know what their mindset is as well. And the combination of those two
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mindsets can, can tell you a lot about the road ahead for the two of you. Does that make sense?
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That makes perfect sense. And I'm curious, um, is there one mindset in particular that has,
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you know, a lion's share of the people in that mindset between the, in that demographic?
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Yeah, great question. So on average, there's about 20% in each of these categories, reluctant
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is the lowest and, uh, excuse me, reluctant is lowest. And then, uh, resolute is the highest.
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So the two anchors on the end of the continuum. Uh, but when you break it down by, uh, some other
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demographic information, you know, gender is a big one. That's when you see more women as romantics
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and more men as rational. So, but, uh, yeah, it's pretty even distribution.
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Okay. So, um, I think, you know, one thing that might put people in that rational or reluctant
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phase is that, you know, they've probably seen the statistics about marriage and divorce. Um,
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but I think there's been studies, I mean, I guess the number that's been floating around is like 50%,
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but there's studies that have showed that it's not as bad. It's actually decreased since like the
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1970s when it was at its peak. But, um, still it's, it can be sobering for people and people
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think marriage is just a crapshoot. Um, your job as a marital counselor doing this premarital
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counseling is to help make it less of a crapshoot. Um, what does the research say on the effectiveness
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of premarital counseling on reducing the chances of divorce?
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Yeah, it's pretty easy to get discouraged because everybody knows someone's divorced, right? I mean,
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you just can't find anyone that doesn't know someone that's divorced. So regardless of what
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the stats are, we've all witnessed pretty much up close and personal, the devastation of, of a,
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of a breakup, uh, in marriage. So, um, does it make any difference? First of all, let me say
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that people still believe in marriage. 86% of young adults, uh, say they want to get married and 82%
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of that 86% say they want it to be for life. In other words, nobody, only a very small handful
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of people are saying, yeah, I'm going to get married, but this is kind of the starter marriage
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and I'll, I'll find another marriage later on. Um, most people say I want it to be for life.
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Um, and so if they avail themselves of some kind of premarital education or counseling that does more
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than just focus on the ceremony, we know for a fact that they lower their chances of divorce by 31,
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um, we also know that they raise their level of fulfillment and happiness and, uh, contentment
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in that relationship by at least a third. And so, uh, it's, it, there's no, there's no doubt that
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premarital education is helpful. And in fact, you know, I have two teenage boys, if they want to get
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married and said, I don't need any kind of premarriage help. I'd just go, are you kidding me?
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Look at the facts here. You want to do this for yourself. Trust me. So I can't imagine anybody
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not wanting to do that. And by the way, the statistics get even higher, uh, for success
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when people will go through some kind of personalized experience, like taking an assessment,
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like the Simba's assessment that I mentioned a little bit ago.
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Okay. So, uh, let's talk about like, what are we aiming for here? If you're, you're in
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premarital counseling or doing some education, doing some reading, um, and you're trying to figure out,
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okay, what can I do to have a, uh, strong marriage from the get go that will last a lifetime? Um,
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what are we aiming for? What does the research say on what a happy marriage looks like? I mean,
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what are the traits of happily married couples?
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Yeah. So first of all, um, the more alike you are, especially when it comes to your values,
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the easier and happier life is, you know, um, birds of a feather flock together. We, we sometimes
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hear people say opposites attract, and there is some truth to that. There's some excitement about
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being around somebody that's different than you. And, uh, but, uh, as the saying sometimes also
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goes opposites attract, and then they attack because it starts to get under our skin. Like,
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why can't you view the world the same way I do, especially when it comes to my values? So I'm not
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talking about, you know, surface things. You know, I like to ride a Harley and she likes to garden
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on a Saturday. Those are two very different things. Sure. That can impact the relationship,
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but not as much as what you might believe about having children or some other values that you hold
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really dear, you know? So, um, so when it comes to predicting happiness in a marriage, you want to,
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you really want to find somebody that can be as similar to you as possible on the things that matter
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most. Um, in addition, uh, we know there's other marks, you know, we talked about wellbeing and,
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and psychological health. That's a huge predictor of success and happiness in a marriage,
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but there's also, uh, to put a finer point on that, there's expectations that we bring, you know,
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that proverbial baggage that we bring into a relationship and all of us do this. It doesn't
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matter whether you're the epitome of wellbeing and health. Um, and by the way, just going back to
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that for a second, nobody ever arrives, right? We can't ever check that off our list. Hey, I'm
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totally psychologically healthy now. Uh, we're always in process. We're all working on that.
