Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 21

There’s another battle raging too: the battle to save relationships. Over 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Our belief from counselling hundreds of couples is that around 70 per cent of these marriage break-ups are preventable. That is, they are caused by people panicking; not having the skills, the support, or sometimes the maturity, to push on through a layer of difficulty which, if it had been faced, would have led to considerable growth. It has been found that people once separated, usually re-partner, then encounter the very same difficulties four or five years down the track – plus all the stresses left over from the first marriage: access, support, and so on. The idea that ‘If I could just find the right partner everything would be wonderful’, while certainly good to pursue as an ideal, is often flawed because it’s the same us that we take wherever we go!

Separated people frequently admit – in the privacy of the counselling room – ‘If I knew what I know now, I would have stayed and worked on my marriage’. While there are partners whom are worth leaving: intractably violent, patently untrustworthy, abusive or addicted; the great majority of us marry people with hang-ups very similar to our own, and from whom we could learn a great deal if we were to persist. This doesn’t mean putting up with what you don’t like, but learning how to negotiate change.

Whoever you are partnered with, it’s still the same task. To thrive in love means learning some skills – which this book will help you with. It means putting a priority on having healthy relationships. This means not getting caught up in the pressure of an insane society – the rush to earn and spend – but realizing that time is the most precious commodity in life and investing it in ways that will maximize the love in your life. This might actually mean increasing your own reflective time (sometimes the best thing you can do for your marriage or your family is take a long walk in the countryside – by yourself). And of course increasing the time you spend with each other, to give love the chance to grow.

Time is the central issue of modern life. We no longer walk down grassy lanes to visit our friends, or work in the fields with lots of time to think, so we have to deliberately set aside soul time: time for peaceful reflection; the opportunities for deep and wandering conversations which were once an everyday part of human life. The enemy of love in the modern world is not hate, but hurry. The good news is that whenever we invest time and effort between any two human beings, parent and child, friend and friend, then love will grow.

So these two battles – for more loving lives for children; and more committed, resilient and erotically charged relationships between men and women – are entwined. Our kids don’t need us to stay stuck in bad marriages or to leave our difficult marriages behind but to get in and sort out our problems so they can see their parents in a living, yet secure and strengthening union. We owe this stability to ourselves and to them.

To assert the importance of love and people is to hold a bright flaming sword up in the snarling face of economic rationalism, the cancerous culture of get-and-spend. More and more people are doing this. More and more people are choosing love as the central principle of their life. It is important to make this choice and let it be the heart of every action.