"I Promise to make our marriage secure!"

by self-centeredness, selfishness, sinful hearts, hardened hearts, and evil desires. But if we desire to fight for our marriages and strive to make them secure we can have a marriage that will last a lifetime. We do need God’s help to win this battle and to secure our marriage units.

I hear a lot about the disintegrating marriage unit in America today from the news and from many other sources – we hear that 50% of all marriages end in divorce and this creates a luminous cloud over the act of marriage in America. But I want you to know that marriages in America - 50% of them are thriving. People really are living happily ever after -50% -of them love being married to their partner!
Readers Digest tells us: Alive and Well:
Inside the American marriage, love, honor, and laughter are still alive. That’s welcome news in an era of broken promises, a divorce rate hovering just below 50 percent, and dire predictions about the "death of marriage" as more and more couples live together and postpone the walk down the aisle -- or never take it at all. When Reader’s Digest asked married women and men across the nation in-depth questions about their attitudes and beliefs about marriage, the results were heartwarming and surprising. In this comprehensive survey, a total of 1,001 respondents said that deep down, they value trust, forgiveness, and good communication much more than whether the housework is fairly divided. Partners told us that fun, laughter, and spending time together are four to five times more important than sex. That they’d marry their spouse all over again. And that divorce isn’t the answer.
This is good news for us in an era that is becoming more anti-marriage. We are facing today the forces of change which are trying to force a new definition of marriage. Our traditional marriages are under attack as they have been since Creation but there is hope for marriage today! Listen to this article about the change impacting marriage today:
WHY MARRIAGE TODAY TAKES MORE LOVE, WORK - FROM BOTH PARTNERS: By Stephanie Coontz
“I once asked my students to review the marital advice books in our town’s bookstores and determine how many were based on actual research data and peer-reviewed studies. Only 34 percent - one in three - passed that test. One student went a step further and researched the family history of marital-advice experts. Half of them had been through a divorce, a track record no better than the non-experts!
Of course, there are many well-researched books that provide tested methods for improving a marriage. And divorced experts may even bring a special insight to their work because they’ve personally experienced how a marriage can go wrong. But the role of marriage in society and personal life has changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 3,000, primarily because of the new opportunities for women to live independent lives. In consequence, everything we used to think we knew about who marries and how marriage works - and why it doesn’t work - is changing…Today, marriage takes more time, more love, more work, and more daily negotiation - from both partners, not just the wife - than it did in the past. There is no magic formula, weekend encounter, or set of "rules" that can bypass the hard work it takes to make a marriage succeed. The bad news is that if negotiations break down, there are few constraints forcing