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Um, but when you begin to look at expectations, you know, those are so, they're shaped so intensely by
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the homes that we grew up in. And so you really want to make sure that, um, what you have in mind,
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your picture in your mind's eye of what married life is supposed to be like is similar to what
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this other person is expecting. Uh, because if not, we get married and we go, Hey, I thought
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you loved me. A loving husband doesn't do that. A loving wife doesn't do that. Why are you doing
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that? Um, so those kinds of things. Um, and then on a real practical level, another marker is just,
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um, uh, financial security. Uh, we just know, uh, that, uh, for happy couples, not that money
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can make you happy, but that when you're on the same page financially, you know, and inevitably
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one of you will feel like more of a spender and one of you more of a saver. Um, and that
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can sometimes feel like opposites, but that's a matter of degree, but just making sure you're,
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you, you've got some solid footing and you're headed in the right direction for financial
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management. Um, uh, that, that's also a huge predictor. Um, as is age, by the way, a person
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that gets married at the age of 21 versus 25, their chances of divorce, doubtful. Think
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about that. That's based on nothing more than just how old they are when they get married.
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And so when you look at happiness in marriage, you know, that, uh, uh, there's lots of things
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that go into it, but here's the crux of the matter. Marriage was never ever designed to
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make a person happy. You make your marriage happy. Let me say that again, because this is
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so key marriage isn't designed to make you happy. You make your marriage happy, which
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basically means it comes down to you and your attitude and that of your partner as well.
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I love that. Um, so let's go back to this, these expectations. I thought this was interesting.
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You have a section in your book about, uh, unspoken rules and unconscious roles, uh, that
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people bring into a relationship. Cause I remember when I got married, um, this came up every
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now, it was like weird moments. It was just like stuff like, well, no, this is how you're
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supposed to do X thing in a relationship, or this is the tradition. This is like, what
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this is, we do this at Christmas. We don't do it that way. Um, it's little tiny things
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that pop up, but you don't think about before you get married. Um, so how do you bring up
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these unspoken and unconscious, unspoken, um, rules and unconscious roles, um, to light before
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you get married. So you're all on the same page. Yeah. Leslie and I have often joked
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about how cool it would be if before a couple got married, you could say, Hey, bring out
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your invisible rule books. Let's compare notes because everybody gets married with a set of
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rules about how life should work. And we don't even know that we have these rules until we
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get married and our spouse begins to break our rules. And they can be about silly things.
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Uh, you know, uh, Hey, when do you open your presents at the holidays or, or, you know,
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do you do that Christmas Eve or Christmas night? Uh, uh, I mean, Christmas morning, you know,
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but just silly things like that, as well as much more significant things, you know, um, on
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that might relate to spiritual beliefs or what have you. So we have these, these unspoken rules.
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And one of the tasks I think for a couple that's, that's thinking about, you know, enjoying
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lifelong love together is to do their best to uncover these rules. So we sometimes call
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them your personal 10 commandments. And, um, uh, if you just take some time to think about
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what was important in your home, I sometimes liken it to, um, you know, if you could go to
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your childhood home and maybe up in the figurative attic, at least you'd find this big dusty trunk
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that would have your name engraved on the side of it. And underneath it, it would say relationship
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curriculum. And you would think through, you know, you'd pull out file folders of all the
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in quotes, you know, I'm doing air quotes here of all the, the courses you took as a kid growing
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up, you know, feelings we don't talk about in this family. Um, you know, stuff like that,
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you know, uh, maybe you took a class in advanced blame shifting and how to do it. You know, I mean,
00:23:32.160
we, we learned all kinds of things from our family of origin. And so, uh, when you begin
00:23:37.720
to look at these unspoken rules that you're bringing into the relationship and your partner
00:23:41.380
does the same thing, let me tell you, you are solving so many problems in advance and eliminating
00:23:46.560
so many headaches down the road. And then you couple that with unconscious, uh, role expectations.
00:23:54.600
Uh, those are, they're closely connected, but they're distinct. You know, the rules are just
00:23:59.080
about how life should be lived. Unconscious role expectations have to do with what a loving
00:24:04.140
husband should do and what a loving wife should do and what they should say and how they should feel.
