I was watching The Biggest Loser the other night. It was my first time. I know. I know. I live under a boulder the size of Mount Everest. I don't get out to the remote very often.
At any rate, what really struck me about the show was this: the weigh in. A few of the contestants lost 3 to 5 pounds during the week. They referred to this weight loss as "a bad 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. But a bad week? 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 marriage 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 marriage project, it took many years for my marriage 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 marriage 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 marriage 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 marriage 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 marriage.
As much as I'd love to cross a finish line, collect my "I completed a marriage project marathon and lived to tell about it" T-shirt, and just be done with it all, I can't. There are many days when my marriage is easy, blissful and just dang wonderful.
There are other days when I'm tempted to get in my car, drive away and never come back. On those days I must talk to myself a lot and work on my marriage all over again. It's always worth it.
Pre order my book about my marriage journey: Project: Happily Ever After
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