This Royal Marriage Could Last
Editorial by Divorce Busting Coach, Cheryl LaBarre

As a marriage educator and divorce busting coach I frequently run into clients who read Raoul Felder’s book in hopes of easily erasing their marital challenges and hoping for a happier life after divorce. While in some instances divorce is necessary (untreated addictions, physical abuse), as a divorce attorney himself, I’ll just bet that most of his clients simply report being “unhappy”. The normalizing of this disposability of marriage is what makes divorce socially contagious.

The prevalence of our soul mate mentality has created over 40 years of broken families who most often find that their ‘happily ever after’ doesn’t really exist—anywhere. By then, families have been broken, children have been shuttled from house to house every other week, wealth has been drastically depleted, chemical abuse and depression increases, kids are more likely to participate in high risk behavior, and the conflict that one had with the other doesn’t go away, because the logistics have just become even more challenging to manage and negotiate. In reality, it is not marriage that fails, people fail. Many fail to have realistic expectations that marriage is not intended to make us “happy”. Research indicates that happy people before marriage make happy spouses in marriage. No person can make us happy. Happiness is an inside job.

When Felder says “if they have ups and downs like most people, they’d be better off apart”, he gives flippant permission to disappointed spouses out there that thought that marriage meant “happily ever after”. I can promise that all of our marriages will have ups and downs, (including royal marriages) that our spouses will disappoint, annoy, challenge us and we will do the same to them. Learning how to intentionally create more of the good and reduce the challenges is not only possible, it is what all long married folks learn to do eventually. It’s called being a grown up. Marriage education classes are available to help create a good marriage so that the fallacy of good divorce can be avoided.


Michele Weiner-Davis
The Divorce Busting Center

Transform your marriage with a private 2-day intensive with Michele Weiner-Davis. http://www.themarriageintensive.com
Email michele@divorcebusting.com