00:24:09.360
And so we want to uncover that for them as well, because that was shaped by, uh, the, the father
00:24:16.100
that you grew up with, the mom that you grew up with, or it's even shaped by the media things that
00:24:21.020
you witnessed and said, that's the kind of person I want. Uh, you know, if a, if a, if a wife is really
00:24:26.300
loving, these are the kinds of things that she would say and think and do. And so the more you can kind
00:24:31.840
of bring that to the surface and then make it conscious, uh, the easier life becomes and the
00:24:39.600
Fantastic. Yeah. I guess one of the, an example of that unconscious role would be, you know, a man
00:24:43.260
thinking, well, the way I show my love is just like working hard and providing for my family.
00:24:48.340
And there might be a woman who came from a family where her husband, where her dad was very
00:24:52.400
affectionate and spent a lot of time with their family. And that's what she's expecting, but he's got
00:24:56.860
the complete opposite expectation. Right. I'll give you one other quick illustration. Just
00:25:02.020
that seems so simple, but it was so impactful on this couple that we were working with a while back
00:25:07.140
and in the home that they had all these lovely little gifts for wedding presents, you know,
00:25:12.260
and they were going to decorate their apartment with the, you know, some stuff to put on the wall
00:25:16.520
and whatever. And it just kept getting put off because in her home growing up, it was always dad
00:25:23.680
who would get out a hammer and nail and a level and put that thing up on the wall. Mom had nothing
00:25:29.320
to do with that. Okay. In his home growing up, dad never thought about doing it. That was a woman's
00:25:35.080
job. She's the decorator. She's going to put the stuff on the walls. And so here they were,
00:25:39.040
they were married for about six, seven, eight months, and they're both waiting for the other
00:25:42.820
person to, to do what, to, to be a loving spouse, right? Because that's what a loving husband does.
00:25:48.880
That's what a loving wife does. And so I remember when they came back to see us for what we call a
00:25:53.200
marriage tune-up a few months into marriage, and they were just both distraught over this. And we
00:25:58.280
were like, are you serious? This is what's, you know, really weighing you guys down. But to them,
00:26:03.540
it was as serious as a heart attack because, and that's the power of these unconscious role
00:26:08.640
expectations. We build this into our psyche that this, if this person loved me, this is what they
00:26:14.500
would do. And it could be something as simple as just hanging a picture on the wall.
00:26:18.300
Right. So have those conversations before you get married. Let's talk, in the book you talk about
00:26:24.420
there's three factors needed for long lasting love in a marriage. What are those three factors and
00:26:31.580
what sorts of conversations should people be having before marriage to ensure that you're on the same
00:26:36.500
page when it comes to these factors? Yeah. Let me preface my comments and my response to this,
00:26:42.820
and I'll give you the three ingredients of romantic love that we know from studies at Yale University
00:26:48.580
by saying that when we devise the CIMBAS assessment, this is a personalized tool. It takes about 30
00:26:56.500
minutes to answer these questions. There's 300 items and all kinds of different, there's drag and drop
00:27:01.980
questions, true and false and sliders and radio buttons, all that kind of stuff. You answer this online
00:27:08.260
and you get this 15 page report on your relationship. Your partner does the same thing.
