Marriages Don't Plummet Toward Divorce
Marriages Don't Plummet Toward Divorce
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On the evening of December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401, scheduled from New York’s JFK to Miami, crashed into the Florida Everglades killing 101 people.
The plane was functioning perfectly and could have easily landed safely at it’s planned destination. However, during the final descent into Miami, the flight crew became preoccupied with a burnt out green lightbulb that indicated whether the landing gear had extended correctly.
The crew decided to put the aircraft into a circling holding pattern and set about investigating the problem. However they became so preoccupied with their investigation that they failed to notice that the plane was incrementally descending toward the ground.
By the time any of the flight crew noticed what was happening it was too late for Flight 401 and it became one of Americas deadliest crashes.
Like flight 401, marriages don’t often become casualties due to some defect or malfunction; they rarely plummet toward divorce. Instead they gradually descend downward, almost imperceptibly.
We become preoccupied with lesser important things and put our marriages on ‘Auto-Pilot’ in a circling holding pattern. And slowly, but ever so surely, we descend until it becomes too late.
By the time we notice that our marriage is about to fall apart, it’s often too late. We can’t undo years of drifting apart and downward drifting in one day, this simply isn’t possible because good marriages are often the natural consequence of couples doing the basic fundamentals consistently over many years.
Since the quality of our lives will largely be determined by the quality of our relationships, it is unwise to put them, especially our marriages into a circling holding pattern.
But we do this when we begin to neglect the basic fundamentals of expressing and demonstrating love, spending quality time together and communicating. We might become preoccupied with career, raising children, entertainment and many other things, and all the while our marriage slowly descends toward destruction.
A few questions that we might ask ourselves to help us avert an avoidable disaster include,
How often to I express love and demonstrate it to my spouse?
How often do I spend quality time with my spouse?
How often do I set time aside to communicate with my spouse?
Ultimately the marriages that excel will be those that are striving for and succeeding at doing these basic fundamentals every day. The moment we stop doing these basic things, we start putting our marriages into a holding pattern that can end tragically if we aren’t careful. Like planes, no marriage can keep going forever in a holding pattern. Sooner or later it will come down with tragic consequences.
Of course there will different destinations or periods in life, and couples will indeed take-off and land many times as they navigate through life together, and they will also experience turbulence. But holding patterns, if used at all, should be used briefly and very carefully.
As we approach another new year, we need to figuratively head back to the cockpit of our marriage, take it off auto-pilot, leave our circling holding pattern, and take control as we fly and navigate toward our desired destinations of a robust and rejuvenating relationship.
Happy New Year,
Matthew