Is your marriage in crisis?

Try this quick quiz.

A. Are you married? Y/N
B. Are you married? Y/N
C. Are you married? Y/N
D. Are you married? Y/N
E. Are you married? Y/N

If you answered Yes to one of these questions, there is a 90% chance your marriage is currently in crisis, recently been in crisis, about to go into crisis, or on a slow burn towards crisis.
..........
The above is an extract from the book Man Overboard. Many readers are sceptical about this remark, especially men. But those for whom the crisis is like a wave crashing on rocks know it is happening... and that wave started a long time before it crashed, a long way out at sea. And it has been a long time coming. The men who doubt the power of the wave are the ones washed off the rocks.

I found support for my contention in the pages of the book The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason. The institution of marriage precipitates a crisis for each individual that enters into it because it carries with it a conflict between 'the needs for dependence and for independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency.' Marriage is an intense invasion of privacy, he says. 'The wedding is merely the beginning of a lifelong process of handing over absolutely everything, and not simply everything that one owns but everything that one is.'

This next bit is beautiful. If you thought what you were going through was a mistake, dwell on this - it's a natural part of the process of marriage. He says: 'There is no one who is not broken by this process. It is excruciating and inexorable, and no one can stand up to it. Everyone gets broken on the wheel of love, and the breaking that takes place is like nothing else under the sun.'

Pain goes with the territory. Love is about feeling pain as your ego is broken down and reconstructed such that you can share your life with another, caring for her as much as for yourself. There is a crisis of ego built into the institution of marriage. And that crisis lasts as long as the marriage lasts. But there is a beautiful freedom to be found there, when your surrendering enables your partner to open like a flower to become the person they were born to be.

THE FULL TEXT OF 'MAN OVERBOARD' IS AVAILABLE IN THE FIRST POST OF THIS BLOG