The Marriage Benefit
Eight Intimate Risks That Help Us To Become Our Best Selves
This is a talk about marriage, but it’s not the kind of “how to make your marriage better” talk that we have come to expect. This is a talk about how stretching the boundaries of what we imagine to be possible can turn our intimate relationships into remarkable opportunities for growth and change. This is a talk about how our relationships can make us better.
And this is also a talk that offers a radical and contemporary answer to an age-old question. Why stay married? Because our long-term relationships can, at their best, help us to navigate the maddeningly relentless passage of time. They can teach us how to find purpose and meaning even in the face of life’s most immovable limits, making growing older an expanding, rather than a diminishing, experience.
This talk describes the eight intimate risks that, when considered together, comprise an action prescription for building better relationships that will, in turn, make us better people.
- Embrace a longer-lasting definition of love
- Celebrate your differences
- Have real sex
- Find liberation through commitment
- Believe in something more important than yourselves
- Give up your habits and addictions
- Forgive and give thanks
- Play
Eight intimate resolutions, and one powerful path to a better relationship and a better self.
The most life-expanding possibilities imaginable can be found in the lives that we already have. The mother lode of these possibilities lies in the unexplored depths of our long-term intimate relationships.