Both individual experience and statistical surveys make it clear that almost everyone suffers severe disappointment within a few months after marriage. A study conducted by the Mental Research Institute with couples married for an average of one year indicated that they felt marriage was different from what they had expected.

One young woman said, “Marriage is not what I had assumed it would be. One premarital assumption after another has crashed down on my head. I am going to make my marriage work, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work and readjusting. Marriage is like taking an airplane to Florida for a relaxing vacation in January, and when you get off the plane you find you’re in the Swiss Alps. There is cold and snow instead of swimming and sunshine. Well, after you buy winter clothes and learn how to ski and learn how to talk a new foreign language, I guess you can have just as good a vacation in the Swiss Alps as you can in Florida. But I can tell you, doctor, it’s one hell of a surprise when you get off that marital airplane and find that everything is far different from what one had assumed.”

This realistic and candid young woman is now happy in her marriage. But for her to reach this point required two years of patient working and changing and of expensive visits by herself and her husband to a competent marriage counselor for a once-a-month “checkup.” She learned that the institution of modem marriage is based on many false assumptions and untrue beliefs.