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Home › Articles › For and About You › The Truth About Growing Apart

The Truth About Growing Apart

6 Surprising Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage

By Morrie Shechtman and Arleah Shechtman

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Worried that you and your spouse are growing in different directions? As long as you're both growing, that's OK. A new book by Morrie and Arleah Shechtman explains why.

You hear it all the time from veterans of divorce. "We simply grew apart." It's enough to create a sense of fatalism about marriage itself. It may even inhibit your commitment to personal growth, as you reason, "If I don't pursue my Ph.D. or start the landscaping business I've always dreamed of, I can devote more time to my marriage."

Growing apart is the No. 1 reason marriages fail. But according to psychotherapist Morrie Shechtman, there are things you can do to decrease the likelihood of it happening to you and your partner – they just may not be the things you'd expect.

"What people usually mean when they say 'we grew apart' is that one partner changed and the other didn't," says Shechtman, co-author, with wife and business partner, Arleah, of Love in the Present Tense: How to Have a High Intimacy, Low Maintenance Marriage (Bull Publishing Company, 2004). "Quite simply, a good marriage fosters personal growth and vice versa. If your partner doesn't grow, then he becomes boring to you. If you don't grow, then you become boring to yourself."

The Shechtmans insist that a fulfilling marriage, like a fulfilling life, is not about comfort zones and status quos. To avoid growing apart, you and your partner must grow together. Not necessarily in the same direction, mind you, but grow you must. The Shechtmans offer the following tips: