My wife and I have been friends for fifteen years, together for fourteen, and, in just two weeks, we will celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary.  On top of that, we’ve been parents now for 2-and-a-half years.  As any long-time committed couple knows, it’s not always easy to keep a relationship strong and healthy when you’re dealing with the passage of time and all the myriad challenges life throws your way.  My wife and I have learned over our years together that it’s work, hard work—and while we’re not always good at doing it, or getting it done, we’re committed to it, to each other, to ourselves, and to us.

 

 

Most couples can already identify their problem areas, at least generally.  But the prospective of someone, even a computer program, spelling in all out in black-and-white can be a bit daunting.  (And our eHarmony Marriage Profile came out to be 58 printed pages!)  But the experience of going through the questionnaire was an interesting and introspective one.  You’re asked to place yourself on a continuum of extremes of agreement and disagreement for statements about everything from personal values to how you and your spouse deal with stress, using a moveable bar.  Because you and your partner can place the bar at any incremental point on the continuum, instead of picking set degrees of agreement, it did make me wonder how the program would would analyze our answers, and made me linger over questions a bit longer than I would’ve liked.  But at any rate, the resulting marriage profile provides personalized analyses of different aspects of your marriage, from romance and chemistry to communication and conflict resolution issues, explaining to you and your spouse your level of happiness in each area, explaining how the differences between you affect your marriage in this area, and recommending actions to take to improve happiness and wellness.

 

I think one of the most valuable things about the Profile is that, besides pointing out and explaining areas of challenge that you both probably already knew about, it pinpoints subtle areas of disaffection that may not be on the surface and, just as important, it highlights areas of agreement and confluence.  Even if those agreements are only about the levels and reasons for unhappiness in a certain area of life, at least you know that you’re on the same page.  And for a lot of people, it’s hard to express that, to know that, to admit that.  Going into this process, we both knew that we, individually and as a couple, had work to do to make ours the marriage we want it to be.  But now, we have so many starting points for conversation, so many concrete ideas to work from and work on.

 

Beyond the Marriage Profile and its analysis and recommendation, subscribers (you can subscribe on a month-by-month basis or for three months at a time) get access to personalized advice articles covering issues raised in the Profile and to 20-minute interactive video exercises for you to complete together.  I must confess, we haven’t been able to give much time to these deeper features, though we want to.  And that, I think, is the biggest thing—that eHarmony Marriage is a concrete reminder that marriage takes time and work to be successful.  As a family in which both parents work, it’s all too easy to let this stuff slip by, to sit on the couch and watch television for the half-hour you have to yourselves between putting the kid to bed and putting yourselves to bed.  And while we both know, and tell ourselves, that we need to put in the time, both to work on our issues and to just be together, a solid reminder like this can’t hurt.

 

This experience confirms what we already knew—that, like most couples, we have challenges, and we want to work on them.  But it also gives us more—more information, more opportunity for introspection, more ideas for improvement.  And, most important, a reminder that, despite those challenges, we are committed, and together.