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  1. The Fundamental Human Concerns and Their Existential, Strategic and Competitive Utility
    15 Topics
  2. The Fundamental Business Concerns and Their Financial, Strategic and Competitive Importance In IR#4
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  3. The Fundamental Marriage Concerns
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Section 3, Topic 3

MC #1 – Our Vows, the Ethics of Our Marriage [15 pages]

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The first concern of marriage is the ethics of the marriage. 

Ethics are individual and social actions or practices of care that we invent for the sake of producing a willingness in others to include us in their future.

Ethics are actions people perform that are grounded in a set of “values”, or judgments, about what outcomes are important, useful and worthwhile enough to produce or pay for with one’s time, energy, money or opportunities.

They can be any category of values, including financial values, academic values, identity values, structural values, or marriage values.

“Ethical action” is individual and social action that is consistent with the category of values and coherent with their fulfillment.

“Unethical action” is inconsistent with values and incoherent with their fulfillment in the world.

The Marriage Workshop focuses on producing practical, strategic thought and action that is consistent with the 14 fundamental concerns and coherent with their care, or ethical thought and action.

When we do not think and act ethically, other people do not want to have us in their lives, and our thoughts and actions thwart our intentions, so we fail to fulfill them.

They do not want us to have the capacity to negatively affect their concerns. 

They don’t want to think with us, accept our assessments or promises, listen to our requests, or have us cooperate with them in shared actions to take care of concerns. 

If we think and act unethically with our spouse, our marriage is over fundamentally even if we continue to live together, no matter how nice and pleasant our relationship may appear inside or outside the marriage. 

Real marriage is not a pretension, but a deep partnership in shared concerns. 

The first concern in a marriage must always be thought and action that is ethically consistent with fundamental concerns, especially our vows or commitments to one another, and coherent with taking care of them satisfactorily.

Fundamental Vows

In the Domain of Marriage, the ethics of marriage are expressed as Marriage Vows that constitute values for each spouse’s behavior with the other.  These are commitments we make at the beginning of our marriage about how we will treat each other in the marriage and for the rest of our lives. 

Usually, our vows begin with some form of commitment to love, honor and cherish the other person. 

We also include an ethical commitment to monogamy or a commitment to forsake all others sexually.

Then we speak the extremely difficult conditions that may occur in any marriage and commit to keeping our vows even then: in sickness and in health; in good times and bad; until death do us part. 

When our vows are just pretty, pretentious or profound-sounding words that are empty of meaning, or we forget them the moment we have uttered them because we are actually following a procedure or form, we are making no real commitment.  Once again, the 50+% divorce rate is no surprise.

Vows are “empty” when spouses are pretending during the ceremony, much like they do on television, and reading a script, rather than really making commitments they understand and fully intend to keep for the rest of their lives.  Vows are “empty” when spouses are acting as if they are playing a role in a wedding, as a spouse for the moment, and not making promises to think and act ethically, which require interpretations and commitments to care for the real concerns of another for the rest of our lives.

This phony or fake commitment is the first unethical move in many marriages, which really means the marriage is over before it begins. 

In our observation, usually, both spouses pretend or make “empty vows” they do not understand or commit to.  In our conversations with spouses over the years, we can track the source of their dissatisfaction with each other back to this moment.  Interestingly, it is easy to see that the couple never really got married in the first place.   “Irreconcilable differences” often means the marriage was bogus from the beginning, rather than the result of attempts to make the marriage “work” after they got married legally.

The second unethical moment we find is the honeymoon, which means whatever spouses do on their honeymoon is inconsistent with their fundamental concerns and incoherent with their care.  (We will leave that claim for the reader to ponder.)

To keep ethical commitments, spouses must have an interpretation of the concerns they want taken care of and the actions appropriate for taking care to produce satisfactory outcomes.  Spouses have to know what their vows mean to their capacities to live a good life with one another, their family and their community, or they make no sense.

We don’t commit to love, honor, cherish or forsake all others “till death do us part” idly.  These are serious adult commitments that children, or children pretending to be adults, cannot make.  This is because they require an understanding of the concerns they address and of how we need to think and act with each commitment in order to perform it effectively or successfully from our spouse’s point of view. 

*   Remember, these are commitments we make to our spouse so our spouse, and only our spouse, can say whether he or she is satisfied with how we fulfill them.

Our marriage vows are commitments we make to our spouses to act to produce satisfactory outcomes in our marriages for each fundamental concern of marriage and, therefore, we need to learn to invent practices that fulfill those commitments in wide varieties of specific situations. 

Mere understanding of our vows and marriage concerns is useless to our spouse.  After all, what good does it do our thirst if someone only understands we are thirsty but does nothing to cure it? 

