It is often good and necessary for us to get a history of your marriage. While there are many different ways of doing this, having you write one out gives us a chance to see your marriage through your eyes as you see it. We would like you to write a brief history of your marriage including how you met, the dating time, the early years, the present, and how you see the future.

Types of Marriages

The mature marriage is a marriage where both individuals are mature and neither is significantly more or less mature than the other. For this to occur usually both individuals had to be raised in homes with two mature parents that allowed for and encouraged maturity. This seems to occur in less than twenty-five per cent of marriages. These marriages can have problems but the problems are usually not the result of something the couple has done but something done to the individuals or couple. It is usually an external rather than an internal crisis. External crises are ones from outside the control of the marriage such as job loss due to the closing of a plant or factory, a house fire, or even a disease or handicap child. None of these things are within the couple's control.

Parental marriages fall into two classifications--more mature parental marriages and less mature parental marriages. In the more mature parental marriage one spouse is mature and significantly more mature than the other. In the less mature parental marriage one spouse is more mature than the other but is not mature. The mature parental marriage usually produces crises at two points in time. At the fifteenth year of the relationship including the dating time the spouse that was being parented wants to leave home and frequently will experience problems for a couple of years. The second crisis usually comes around the twenty-first year including the dating time when the spouse who was doing the parenting is tired of the additional responsibility and wants the parented spouse to grow up and take responsibility. Again this marriage usually experiences trouble for a couple of years. The less mature parental marriages usually don't make it past nine or twelve years including the dating time. Approximately fifty percent of all marriages fall into one of these two parental marriage categories.

Here neither individual is either mature or significantly more mature than the other. As long as there are no crises in the marriage these couples function normally. When crises come they do not have the maturity to survive. Approximately eighty percent of these marriages go into crisis by the seventh year of the relationship and unless one or both of the spouses begin to mature the marriage usually doesn't survive. If both mature a mature marriage is possible. If one matures and the other doesn't then a parental marriage results with potential problems in later years due to the parental marriage issues.

We have been discussing maturity, but what does that mean? There are different ingredients to maturity. We can see how physically mature a person is by just looking at them. But how do we determine emotional and spiritual maturity? Sometimes we can determine mental maturity through language development or intelligence. What about experiential maturity or the ability to relate maturely to someone? Each of these brings to maturity a different ingredient. Taken together they can give us an indication of the maturation of an individual or a marriage.

Print & complete the Marital History Profile.