It is not wise to stay in a bad marriage for the sake of your children. It is clearly harmful to raise kids in a home that is consumed by hostility. A peaceful divorce is preferable to endless marital warfare. Unfortunately, many divorces are not peaceful. Too often there is mutual enmity between the parents that continues after the breakup. For that reason, children of divorce often fare just as poorly as those caught in the crossfire of a miserable marriage. The notion that you can save your relationship just by learning to communicate more sensitively is probably the most widely held misconception about happy marriages. Counselling that relies solely on active listening and conflict resolution to rescue relationships often fails because successful conflict resolution isn’t what makes marriages succeed. Even happily married couples can have screaming matches since loud arguments don’t necessarily harm a marriage. Neuroses don’t have to ruin a marriage. If you can accommodate each other’s “crazy” side and handle it with caring, affection, and respect, your marriage can thrive. Severe mental illness is however another matter. You’re not a bad person if you end a relationship with a partner who is grappling with severe psychopathology and is unable to think and function independently. Having and sharing common interests keep you together. Avoiding conflict will ruin your marriage. Plenty of lifelong relationships happily, survive even though they keep having confrontations. Couples simply have different styles of handling conflict. Some avoid fights at all costs, some argue a lot, and some are able to talk out their differences and find a compromise without ever raising their voices. No one style is necessarily better than another—as long as the style works for both people. Affairs are mostly not the root cause of divorce. In most cases, it’s the other way around. It’s the problems in the marriage that send the couple one (or both) of them looking for an intimate connection outside the marriage. Affairs are usually not about sex but about seeking friendship, support, understanding, respect, attention, caring, and concern. Divorced men and women say their marriages broke up because they gradually grew apart and lost a sense of closeness, or because they did not feel loved and appreciated. The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. For men, the determining factor is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. So, men and women come from the same planet after all. Conclusion Marriage is therefore an extremely complex and imposing institution that most of us just aren’t good enough for. It takes courage, determination, and resilience to maintain a long-lasting relationship. But once you understand what really makes a marriage tick, saving or safeguarding your own will become simpler.