When we mistakenly think understanding equals commitments and the skills needed to fulfill them, a notion that is a byproduct of our educational system,

… we say we understand our vows, which is easy,

… but we don’t commit to fulfill them by producing outcomes coherent with their satisfactory care, which is very, very difficult and very, very costly,

… and why marriage is for adults, not children.

When we commit to our marriage vows, we commit to act with and from them in our marriage.  To fulfill our commitments satisfactorily, our bodies need to be able to perform actions coherent with their care so that our intentions are fulfilled in the world, rather than speak empty rhetoric that disappears like smoke in the wind.  Like all other actions our body performs effectively, we require education, coaching, observing, assessing and recurrent practice to succeed.

Also, like other actions, when we try to perform them in new situations or new environments, we have to adapt to the new situation in order to fulfill them.

Marriages last a lifetime, or that is our intention when we say until death do us part.  They exist in many environments and situations over that time. 

In addition, both spouses are growing older and, usually, raising a family, which also means spouses’ “spaces of possibilities” to fulfill certain intentions, such as earning, saving and investing enough money to “live a good life” during 20-30 years of old age with their children and grandchildren, are always shrinking

This obligates spouses to produce knowledge and money for old age by age 60, which is when age-related infirmities that stop people from working begin to appear, and at a much faster pace than might be comfortable.

But it is also part of the job.  It’s part of fulfilling one’s marriage vows to love, honor and cherish, at least if we think helping our spouse eat, have health care, live in a safe home, be able to drive and visit with family is consistent with them.

Spouses, as well as their families, are always becoming new concerns no matter what is happening in the environment around them. 

This means that to live in a marriage successfully both spouses must always be making new interpretations of their situations, the selves they have become and the selves they will become (old and retired),

… and be endlessly redesigning their specific ethical practices of loving, honoring and cherishing one another.

Our interpretation of loving, honoring, cherishing and forsaking all others includes these distinctions: 

What does it mean to “forsake all others”?

To forsake all others is relatively simple so we will begin with it. 

To forsake all others is just “a forbid” in the relationship.  But people have different interpretations about what exactly is to be forsaken.  Sexual intercourse is obvious to most people.  For most, flirting is obvious.  From there, most couples need to have an understanding of what else is forbidden, or required, such as always acting as if our spouse is right next to us when we are working.

In our experience, during the three-to-eight-year period after the marriage begins, both spouses need to practice what we call “announcing” their marital status with their dress and actions.  This keeps peace in the relationship, and shuts down advances from others in the community who are still looking for a spouse.

After that period, if the marriage is strong, we notice spouses give one another increasing trust to express themSelves more in public through what they wear and how they speak the virtues of others.  That is, men and women who trust their relationship can begin to dress “sexy” again in public.

Both spouses, however, must endeavor to never cause the other to worry.

What does it mean to “love”?

To commit to love someone is to promise to maintain our assessment that our spouse is all right just the way he or she is, and just the way she or he is not.

It means to avoid managing, improving, judging and evaluating our spouse because, after all, we have already said that for us our spouse is O.K. just the way he or she is now.

So right after the marriage ceremony it is inappropriate for spouses to clap their hands gleefully and announce, “Now I’ve got ‘em!  Now I can manage, judge, fix and improve them so that they are the way I really want them to be!”  Not.

With the commitment to love comes the obligation for spouses to avoid arrogant judgments that their ideas about how their spouse could “improve” have any merit at all.  In fact, intentions to make one’s spouse fit one’s images of a “perfect spouse” are not only arrogant and immature, they are also deeply disrespectful to spouses, vows and to the discourse of marriage.

The commitment to love obligates a spouse to maintain the assessment of acceptance and positive assessment in good times and bad times, in sickness and in health, while forsaking all others until death. 

A commitment to love is also a commitment to declare into existence and speak our spouse’s virtues.  We commit to speak our spouse’s virtues publicly as well as in private. 

We declare or interpret the virtues of our spouse in private as an aid to the development and empowerment of our spouse. 

We grant our spouse’s enormous psychological power to specify who we are, and who we are not, in the world.  The more we speak our spouse’s virtues, the more our spouse can try to fulfill them in our marriage and in the world. 

We speak our spouse’s virtues publicly to inform our community.  We do it to build trust and dignity for membership.

What does it mean to “honor”?

To commit to honor our spouse is to promise to hold his or her concerns in “high regard” or with very positive assessments. 

It means that we promise our spouse that we will hold our spouse and what he or she cares about in life in high regard,

… whether or not we share the point of view

… because our “agreement” is not needed, wanted or asked for.

What does it mean to “cherish”?

To commit to cherish our spouse is to promise to hold his or her concerns as our own, or as importantly as we hold our own.

