It is this complexity, this richness, this history that I missed when my first marriage unaveled. Falling in love is grand, but it doesn't hold a candle to feeling love from and for a partner who is part of your life's fabric, someone who knows you.

It doesn't hurt that my Ed is a handsome, highly talented man with a deep and comforting voice and a vibrant love of life and living. But what makes our relationship so great, I think, is our shared willingness to see our many differences and disgreements as stepping stones to a fuller life, rather than a threat to life as we knew it before we met.

All we have to do is expect love and assume love, instead of always testing love.

Picture yourself planning a garden tour. You have seen your friends' photos of their garden tours. You love the large, single-color clusters of red, yellow, or pink tulips. The sparsely planted arrangements of tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths delight you. And those azaleas! The variety is amazing. The colors are so perfect. You are really looking forward to your garden tour.

You look for tulips. You look for those translucent colors of the azaleas in the gardens they visited. But you have been robbed! In the gardens you visit, there are rust-colored chrysanthemums or orange and purple birds of paradise or spiky, purple hostas with more leaf than flower. This is not what you expected!

If you keep using your checklist of tulips and azaleas from observing your friends' garden trips through snapshots, your trip will be a huge disappointment. If you let go of this list of expectations and open your eyes, you will discover a wealth of nature's beauty. You can be disappointed, or you can crumple up your list of expectations, look for whatever delights your senses, and be in awe.

Your marriage is your garden trip. If you spend it looking for what you've seen in snapshots of your parents' or friends' marriages, you cheat yourself out of an incredible experience. Love comes in as many colors, shapes, fragrances, and seasons as flowers do. Live your marriage on the edge of your seat, always watching for the next, unexpected bit of love your spouse offers you, always savoring each one.

Almost all of us can remember such times, when we pulled together to get through difficult times. We felt close. We felt loved. We felt blessed to have this person we share a lifelong commitment with.

Reminds me of that marvelous form of happiness Aristotle called Eudaimonia, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow, and Martin Seligman calls Engagement. It's a quiet sort of happiness, one where we don't even notice whether we're happy or not. We're content, but engaged with something other than how we feel. Time flies by. When we notice how we are again, it's just sort of a warm glow.

The "times of nickels and dimes...and love" are Flow for Two. We don't have to check how our relationship is going, because we're just in it, engaged in what we're doing together. When we come up for air, we just notice we feel very close to this other human being.

Csikszentmihalyi set out some criteria for Flow. They include working at something that's just a bit of a stretch for our current abilities, not routine and not so hard we can't go on. Making do, managing limited cash and time, sharing tasks -- those are stretches, exactly the sort of challenges for which we need a life partner, a spouse.

His criteria also include working at something where we have a way to tell, from moment to moment, whether we're succeeding or not. For a couple, a limited budget provides such a measure. So does a tight schedule and a shared to do list. Even if we forget to congratulate each other on our progress, we both know how we're doing.

So, if we "remember those times of nickels and dimes...and love" together, perhaps whatever problems pull us apart later are not flaws in our mates.

• If we are overwhelmed, as a couple might be after a fire or a cancer diagnosis or stricken child, maybe we need to bring in some outside help, to take the challenge down to the level where it's just a stretch for us as a couple.


• If we are fighting over money or parenting, perhaps what we need is to stop and find the same measure for success, so we can work on the problem together again.


• If we are drifting apart, maybe all we need is a new, shared goal, one that's just a little beyond our current abilities.

The teleclass is free for all subscribers to my Enjoy Being Married mailing list. I hope you can join us.

[A study on household energy use released by the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts in June] found that despite the advent of airconditioners and plasma-screen TVs, the average energy consumption of each Australian household is not expected to change significantly. From 1990 to 2020, household energy demand will increase by 56 per cent, but mainly because the number of Australian households will increase by 61 per cent.

And it's not just electricity:

A four-person family that breaks up will generate around 43 per cent more garbage than they did when they were together. They will use up to 34 per cent more water and up to 70 per cent more energy, depending on the type of new dwellings being occupied.

Have you gone green with marriage education?

1. You get what you want or something you like even more.


2. You give generously to your husband or wife.

It's a two-step process. (I do love the Two-Step.)

1. Type your name and email address at www.EnjoyBeingMarried.com and click on the Subscribe button.


2. Find the email from newsletter@enjoybeingmarried.com in your inbox a few minutes later and click on the link in it. (If you have spam filters, you might want to add the address to your list of approved senders.)

