I don’t know of any Church talk on marriage advice that has hit the spot perfectly for me. Nothing wrong with them, neither, and often bits and pieces here and there that I can pull out. The problem is that marriage is highly individual. Every marriage I know is a foreign country. Each couple can say, “we are a little civilization, the two of us.”

We have it on Tolstoy’s authority that all happy marriages are alike . . . but how they became happy is unique to each one.

I recently sat down to read a Church talk on marriage advice, A Lasting Marriage by Robert L. Simpson. One thing he wrote struck me. He advised “reasoning together.” Yes! I said. I knew exactly what he meant. Except for us, reasoning together is the precious result of a happy marriage, not the cause. It takes a lot of hard-learned technique and willed dedication to keep our marriage at the point of reasoning together. Very much worth it, though.

So from a certain point of view, marriage advice that consists of ‘reason together’ is useless. But from another point of view, perhaps the only and the best thing to do is just to keep the destination in front of people. Light the house, and trust the travelers will find their way to it.