To hold our spouse’s concerns as our own is to commit to act for the sake of them as if they were our own. 

Sometimes, that means doing nothing but allowing our spouse to act as he or she chooses for the sake of the concerns.  Sometimes it means helping our spouse to think, design action or take care.  Sometimes it means to just get the job done for our spouse if we can.

To love, honor and cherish our spouse requires wisdom, care, power and discipline.  This is part of our Marriage is a Work of Art in Progress. 

One aspect of the wisdom we require to love, honor and cherish our spouses is how to support our spouse and let him or her “be” at the same time. 

If our spouse wants new clothes or a set of golf clubs, that is relatively easy to help with or provide. 

If our spouse wants to accomplish something, we need to have the wisdom to know that we cannot do this for him or her in the way we can buy a gift of clothing. 

Depending upon the concerns of our spouse, we need to have wisdom and skill to love, honor and cherish him or her.

Honoring our vows is one of the first virtues we can build with our spouse. 

Honoring our vows is a skill we develop and maintain with careful attention.  Needless to say, it is also one of our weakest cultural skills. 

Even though we may not have learned these skills in childhood from our parents, we must know them by the time we are courting in order to speak them and demonstrate our capacity to perform. 

For most of us, we didn’t know them even when we supposedly committed to them at our wedding.  Performing a ceremony, however pretty it might be, and committing to lifetime vows are not the same thing.  They are, in fact, opposites.

In our experience, one of the primary causes of the 50% divorce rate for first marriages, and a 70% divorce rate for the second, is that people are not keeping their vows and don’t realize it because they were only using “empty” rhetoric to put on a good show during their wedding.

Linda and I witness this ourselves when we talk with couples who are in trouble and disoriented, report mediocre marriages, or have failed and are divorced. 

Without exception, in our experience for 40 years, these couples do not remember their vows.  Literally, most of them don’t remember what they committed to at their wedding and have no idea about the real and adult meaning of their vows, anyway.  Sometimes they had them written down in their photo album.  Sometimes they even had them framed and hung on the wall as a memento of the occasion. 

In every case, though, they have no operational interpretation of what their vows mean as a set of actions with a purpose and conditions of satisfaction.


#1 – Extension of Our Vows

Reciprocal Vows

An uncommonly successful marriage ethic

Because so many people whom we have interviewed are as thoughtless about the lifetime vows they are accepting from their spouse as they are about the vows they are making, Linda and I believe that our culture needs to produce an extension of traditional marriage vows.  Explicit reciprocal vows are in order.

When people’s marriage vows are under stress, which means at least one spouse is having trouble loving, honoring and cherishing his or her spouse, the other spouse’s thoughts and actions often have something to do with the problem. 

Making a “reciprocal vow” to our spouse to help them keep their vows with as little effort and as much joy and satisfaction as possible can only help with this problem until the common sense of our culture that surrounds marriage and leads to the 50% divorce rate corrects itself.

The problem is that marriage vows are more challenging and difficult to keep than most people we have met imagine.  It’s not easy to love, honor and cherish someone 24/7 when exhausted, raising a family, working hard, under stress and trying to figure out what to do and how to do it in order to survive, be free and “live a good life”. 

With a 50% divorce rate it is clear that spouses can and do make it impossible for one another to keep their vows despite their best intentions. 

We might say during the wedding that we commit to loving, honoring and cherishing our spouse, but that doesn’t mean people are willing and able to keep these vows throughout every challenging situation.  And they may not be able to keep them over a long expanse of time when dealing with many stresses while exhausted and under-educated about how to make enough money to afford the goods and services everyone requires to take satisfactory care of their concerns.

The name we propose for the extension of marriage vows is, Reciprocal Vows”.  This practice is missing today and it certainly does not exist in our culture’s common sense notions about how to make and keep a marriage working.  We call reciprocal vows a commitment to act that makes it easy for a spouse to keep his or her vows to the other. 

Reciprocal vows are made in appreciation for a commitment to love, honor and cherish made to one spouse by the other spouse. 

With reciprocal vows we honor the commitment made to us by our spouse and respect it by committing, in return, to be as easy, enjoyable and rewarding to love, honor and cherish as possible.  After all, our spouse, whom we love, really has many more important things to do with his or her life than work hard to deal with our misbehavior, indifference, thoughtlessness, immaturity, irresponsibility, etc. 

Reciprocal vows include our commitment to act in a way that also makes it easy for our spouse to forsake all others, which means we need to be good at sex and enthusiastic about it, rather than ignorant, inhibited, indifferent and mediocre. 

If we have to go through some embarrassment about sex to learn how to be really good at it for our spouse in order to make it easy for them to “forsake all others”, then we go through whatever is necessary with as much passion as we can muster. 