00:27:14.440
And one of the pages out of the 15 is dedicated to this very thing that I'm going to tell you about,
00:27:19.940
and that is love, love and sexuality. And years ago, and by the way, if somebody's interested in
00:27:27.060
that, they can go to CIMBASassessment.com. That's Y-M-B-I-S. It stands for saving your marriage
00:27:33.120
before it starts. But years ago at Yale University, there was a professor who did this incredible study
00:27:41.760
on romantic love when nobody else really was doing that. You know, it was too mushy. It wasn't
00:27:48.860
scholarly enough to study romantic love. His name was Robert Sternberg, by the way. And he did this
00:27:55.280
massive study, the first of its kind, to basically answer the question, what are the ingredients of
00:28:01.380
romantic love? And he came up with this thing called the triangular theory of love, which sounds
00:28:07.540
like an incredible sleeper, right? I mean, like, did we just lose half of our listeners when I said
00:28:12.520
that, right? Triangular theory of love. It sounds so, you know, academic, but I got to tell you, it's
00:28:17.820
super practical. And he said that if you just think of love as a triangle, and you can kind of visualize
00:28:24.180
three words, one on each side of the triangle, or, you know, and as they were to write them on,
00:28:29.900
on the outside of the triangle. The first one is passion. And that's really the biological
00:28:35.340
side of love. Passion is that part of love that kind of just flows with the hormones. There's
00:28:41.140
nothing particularly noble about it. It was, you know, that's what gets two people together. In the
00:28:46.200
first place, there's kind of this chemistry that takes place and you go, wow, I got to get to know
00:28:50.540
that person, right? That's passion, biological. On the other side of the triangle, you could write the
00:28:57.900
word intimacy and this is the emotional side of love. While passion is biological, intimacy is
00:29:04.960
emotional. And this is about all the kind of connectedness. We have things in common that we
00:29:13.860
just go, oh, wow, really? You too? And there's that sense of just intimacy that you get me and I get
00:29:20.480
you like nobody else on the planet. Like, wow, you like see through me. You have some deep
00:29:26.440
understanding of who I am. And it's great to be known, right? And it's great to know another person
00:29:32.840
that brings us together. That's intimacy. We're reading off the same sheet of music here. And then
00:29:39.600
on the base of the triangle, you can write the word commitment. And commitment is the willful side of
00:29:45.860
love. So if passion is biological and intimacy is emotional, commitment is willful. This is that
00:29:52.080
part of love that truly is a decision. This is that part of love that says, in spite of all the
00:29:57.740
things in my life, I can't seem to pin down. I'm going to make one thing rock solid. And that's my
00:30:02.920
relationship with you. Now, does that come from your hormones? Of course not. Does it come from your
00:30:08.800
emotions? No, it comes from your will. Love is a decision, as some like to say. So those are the
00:30:14.800
three ingredients of romantic love. But the research didn't stop there, just in identifying
00:30:22.180
the ingredients. Because here's what's important about this. The bottom line of all the research
00:30:27.680
was to show that these ingredients are incredibly fluid. They're not static. Love is not a static
00:30:34.920
thing you fall into and you fall out of. Love changes. There's an ebb and flow to it. There's
00:30:41.020
seasons to it. And so the love that you have today is not the kind of love you're going to have five
00:30:47.160
years from now or five months from now or even five days from now because love changes. There's a lot of
00:30:53.900
fluidity to it. And so that's why we always, when we're doing premarital work with couples, we often
00:30:59.220
work on how do you cultivate those ingredients of passion, intimacy, and commitment. Because if you're
00:31:05.480
waking up every morning after you get married and expecting all three of those ingredients to be at a
00:31:09.720
10 out of 10, you're going to be sorely disappointed because love doesn't work that way. It takes a lot
00:31:15.960
of attention on all three of those fronts. Right. And I imagine when people first get married,
00:31:20.980
passion and intimacy probably are like stronger. I mean, there's commitment there, but
00:31:26.700
it doesn't require so much will because they have all this emotional and biological drive to be
00:31:33.520
together. And then that's going to change as their relationship matures.
00:31:39.360
Yeah, that's exactly right. And when you begin to chart out love over the lifespan,
00:31:44.780
you will see what researchers call this big inverted bell curve. And so you have this incredible
00:31:50.400
satisfaction at the beginning. You know, you ask a couple that's just gotten married,
00:31:53.580
hey, how's your love life? It's incredible. You know, it's 10 out of 10. I'm so glad we got married.
00:31:58.220
And then you come back, you know, five years later, uh, not so much 10 out of 10 anymore.
