In this bonus episode of The Possibility Podcast, enjoy my appearance on the All Together podcast from Life Science Labs.

In this interview with host Dina Sargeant, I talk about the possibly fading relevance of marriage, and what that might mean for committed relationships.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

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Transcript of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz #138

MEL: Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

DINA: Hey everyone and welcome to Altogether, the family science insights podcast produced by LMSL, the life management science labs. We are champions of life management science, providing structured insights informed by science and inspired by practice on key aspects of conscious living. Each week we bring you scientific and practical insights on each element with the expert knowledge of professionals in the field. I’m your host Dina Sargent. Let’s get started.

DINA: Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode. The marriage is a really tricky thing for a lot of people to really talk about as there are always different expectations on either side as to what their marriage is supposed to look like or what it can look like. Our guest today is here to talk about a new way of marriage can go and rethinking the idea of marriage. He is a psychotherapist, a two-time TEDx speaker, marriage counselor, and author. Please welcome Mel Schwartz. Thank you so much for joining me, Mel.

MEL: It’s my pleasure to be with you.

DINA: Now how did you get into wanting to be a marriage counselor and sort of helping guiding a lot of couples throughout their journey within a marriage?

MEL: Well, hold on to your seat for the answer.

DINA: I’m holding on.

MEL: I went to graduate school to learn my practice and my trade, not early in life. I was 40 years old. Upon graduating, I was going through a divorce in my life, which had a profound impact on me. I had two young children, and I realized that relationships, marriage, we start them with the best of intentions, feeling in love, cheerful, and optimistic. The fact that in the US, half of marriages end in divorce, what it is in Australia. But I wrote in my first book, the fact that half of marriages end in divorce, that’s not the issue. The real problem is that the majority of intact marriages, some years down the road, aren’tall that happy. In other words, the success rate of marriage and committed relationship needs to be about happiness, not just the barometer of divorce. So if only a small percentage of relationships and marriages thrive, it’s insane to keep playing by the same rules. If marriage were a corporation, it would be bankrupt. We’d never tolerate that failure in business. Why do we tolerate it in our lives? So that revelation prompted me to write my first book, which is called The Art of Intimacy, in which I said, the problem is that we receive no education in relationships or marriage. Unless you are fortunate enough to have parents who ideally model the role for us, then you know, we got no training. We just went into it. You have to pass a road test to get a driver’s license, but you don’t have to be educated and literate to engage in marriage and have children. We just stumble our way through. So there’s such a crushing weight of despair and the feeling of, I’ve done something wrong, you’ve done something wrong. In most cases, nobody’s done anything wrong. We just need to learn the lesson. So that’s what really motivated me to come to understand the intricacies of relationship and to be able to look at it and see how I can help people. That was my motivation.

DINA: It’s a big motivation because when you’re talking about the idea of divorce, it must come a lot to come to that state from two people really being in love and wanting to build a life together to end up being like, okay, this isn’t working. Instead of working it out, we’re just going to have to completely call it quits and end it and sort of go through that. There must be some really big issue. And I know there’s so many different reasons for divorce. I mean, one of the biggest reasons I know of is the financial parts of it where money is always a big problem, always a big thing that couples are always fighting over. So I’m excited today to talk about the different areas as to how we’re talking about rethinking marriage and how we’re trying to align ourselves to what makes us happy, but also what makes a better couple sort of align together.

MEL: Well, the first thought in that regard is if you meet at any point in life, but let’s suppose you meet and become a couple at 20 or 25 or 30 years of age or 35, the presumption is that we’re going to either continue to grow in a parallel path or both go to not grow and remain parallel. The system of marriage has to allow for change and growth. So if two people grow in parallel ways, then there’s a greater chance the relationship working out. But to evaluate that, to start with before marriage, we should be asking each other challenging questions, but we don’t. We put our best foot forward. If you think about putting your best foot forward makes no sense because you’re not putting your true self forward. It would make more sense to put your genuine, authentic self forward and find out how do you feel about me for who I really am, not who I’m pretending to be. Because that’s what’s going to be revealed months or years down the road.

DINA: That’s very true. And you sort of forget that when it comes to, I mean, when you talk about being young and in love, you sort of forget, okay, but this is the best part of each other. This is the best that we’re showing each other. When it comes to the worst, what’s going to happen, what the situation is going to be. So yes, I’d love to dive into that even further. But before we do, I’d love to get to know some of your interests and some of your recommendations as well, possibly by playing a little icebreaker that we like to call have you met Mel. So to start off with, do you have a favorite book that you could share with us?

MEL: Well, my favorite book is a book called Thought as a System, written by a late Nobel physicist, quantum physicist named David Bohm, B-O-H-M. And that book was very, very inspirational for me in understanding the nature of thought and how we think, which impacts everything.

DINA: Yeah, that’s really interesting. What especially about it have you really learned from reading that book?

MEL: Well, Bohm makes a distinction between thought and thinking. And he collaborated with Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher in that regard too. Thought happens. We have thousands of thoughts a day. Most often we’re not aware of what they are. But when we are aware, the thought tricks us in that it’s telling us the truth about something. That’s called literal thought. And that’s why people have a hard time to change, because we keep having the same old literal thought. Thinking would sound like this. You know, when you asked me that question, I had a thought come up. Here’s what my thought was telling me. See the difference there? There’s a me having a thought. My thought is telling me something. That is thinking.