Patience, humility, forgiveness, tolerance, compassion, honesty, open-mindedness, and trust are all gifts that marriage offers.

One of the things I love most about teaching college students is that I get to hear about their views of contemporary life. In my human development class, I recently mentioned the statistic that 40% of babies today are being born to unwed parents. Rather than shock or dismay, their response was more like, “So?”

We then launched into a discussion about how tenuous marriage is. “Why should you get married if six months later you’re only going to get divorced?” was their response which came as more of a statement than a question. The consensus of the class seemed to be “Marriages fail. Why bother.”

Their attitude made me search for a way to respond to their cynicism about the institution of marriage. The answer that I came up with is that marriage teaches that life isn’t only about you. Marriage forces you to consider someone else’s needs and wants. It forces you to think about what impact any decision you make would have on another human being. In short, it forces you out of narcissism into partnerism. Partnerism seems antithetical to today’s age of “me.” Perhaps that’s caused, in part, by survival anxiety. The world seems more complex and more threatening. Jobs are scarcer. Today’s 20 somethings are putting marriage and child bearing on hold until they feel that a steady stream of income is more certain. If, as they feel, that marriage is so tentative, their rationale becomes that they better get their career act together before the make any kind of commitment to a partner.

This frame of thinking, while logical, negates the spiritual purpose of our being on earth. Spiritually, we’re here to learn how to love. In the words of Elton John “Love is the opening door, love is what we came here for.”

I think one problem we have in modern life is that we confuse hedonism with love. Hedonism is short term search for pleasure. Our 24/7 world carries with it an emphasis on immediate gratification. Relationships based on immediate gratification are empty. Larry the cable guy tells a story about how he was awakened at four in the morning by a girl pounding on the door. “What in the world?” he says, “I got up and let her out!” “What in the world” is too often the response after a loveless sex session, no matter how hot and heavy it started out.

There’s a study by researcher Barbara Fredrickson about the effects of Loving-Kindness meditation. Loving-Kindness Meditation is a Buddhist meditative technique in which people focus on extended thoughts of love and well-being to themselves, people they knew, and to the entire world. At the end of the eight-week duration of the study, Fredrickson’s subjects reported fewer symptoms of illness, increased life satisfaction, and an increased sense of purpose.

Imagine what a life-long focus on extending loving-kindness to a spouse can do. Of course sometimes focusing on a spouse’s needs and wants in addition to your own can seem like a burden. But that’s where the loving-kindness is; that’s where opening the heart is; and that’s where scraping away the veneer of separateness uncovers more and more of the loving soul that is your original nature.

Patience, humility, forgiveness, tolerance, compassion, honesty, open-mindedness, and trust are all gifts that marriage offers. When embraced, these gifts lead to increased joy, well-being and health.


Dr. Sorah Dubitsky, Ph.D., is an author, speaker, teacher and healer. She conducts workshops and seminars on love, marriage, sexuality and spirituality. She also offers individual and couples counseling. She is also a fellow at Florida International University’s Center for the Study of Spirituality. Her book, A Chorus of Wisdom is available at Amazon.com and all major online and retail book outlets. Visit her website. Send an email to dr.sorah@drsorah.com. Your can also listen to Dr. Sorah’s postcast of her Course in Miracles lectures. There is also a YouTube Channel devoted to Sorah and Larry Dubitsky’s wisdom and humor . © copyright 2009 by Dr. Sorah Dubitsky.