00:32:03.220
And you come back, you know, 18 years later and it's like love life. What's that? You know,
00:32:08.900
and they have teenagers and, and the junior hires or whatever. And here's the, here's the really
00:32:14.280
encouraging news. You come back to that couple 25 years later, Hey, how's your love life? And what you
00:32:20.840
discover is there's this new kind of depth and maturity to their love life. And the level of
00:32:26.940
satisfaction is on the rise. And in the second half of marriage, a couple of love life and these
00:32:32.480
three ingredients increase significantly. All right. Now, of course, some couples don't make
00:32:37.680
it that far and they're missing out on the very best part of married life. But on the second half
00:32:42.120
of married life, a level of satisfaction literally begins to go off the scale. Social scientists no
00:32:47.040
longer have instruments to measure how happy these couples are. So it's an incredible, and by the way,
00:32:54.580
I don't want our listeners to get discouraged and say, Oh man, so you have to go through this big,
00:32:58.400
huge inverted bell curve and get disappointed. No, the point of that, that's big sociological
00:33:04.060
trend. The point of that is to say, if you know the secret, you know, what are the three essential
00:33:09.320
ingredients of love, passion, intimacy, and commitment? If you know this, you can unlock the,
00:33:15.880
you know, you have the key to unlock lifelong love at its fullest because you're going to work on
00:33:20.820
those three things. And that's enough to keep some couples going. You know, it's, it's, we,
00:33:25.620
we can sometimes think, Oh, there's another shiny object over here or whatever. Just focus on passion,
00:33:30.540
intimacy, and commitment. And you do the hard work of cultivating those three things and you're going
00:33:36.160
to love the life you live together. Right. And I mean, I guess one thing, I mean, I think that's
00:33:40.060
useful to understand for people because, you know, the passion is going to be there for, I mean,
00:33:43.980
I guess they say like the, the shelf life or the half-life of romantic love is like three years.
00:33:49.160
And then it starts to sort of petering out and that's natural, but there's things you can do.
00:33:53.380
So just expect that, right? If you don't feel the fireworks, like you felt when you first met your,
00:33:57.700
your wife, that's okay. It's natural, but there's things you can do to cultivate more passion,
00:34:02.260
uh, in your marriage. That's absolutely right. In fact, let me give you one practical thing you can
00:34:08.400
do. Uh, cause this research has been incredible. Leslie and I, we've been married for 32 years and we
00:34:14.280
discovered this, um, a number of years ago and it is so true in our relationship and lots of other
00:34:19.520
couples. But when you do, you know, it's one, we sometimes talk about date nights after you get
00:34:24.660
married, you know, so much emphasis is put on dating before you get married, but after you get
00:34:30.340
married, it's just important to continue your date dating life together. And, uh, what happens is
00:34:37.440
we kind of get stuck in a rut and we go to our favorite restaurant because, Oh, I love the lasagna
00:34:43.080
there. And then let's go catch the latest movie. And so we do that and then we come home. And so
00:34:48.560
it's kind of movie, uh, a dinner and a movie and kind of that's it and nothing wrong with that. That's
00:34:53.760
great. But here's what the research shows when a couple, especially a married couple will, that's
00:35:00.280
been married for a while, will do a date that is novel. In other words, they're doing some activity
00:35:05.960
that they've never done or they haven't done in a long time together. What happens is they have
00:35:12.000
this chemical brain shower of all these, uh, that incites all these emotions that they haven't had
00:35:18.900
since they fell in love and were dating in the early stages of the relationship. And so that experience
00:35:25.440
of doing new and exciting things together, um, and doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to
00:35:30.620
be expensive. I'm not talking about that. In fact, with the study, had these couples, Del Crow,
00:35:35.960
their, their wrists and their ankles together and they had to go through this obstacle course
00:35:40.320
and they compared what happened at the end of that date versus a couple that went out to a romantic
00:35:46.100
dinner and a movie. Well, who do you think was talking the most after that? Who do you think
00:35:50.480
was most energized after that? You know, and they were, they're going, Oh, I can't believe we beat
00:35:55.260
that other couple. And we made it over that one thing. And can you believe we went to that tunnel?
00:35:58.480
That was crazy, you know? And it just, it brings about all this new, um, kind of dormant
00:36:04.620
chemical of falling in love that hasn't been around for a while. So be innovative in your
00:36:10.420
dating world. All right. I love that. It's great practical advice. Um, so focus on these three
00:36:15.320
aspects of the love triangle, intimacy, passion, commitment. But even if you're focusing on those
00:36:20.060
things, there might be what you call saboteurs that will pop up even in a happy marriage. Um,
00:36:26.380
what are these saboteurs and what can you do before marriage to reduce the chances of them popping up?
00:36:31.740
Yeah. And once again, on our SIMBIS assessment, we have a page dedicated to this and, and, uh,
00:36:38.800
I got to tell you, this is the most neglected area of marital preparation, uh, today. And the
00:36:45.340
research shows it should be in the top three. It's, um, it's really fundamental and it can be summed up
00:36:51.840
in kind of a single sentence. And that is to adjust to things beyond your control. Um, if you don't get
00:36:59.780
a lock on this early on in your relationship, you're setting yourself up for serious heartache.
