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Or how to become a good balloon….

YOUR MARRIAGE IS DESTINED TO FAIL; SO HOW DO YOU SAVE IT?

By Glen Tornell for Area Woman Magazine

Type “divorce” in Google and you’ll get 121 million hits.

Not unexpected, seeing that half of the 90 percent of Americans who wed end their first marriage before celebrating their 15th anniversary.

And the second time around isn’t a charm. Divorce is even more likely on the rebound.

“We’re built to love, but not to live together,” says Dr. Richard Kolotkin, a clinical psychologist and MSUM professor who’s done more than his share of marriage counseling during the past 28 years. “In the absence of insight, misery is a natural consequence of tying the knot.”

Kolotkin, the author of the forthcoming book “The Insightful Marriage,” bases his advice on the fundamental science of psychology, the bedrock of his 28 years in private practice and public education.

“Despite the presence of a vast array of marital self-help guides and pop culture remedies, people are still miserable in their marriages,” says Kolotkin. “Why? Because most of the advice they get is either too simplistic or based on intuitive assumptions, too often telling couples just what they want to hear.”

Kolotkin, however, pulls no punches. “Most couples won’t want to hear what I have to say: that marriage is the hardest thing they’ll ever do, and that their natural instincts are aimed at destroying their relationship.”

Not exactly uplifting. “But if you understand the psychological principles of how this force field called marriage works,” he said, “it can renew the passion and joy that first brought you together.”

But difficulty is the price of admission.

“It’s hard making a marriage work,” he said, “but it’s also hard living in a bad marriage, and it’s painful getting divorced, too.”

In a nutshell, Kolotkin said, the self-destruct mechanism in marriage is a fundamental concept in most Psychology 101 classes: our primal instinct for self-preservation, an inborn, hardwired mandate to survive that’s encoded in our DNA.

“We’re ultimately creatures of self-interest,” he said. “Yet almost everyone believes in marriage and defines having a happy marriage as an important life goal. So we put two people into the confined space of marriage and then wonder why things go so terribly wrong.”

Marriage has never been easy, Kolotkin said, but this marital gremlin he calls “the self” gained power exponentially during the 1970s, when divorce statistics started multiplying.

It began with the self-actualization movement, the “be what you want to be, do what you want to do” spillover from the Sixties social revolution. Then came the so-called “Me generation” of the go-go Eighties and continues now with what some pop culture gurus call the Entitlement generation.

“It changed the dynamics of marriage dramatically, with insidious consequences,” he said. “As a result, self satisfaction became an entitlement.”

Pick your stereotype: macho men sharing space with princesses, metrosexuals trying to live with you-go gals, dictators in love with anarchists, all on a crusade to max out their inner potential.

The result: marriages drowning in stress, anger, petulance, even violence, and a divorce rate gone wild.

“The fundamental problem,” Kolotkin said, “is that the focus of marriage should not be self-actualization, but self-exploration, learning how to live with your mate.”

That’s because self preservation almost always unconsciously trumps the desire to be happily married.

“To understand this, it’s helpful to look at marriage as if both husband and wife were two balloons trying to live in a confined space. It clarifies some of the major reasons couples are miserable and get divorced.”

To find happiness, Kolotkin says, you must learn to fight the automatic response to protect yourself at all costs. “In other words, you have to learn to be a good balloon. And that’s not natural.”

What’s natural, he said, is for each balloon to fill up as much space as possible, creating pressure and conflict.

The secret to a happy marriage he said, requires that you deflate somewhat. Marriage, in fact, should never require that you lose the essence of who you are.

“Couples have to understand and refine this self-preservation instinct so that it works well in your marriage. But learning how to get off auto-pilot takes some work.”

Kolotkin’s book focuses on life stories followed by lesson plans and summaries for each of its 19 chapters, leading the reader on an interactive quest to understand just what an insightful marriage is. It’s expected to be published next year.

“It’s not an easy journey,” he said. “But it’s worth the effort.”

Kolotkin’s book is expected to be released next year.

Meanwhile, if you want to find that enduring marital magic and passion that ignited your relationship in the beginning, he said, go back to the basics––that primal urge to protect yourself––and just let some air out of it.