Nothing about companionship-intimacy-sex is obvious.  We must learn everything in order to be good at it.  And the only way human beings learn is by languaging, or talking about something.  In order to get good at sex, therefore, spouses have to read and talk about it.  And, they need to practice, a lot.  Let the good times roll!!!!!

Another part of our Reciprocal Vows is to commit to do our best to stay healthy and maintain good times. 

Making, remembering and keeping reciprocal vows is another virtue in marriage.

Clearly, people have a limit to their tolerance of behavior that is difficult or impossible for them to love, honor and cherish before withdrawing their own commitment or seeking divorce.  People have a limit on what they can tolerate before they quit forsaking all others.  One spouse may commit to love the other, but the other spouse’s moods, thoughts and actions can defeat the commitment. 

These are the reciprocal vows we propose:

#1 –  If spouses are willing to accept a commitment to be loved from their spouse, then they commit to act in their lives in a way that makes it as easy, enjoyable and satisfying as possible for their spouse to love them. 

#2 –  If spouses are willing to accept a commitment to be honored and cherished from their spouse, then they commit to act throughout their life to be as easy to honor and cherish as possible. 

In short, they commit to act to be as lovable, honorable and cherishable as they possibly can.

Reciprocal vows are a commitment to act thoughtfully and skillfully to help our spouses keep their vows to us, or to make it as easy for them as possible. 

This makes “Reciprocal Vows” another expression of loving, honoring and cherishing our spouses.

If people accept a commitment from their spouse to forsake all others, then they commit to actions that will keep that temptation at bay for the spouse. 

If they commit to limit who will take care of all of their concerns for physical and emotional loving to the other spouse, then they are obligated to become highly skilled at emotional and physical loving. 

We observe no formal or cultural orientation towards reciprocal vows, and we have been looking and listening for decades.  Some spouses definitely know that they need to work at something in their marriage, but they lack an articulation of this concern. 

The purpose of inventing this distinction is to produce an observer in a marriage who can commit to care for these concerns.  The distinctions enable a spouse to observe, make an assessment of satisfaction, design action and build skill to perform the ethic.

“The Death of a Thousand Cuts”

Without the distinction of reciprocal vows, spouses easily act in ways that are counterproductive to the meaning and fulfillment of their ambitions. 

We see people acting with their spouses as if the spouse is a parent who will always love them unconditionally, or as if they are entitled to be loved, honored and cherished no matter how badly they misbehave or decline to do as they vowed at the wedding.

We must always remember that we did not marry our mother or father.  When this happens, spouses appear to be spoiled, self-centered, thoughtless, inconsiderate, selfish, shallow and even mean-spirited.  In short, they act like children instead of adults. 

We see the manifestations of this thoughtlessness in the way these spouses raise their children without regard for others or a sense of their obligation to set an example for others.  We even see it in the way they don’t train their dogs. 

We see their blindness and indifference to ethics and reciprocal ethics in the way spouses act towards others at work, the way they don’t keep their promises, the way they litter in other people’s environment, and the way they smoke while others are eating because they can.  

We see it in the indifferent and disrespectful posture they assume with each other while talking.  They speak with false pride, arrogance and complacency about their place in one another’s future. 

We see it in the way people feel they are entitled to respect and to be held in high esteem by their spouse with no obligation to accomplish anything to earn the assessment. 

And, we see it in the lack of companionship people display or the way they are unwilling to join in continuous learning with one another about marriage out of an intention to learn more to become even more lovable, honorable and cherishable.

Without reciprocal vows we watch a dance between spouses we call “The Death of a Thousand Cuts”. 

The Death of a Thousand Cuts is similar to the story of the straw that broke the camel’s back.  A camel can easily survive a piece of straw placed on its back. 

People can easily handle their spouse being late for dinner, making a negative assessment of them, not appreciating their contribution, not joining them in a favored entertainment, forgetting to make the bed, breaking a promise, declining to have sex, or declining their point of view. 

But like the camel and the straw, enough small ethical betrayals will break the commitment of even the most committed of spouses.  It isn’t the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.  It is the sum total of all of them. 

The Death of a Thousand Cuts in a marriage is the name we give for the never-ending stream of small ethical betrayals that announce to our spouses that we take them for granted, don’t value them, are indifferent to the marriage, can live without them, don’t love them, don’t honor their point of view, and don’t cherish their concerns as our own. 

At the end, the spouse who is quit or expelled can’t figure out why. 

After all, just because they were late for dinner isn’t really a reason for divorce, is it? 

No… unless it is the last straw.

Once ethical thinking and practices are established as the ground rules for how spouses will act towards one another, we need to get to work in the world in which the marriage exists.