00:37:05.840
And, um, in fact, I remember Leslie and I were speaking in San Juan Island off the coast of,
00:37:12.420
of, uh, Seattle here. And, and, uh, we had to get to another engagement. And so we took this little,
00:37:18.520
you know, four seater Cessna, this pilot picked us up on this little Island and took us back into
00:37:23.520
Seattle. And as we were landing, I asked the pilot, I said, Hey, what's the secret to a good landing?
00:37:30.360
And he said, the secret is to find the right attitude in spite of atmospheric conditions.
00:37:35.740
And I thought he meant to say altitude, but he corrected me. He said, no attitude. And that
00:37:39.620
was the first I'd ever learned that pilots talk about an airplane having an attitude as it lands.
00:37:44.800
It has to do with the tail and the nose and relationship to the ground. And, and, uh, when I
00:37:49.320
got off an airplane, I remember I turned to my wife Leslie and I just said, man, I got to write that
00:37:52.860
down. Finding the right attitude in spite of atmospheric conditions. I wish we could give it
00:37:58.940
as a wedding gift to everybody that gets married in the world, because it would solve so many problems.
00:38:04.900
Um, the saboteurs that we face, uh, and if you haven't, you know, every, every good marriage
00:38:10.600
eventually bumps into something bad. It's just inevitable. Put your seatbelt on cause it's coming.
00:38:15.700
All right. Um, and, uh, for us, we have a, uh, a child that had incredible health challenges.
00:38:23.960
Um, for others, it might be something like bankruptcy or infertility or infidelity or just go down
00:38:30.840
the list, right? Every good marriage eventually bumps into something bad. How you adjust to that,
00:38:35.600
as well as all the little bumps in the road along the way will determine whether or not your marriage
00:38:40.440
sinks or swims. And it all comes back around to, uh, adjusting to things beyond your control,
00:38:47.120
finding the right attitude in spite of atmospheric conditions. Because saboteurs are things like
00:38:52.900
blame and, uh, resentment and self-pity. I remember when we first got married and we were living in Los
00:39:00.940
Angeles, going to graduate school. And I think that's one of the biggest self-pity parties Los Angeles has
00:39:05.740
ever seen. And self-pity is very contagious. Things just weren't going my way. And if you complain
00:39:12.480
about that in your marriage, your spouse will begin to kind of join the party. And before you know it,
00:39:17.880
you're kind of digging yourself into this big pit that serves no purpose whatsoever. So the
00:39:24.140
saboteurs of, of, uh, happy, happiness in marriage, the list goes on and on, but the remedy is the most
00:39:30.980
important thing. And that is finding the right attitude in spite of atmospheric conditions.
00:39:36.240
That's fantastic. I love that. Um, so we're the art of manliness podcast. Most of our listeners are
00:39:40.700
men. Um, there's been a lot, you know, some red, you know, written about, you know, men are from
00:39:45.460
Mars. Women are from Venus. They have, they communicate differently. They have different needs.
00:39:49.660
Is that really true? Do men and women communicate differently? And if so, um, what can men do to better
00:39:56.680
communicate with their wives or their future wife? Well, there's definitely a gender gap that we all
00:40:03.300
need to be conscious of. Um, but when it comes to, you know, your question about do men and women
00:40:09.300
communicate differently in a sense, but more important to me than the gender gap, which I want
00:40:14.300
to come back to in a moment, but more important is the personality that we bring into this relationship.
00:40:21.320
Um, because that will determine more about how we communicate, how we like to be
00:40:26.680
uh, communicated to by our spouse than anything else. And, uh, so, uh, once again, that's why we,
00:40:34.800
we built this assessment so that you can really dig into your two personalities. And what that does,
00:40:42.020
it not only just raises self-awareness or the hallmarks of wellbeing and health, but it also
00:40:47.980
opens a door for empathy. So you begin to bridge that gender gap more easily, um, because you're focused
00:40:54.880
not just on, Oh, men are this way and women are that way, which there's a lot of truth to that,
00:40:59.340
but it's also because you're going, I want to understand you as a person. And when we do that,
00:41:06.680
we kind of crack the code of each other's talk styles because we're understanding our personalities
00:41:11.780
in on the SIMBIS assessment. For example, we have this paragraph at the whole page on communication,
00:41:18.000
and we uncover your personal talk style, just how you are hardwired in your personality for
00:41:25.080
communication. And everybody is different. So you've got to understand that about yourself and
00:41:30.760
about each other. But when it comes to those bigger issues on bridging the gender gap, uh,
00:41:35.760
two things I'll mention, there's lots of them in, in, in our book, Saving Your Marriage Before It
00:41:39.960
Starts. We mentioned three things that every husband needs to know about his wife and vice versa.
