What the Biggest Fail Taught Me On Marriage

All of us want a quick fix, but that isn’t the way of fixing weight or matrimony. I think of it as being a garden, you plant your seeds, a few were a good idea, others you discover were weeds. You water it, watch it sprout, but still have to wait a very long time until you eat your tomato. Then what takes place? You begin once more, day after day, perhaps with better land, few weeds and a more knowledge.

I was watching The Biggest Loser another night. It was my first time. I know. I live under a rock the size of Mount Everest. I do not get out to the faraway very often. In any case, what really struck me concerning the show was this: the weigh in. Several of the contestants lost 2 to 6 pounds during the week. They mentioned this weight loss as "a terrible week."

Three to five pounds is a bad week?! Sure it might sound like a tiny change compared to the 11 and 12 pound losses of some of the other contestants. There are millions of dieters all over the world who would kill to get on the scale and see a number that is one half a pound lighter than the number they saw the week before. Three pounds for most dieters is usually cause for celebration.

At any rate, the show got me thinking about how we Americans have come to expect instant and dramatic results.

And that got me thinking about matrimony improvement.

As a health writer, I’ve penned dozens of diet articles. As a result I’ve written the following line more times that I can remember: It took you many years to put on those pounds. That’s why it takes a long time to get them back off.

The same thing, I’ve found, is true with marriages. As I learned from my own matrimony project, it took many years for my matrimony to go from Wedded Bliss to Planning His Funeral. As a result, I could not expect to have one deep heart-felt talk with my husband and then-poof!-all of my marital problems would be solved.

My marriage could not be fixed with the equivalent of a crash diet. No, it needed a lifelong change.

As a result, my marriage improvement progress looked like this.

Stage 1: Hopeless. I initially started working on my matrimony so I could know that I gave it my all before giving up. I didn’t truly expect the project to work. I ordered 12 marital improvement books and pledged to read them anyway. I wanted to know that I’d tried everything before giving up.

Stage 2: False Hope. Some of the techniques we tried actually worked. We started having sex again. We started hugging again. We started having conversations again. After just one or two months, I told friends that my matrimony was SAVED! I was annoyingly evangelical about my project and about how everyone else needed one, too!

Stage 3: Humbling Realization. We got in a huge fight over getting the VCR to work properly. That’s when I realized that a marriage can’t necessarily be saved in just a couple months-just as a dieter can’t necessarily lose all of her weight in just a couple weeks.

Stage 4: Real Hope. After 6 months, I could see we were consistently taking two steps forward and only one step back. It was similar to a dieter losing 3 pounds, gaining 1 and then losing three more.

Stage 5: Set Back and Anger. About a year after the project, we got in a huge fight over whether my husband could go for a bike ride. I got so angry that I screamed obscenities with our daughter nearby and I asked my husband to, "leave." I then sobbed that my matrimony would never be saved. And then I promised to try even harder.

Stage 6: Acceptance and Surrender. It has been three years. Now I see that a marriage project is never done. The journey is never truly over. If a dieter reaches her goal weight and then breaks the diet and starts regressing into bad eating and lifestyle habits again, the weight comes back on. It’s the same with matrimony.

As much as I’d like to cross a ending line, gather my "I finished a matrimony plan marathon and lived to tell about it" T-shirt, and just be done with all of it, I can’t. There are lots of days when my matrimony is simple, pleasurable and just dang fantastic. There are more days when I’m tempted to get in my car, drive away and never come back. On those weeks I have to talk to myself a lot and work on my matrimony all over again.

It is an interesting take on both the show and on the realities of matrimony. Like our dieting, matrimony does have its ups and downs and only works when you put effort and time into it. I’ve never seen the show either. But I like this reminder that improving and sustaining a good matrimony is an ongoing trip.