***The Perfect Wedding Gift

The Perfect Wedding Gift

By Dr. Charles D. Schmitz and Dr. Elizabeth A. Schmitz
"the marriage doctors"

Award Winning Authors of the NEW Hardback Book
Golden Anniversaries: The Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage

The best wedding gift of all is the gift of marital success! While we tend to shower newlyweds with material gifts, perhaps, the best gift of all would be to share with them the secrets of a successful marriage. In other words, maybe we should help those who are getting married learn how to get it right the first time. A happy and successful marriage could be the greatest gift of all.

You cannot learn or understand success by studying failure. That’s a fact! We understood this notion more than 25 years ago when we began our research. By interviewing couples with successful marriages lasting from 30 to 60 years, we learned a lot about successful marriage. We discovered the “Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage” by gathering data from hundreds of interviews with long-time, happily married couples and their own extraordinarily successful 41-year marriage.

We have determined over the years that the best way to understand successful marriage is to study successful marriages. Our research protocol is a very different approach from the one employed by most relationship experts. Frankly, we do not believe you learn a lot about success by studying failure. You learn about success by studying success. So study success we did.

The criteria for determining a successful marriage (i.e., qualified to be interviewed for our study) were stringent:

• First, the couple had to be married to each other for at least 30 years;
• Second, in response to the question “How would you rate the overall happiness of your marriage on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 the highest)?” The couple being interviewed had to agree that it was a 9 or 10.
• Third, we developed a field-tested research protocol that determined if their marriage was truly a successful one.

From these successful marriages we gathered more than 15,000 years of collective wisdom from couples in the United States — people of different faiths, ages and ethnicities, including Caucasians, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans married in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In addition, we interviewed successfully married couples in China, France, Great Britain, Argentina, Chile, Taiwan, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and Canada. After 25 years and hundreds of interviews with successfully married couples (as well as our own successful 41 years of marriage), we discovered seven pervasive characteristics present in all successful marriages.

The central point of our research is that successful love and relationships are an accumulation of the “little things.” It isn’t enough to just think about the little things or just talk about the little things. You have to just DO the little things every day. That’s what makes love and relationships last! If you understand and implement the simple ideas presented in our book, a newly married couple will be well on their way to having a successful and long-lasting marriage.

While successful marriage isn’t difficult to understand, many couples fail to do the simple things required to make their marriages work. They either forget to do them or they haven’t learned them in the first place.

As a candid glimpse into the lives of successfully married couples, Golden Anniversaries: The Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage, provides a uniquely positive perspective on what makes marriages survive and thrive. Using poignant, real life stories to uncover the “Seven Secrets for Successful Marriage,” we have captured the essence of more than 25 years of interviews with successfully married couples in the United States and around the world. And you will love the results! Newly married couples will certainly benefit their marriage by knowing them.

Successful couples also talked about their marriages going through cycles similar to the stages of life. Many of the couples described experiencing difficulties and turmoil with the transition into a different stage, such as the addition of children, the increased pressures of striving for success in their careers or the empty nest syndrome. While each change brought its own rewards, it also brought with it stress on each individual and on the relationship within the marriage itself. Their stories shed light on ways to use the “Seven Secrets” to effectively handle the stress of these anticipated transitions.

By reading our “labor of love,” you will learn that understanding successful marriage is a prerequisite to understanding why most marriages succeed and some fail. This book gives you the power to make your marriage a success so you can celebrate your Golden Anniversaries together.

A successful marriage is the perfect gift! Make no mistake about that.

Love well!