00:41:44.460
So let me lift out one, uh, especially for men. And that is that every man needs to understand that
00:41:52.280
his wife, um, needs to have, um, needs to be cherished, cherished. And that word cherished
00:42:01.040
is a really feminine word because most men, in fact, some studies have even, you'll think I'm making
00:42:06.640
this up, but some studies have actually shown you ask, uh, women to list the top 10 things they want
00:42:12.520
in their spouse. And inevitably a woman will say, well, I want him to cherish me.
00:42:18.340
You ask men to list the top 100 things they want from their wife. And you'll be hard pressed to find
00:42:24.720
a guy that says, well, I know one thing she better cherish me. Right. Guys just don't think about that.
00:42:29.680
It's not in our nature. And so that that's one suggestion to cherish a woman. Now, what does that
00:42:35.380
mean? And I always love it. Leslie and I do these events around, uh, North America called fight
00:42:40.780
night. They're, they're, um, basically just a fun day night for a couple to kind of laugh while you
00:42:45.920
learn. And I will sometimes ask the guy, Hey men, what does it mean to cherish a woman? And you can
00:42:51.700
hear crickets in the room. Cause we just don't know. Cherish a woman, a lover. Yeah. Well, let's get a
00:42:57.460
little more fine than that, you know? And, and so, uh, just a silly example, uh, silly to some men,
00:43:04.900
uh, very serious for a woman. But let's say you, you show up at your wife's work when you know,
00:43:09.680
she's going to have a really challenging meeting or something like that. And you deliver her favorite,
00:43:14.420
uh, coffee drink, uh, from a favorite, uh, you know, barista. And you, you write a little note
00:43:21.300
on the lid and you just leave it on her desk. You may not even see her and you do that. All right.
00:43:25.860
That's cherishing a woman. That's saying, I'm thinking about you and I'm really, uh, I really
00:43:32.700
care about how your day's going. That's what we mean by cherishing a woman. So the book is filled
00:43:37.680
with all kinds of tips like that on how you can do those things as well as many others to bridge the
00:43:43.200
gender gap. But I'm glad you asked the question because it's a big one. Yeah. And then, you know,
00:43:47.920
this idea of, uh, communication, uh, you know, what's something that's going to happen up in marriage
00:43:52.560
every now and what's going to happen inevitably is arguments. You're going to have disagreements.
00:43:56.900
And I think a lot of people have this idea that a happy marriage is an, a marriage that where they
00:44:01.360
never argue, you never raise your voice at each other. Um, but is fighting really bad for a marriage
00:44:07.700
or can it actually be good for a marriage? Yeah. I appreciate that question too, because as I
00:44:12.440
just mentioned, you know, we did this event called fight night and it's all about conflict.
00:44:16.660
And the reason we do that and the reason that's so popular, we'll have several thousand couples each
00:44:21.860
time we go to do one of these things. And the reason is all of us have conflict. Nobody's immune,
00:44:28.200
right? Uh, the question is how do you use it to your advantage? And here's what we tell people,
00:44:33.420
uh, uh, those live events that we do, uh, when you master the skills of a good fight,
00:44:39.660
conflict becomes the price we pay for deeper intimacy. In other words, conflict can actually bring
00:44:45.700
the two of you closer together if you know how to manage it successfully. And so, uh, yeah,
00:44:51.680
to answer your question straight on, conflict is not bad for a marriage. Uh, what matters is how
00:44:57.720
you manage that conflict. So the goal is not to steer clear of it. It's just to know how to handle it.
