Do you liken marriage success to be a kind of slot machine, guaranteed to pay off. You put in little yourself and have a lot of fun making the wheels go around. In return you expect the jack pot of happiness, spilled out right at your feet.

If you want to succeed in marriage, recognize first of all that it is not a means of solving problems. Marrying is like accepting a promotion. It means more pay, but it means also more responsibility and bigger and better headaches.

Marriage in itself will not make anyone happy. It merely gives you a better chance to earn it. The happiness of marriage is like a car, or a refrigerator, or something else you would like, in a show window. If you want to have it in your own home, you must be willing to pay the price; not only willing, but able.

Here are some of the keys to marriage success:

Will you put up with inconvenience? Dealing with frustration?

Do you know that success in marriage requires serious effort and marriage skills?

Are you emotionally able to accept competent help when you need it such as Christian marriage counseling?

Do you have the will to succeed? Do you have the case against divorce?

Success in marriage involves far more than merely staying together. It means the working out of a relationship which is increasingly satisfying and worthful to all concerned. Many couples have clung together long after their marriages have lost their purposes, just because they wanted to show others that they could "succeed."

Others have remained together because of social pressure, religious demands, or just because of their pride. I do not say that they are wrong in so doing. I am saying that marriages which can be held together only by such reasons are a waste of life.

Life in terms of the development of a rich relationship will best result as the outgrowth of larger purposes around which the whole life is organized. Historically, for centuries in the past there was no divorce in Rome. Why? Because the family did not exist for the satisfaction of the individual.

Its purpose was to provide disciplined citizens for the state; citizens who would be its soldiers or the mothers of soldiers. The marriage of many couples today is the joining together in some common cause to which both are dedicated.

The cause may be foreign missions. It may be world peace. It may be what is the essence of religion at its best; the dedication of self to the creative forces of life. But whatever it is, when this larger purpose is present, the couple has a basis for marriage success. Do you have a large purpose in life?