This comes from Krister Hakansson of Sweden in a report to the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease today. The study looks at more than 1,400 people in Finland over a 21-year period from middle-aged to over 65.

Among those who carried a gene associated with Alzheimer's, the ones who were married when the study began fared much better than those who were widowed or divorced then.

Shabana Azmi, actress, activist, and Member of the Indian Parliament's upper house (the Rajya Sabha), said this Monday at the opening of a premartial counseling center in India's capital.

Although Azmi spoke of Delhi's mostly arranged marriages, she could have been talking about marriages in the U.S., too.

We fear lowering our expectations. None of us wants to be taken advantage of. However, marriage succeeds best when we expect love and little more. Our laundry lists of how we ought to be loved just get in the way of being loved.

The columnist suggested she talk to her husband, so she can discover he's bored, too. I was flabbergasted. Talking about boredom is BORING! And it seldom leads to excitement.

She could, instead, assume love. Why would someone terrific who loves you fiercely bore you? Here are some possibilities:

• You've put the job of keeping your life interesting on his shoulders, and he hasn't any better idea than you do what might entertain you. Take back this job. Try new things. Get excited about life, and your husband will almost certainly look a lot more exciting.


• He's tried to regain your interest, but you've been unreceptive, perhaps complaining about the cost or the time it takes. You never noticed the love you were being offered, and he felt you rejected it.


• He's trying his best to interact with you in the way he believes you like best. Perhaps your tastes have changed, but you haven't let him know this.


• He's struggling way too hard at something else, like getting out of debt or banking enough for retirement or winning some competition. Once you figure out what it is, you may be able to inject excitement and closeness by pitching in on his project.


• Somewhere along the way, he handed you responsibility for keeping your sex life interesting, and you have run out of ideas. There are lots of people to ask and books to read for more suggestions. Or you could simply ask him to come up with one and give it a willing try.


• You have stopped asking the interested questions you asked while you were dating, so he's stopped looking interesting. You may think you already know all about him, but he has been changing and growing and might seem utterly fascinating if you met him today. Pretend you just met and see what happens.

While assuming love, you can imagine the most saintly spouse in the universe loving the world's most loveable person in the same way your spouse is loving you. Just explain how this could happen.

Keep adding to the list until you suddenly get the "aha!" that jogs your memory and points the way toward a fix for the two of you. Or keep going until you realize there are more OK explanations than bad ones for what is happening, and you get the "Ahhh" that makes everything fine again. Only if you come up empty handed should you even consider ending your marriage.

Nineteen years of shared history offers more richness than any new relationship could. As long as you two still harbor some love for each other, a really great marriage remains within your reach.

• Faith


• Eat together


• A lot of give and take


• Family time


• Stay in touch with close relatives


• Humor


• Good cooking


• Accept each other's idiosyncrasies

Tony Snow died today of colon cancer, at age 53, leaving a wife and three children it's evident he cared for deeply, and some great advice for all of us.

When people marry expecting they'll divorce if it doesn't work out, I always wonder how they can be so cavalier about the rest of their extended family. Some manage to stay connected to their new family after divorce, but not many. My life would seem so much smaller without my California-Florida-Pennsylvania-Ohio-Texas-Ontario-Saudi Arabia-India family arms. They are a wonderful part of being married.

Which bookstores? Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, Hastings Books, and independent bookstores like Doylestown Bookshop. Some outlets may not carry the magazine, and some may run out, so please ask a sales clerk if you have any trouble locating a copy.

It looks like a really great issue, with 29 feature articles on relationships, motivation, personality disorders, getting unstuck, and more, plus lots of shorter pieces and cartoons. Mine is the lead article on the cover, in case you want to look for it.

So I was thrilled to receive a Google alert this morning about an excellent article in Pakistan Daily about preparing for a Muslim marriage.

For those of us who are not Muslims, it may seem remarkable that Muslim Americans, many or most of whom marry people they've never dated and didn't fall in love with before the wedding, and who don't consider staying marriage a religious requirement, have a lower than average divorce rate of 33%.

Whether you practice Islam or not, the article makes some very good points about preparing for marriage and not just the wedding.

I learned the divorce rate is slightly lower for Muslim Americans, but still a discouraging 33%. The author offers some good advice about preparing to remain in the other two-thirds.