00:45:04.880
And, uh, of course we have bad fights that draw us apart and we have dumb fights that are just a
00:45:11.040
complete waste of time. I had a couple that, uh, told me just this last week that they were fighting
00:45:16.520
because, uh, when they went to bed, um, uh, you know, the last person in bed didn't turn off the
00:45:23.760
lights and the light switch by the door. And they both just had this pride fight about, uh, you,
00:45:30.220
you get up. I did it last time you get up and they just fell asleep with their lights on,
00:45:34.060
you know, woke up at three o'clock in the morning, the lights are still as bright as day. Um,
00:45:38.200
you know, just, that's just a dumb fight, right? That's pride. And so when you learn to manage
00:45:44.140
those kinds of little tips, as well as the bigger things, like, are we going to move to St. Louis
00:45:48.900
for your job? Uh, when our family is here in Portland, Oregon, or whatever it might be,
00:45:53.840
you know, when you can learn to, to manage and navigate the tumultuous water, uh, you will learn
00:45:59.980
to bring your spirits together and, uh, rise above you'll be in the top 10% of couples that enjoy
00:46:05.060
success because so few couples know how to fight a good fight, as we like to say.
00:46:11.000
Yeah. I, those dumb fights, those, those happen. And it, I mean, I've had those with my wife and
00:46:15.920
I, we've had, we're, whenever they happen, it's like, I'm like, why are we fighting? Like one of
00:46:19.400
us will have those moments, like, I can't even remember, like, why were you fighting? And then
00:46:23.000
we started laughing. I mean, we kind of laughed it off and that's sort of our way of diffusing
00:46:26.200
the situation. Um, cause usually as we forget what set it off and it's usually dumb. Um, so that-
00:46:33.060
We had a couple, a little while ago, they were fighting about whether their cat was fat or
00:46:37.900
not. That's a dumb fight. You know, it's just like, why are we having this fight?
00:46:42.560
Are we just, I think the key is like for us to just like laughing about it and realizing,
00:46:46.880
okay, we just, we're human and we just got wasted five minutes of our lives. Um, so we've
00:46:53.420
been focusing on what to do to prepare for a marriage, but a lot of folks are listening
00:46:56.960
to this. Um, they're in a marriage. It's not so great. It could be better. They're having
00:47:03.380
problems. Do these tips apply to them if they, you know, do these things that they, they can
00:47:08.500
help strengthen and possibly save their marriage?
00:47:11.580
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, uh, you know, this assessment that I've been talking about, we
00:47:16.120
designed it for pre-marriage and, and kind of pre-engagement, you know, those couples on the
00:47:22.480
edge of, of commitment. Um, and what we discovered is, uh, it's applicable to any age or stage. Um,
00:47:30.860
you know, it doesn't matter whether you've been married for 30 years or, uh, or three, three years,
00:47:36.520
or you've just been dating for three years and you're thinking about getting married. Um, you know,
00:47:41.620
we all deal with these same issues and those issues are, are love and communication and conflict
00:47:47.860
and bridging the gender gap and attitude and expectations and, and all this stuff that we've
00:47:53.240
been, been talking about. And so that's why, uh, we actually, uh, now use this Symbus assessment
00:48:01.460
Fantastic. Well, Dr. Perry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people learn,
00:48:04.820
um, more about your work? I think you mentioned, uh, is it Symbus.com they can go to?
00:48:11.060
Symbusassessment.com and that's S-Y-M-B-I-S. That stands for saving your marriage before
00:48:17.660
it starts. That's the title of, uh, our book. And by the way, there's, there's her workbook
00:48:23.360
that, uh, people can go through that together. There's even a DVD if they want, but, uh, they
00:48:28.820
can find all of that on our website, our primary website, which is less and leslie.com less
00:48:36.020
and leslie.com. And, um, that's L-E-S and then the word and A-N-D and then Leslie L-E-S-L-I-E.com.
00:48:44.520
Um, and of course there's a link there to the Symbus assessment that we've been talking
00:48:49.240
Fantastic. Well, Dr. Les Parrott, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:54.420
Hey, my, my honor to do it. And thanks for having me on.
00:48:56.960
My guest today was Les Parrott. He is a clinical psychologist specializing in marriage and family.
00:49:02.040
Uh, he's the coauthor of the book, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. You can find more
00:49:06.200
information about his work at, uh, lesandleslie.com. Or like, as he said in the podcast, you can take
00:49:12.620
his Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts assessment at symbusassessment.com. Uh, and be
00:49:18.900
sure to check out the book on amazon.com, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. Also check out the
00:49:22.800
show notes at aom.is slash parrot. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness
00:49:39.000
Podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at
00:49:42.520
artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy the show and have gotten something out of it, I'd really
00:49:46.600
appreciate it if you give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps us out a lot. As
00:49:50.680
always, thank you for your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to