The 10 Laws of Happily Ever After:

PREFACE I will never forget the love, passion, and excitement I felt on my wedding day. My wife was breath taking in her wedding gown. I remember being excited to start a new life with her. She had a way of making life more enjoyable and fulfilling. Everything I did seem to have new meaning and fulfillment. Success became sweeter, and failure became less painful. Coming home to my wife after work each day was the best part of my day. I couldn’t wait to see her, hold her, and be in her presence. I felt like I was on top of the world. I was living my Happily Ever After. My only fear was that the love, passion and excitement would fade away over time like so many others. I was determined to figure out how to keep my Happily Ever After alive and strong. The 10 Laws of Happily Ever After is the result of over 10 years of personal study, observation and discovery. The love, passion, and excitement I felt for my wife is actually stronger today than it was on our wedding day. My wife continues to take my breath away with her beauty and poise. Happily Ever After is possible, my wife and I are living proof. I believe everyone deserves to live Happily Ever After. The greatest tragedy of our time is not the natural disasters or war, but the broken hearts and pain caused by failed marriages. The national divorce rate indicates that 50 percent of first-time marriages will end in divorce. Second and third marriages have an even higher divorce rate. That is a lot of broken hearts and pain, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This book provides couples with true universal principles to create a long-term satisfying marriage. Many will argue that there is no single set of rules or laws for creating a successful marriage. My response to that is what one is not aware of does not exist. Marriage can and should be easy. When you live The 10 Laws of Happily Ever After marriage becomes easy. This book can create your own Happily Ever After. It is the key to a long-term marriage full of love, passion, satisfaction, and bliss. This book can fix a broken marriage—and fortify a strong marriage. It can dry the tears of the brokenhearted and prevent broken families. This book can be the solution to our national divorce epidemic. It can strengthen the nation by strengthening each marriage and family. CHAPTER 2: THE LAW OF CHOICE The law of choice states that two paths diverge from one. Which one will you follow? Every second of every day, we are presented with a choice. Choosing to be married is not a onetime choice we made on our wedding day, but a choice that we make every day. Every second of every day, we choose which path to follow. One path leads to our true north—the other leads to our magnetic north. OUR TRUE NORTH PATH Our true north is what we want out of life. It is what will truly bring us success, joy, and abundance. The path of our true north creates a life full of success, peace, satisfaction, joy, and abundance. When we are following our true north path, we are in control of our lives. When we are in control of our lives every second of every day, we are consciously responding to the choice presented to us in a way to support what we want. When we are in control of our lives, we create the lives we want. Happily Ever After is found on our true north path. This is why we choose to get married. We believe that marrying our prince or princess will bring us success, joy, and abundance. No one says “I do” because he or she wants to be miserable for the rest of his or her life. Yet, too often, marriage becomes miserable because we choose to follow our magnetic north. OUR MAGNETIC NORTH PATH Magnetic north is also called our automatic or natural north. This path is the result of the automatic or natural reactions that we make every second of every day. Every second of every day, we are presented with choices; some of these choices are made consciously, others are made unconsciously as a result of our habits, routines, present thoughts, and emotions. Magnetic north satisfies our short-term lusts and desires and fosters selfishness, the cancer of all relationships. Our magnetic north creates a life full of frustration, deception, instant gratification, long-term regret, hopelessness, and stress. When we follow our magnetic north, our actions are an automatic reaction to our environment. We give up our freedom to respond and automatically react based on our current thoughts, emotions, routines, or habits. We give control of our lives to our environment. When our environment has control of our lives, we end up with whatever life gives us. TRUE NORTH VS. MAGNETIC NORTH The needle on a compass always points toward magnetic north. The difference between true north and magnetic north on a compass varies only a few degrees. If we were to vary our course a few degrees while crossing the street, it would not change our end result. Varying our course a few degrees while flying from California to New York would cause us to completely miss our end result. We would never reach our desired destination. When it comes to marriage, we often start out headed in the right direction, but we allow our course to vary a few degrees, which at the time does not seem to affect our end results on a day-to-day basis. Over time, this small day-to-day variance in our course puts us farther away from our desired results. Before we know it, we wake up one morning and realize that our Happily Ever After is gone. We look back and think we were young, stupid, and blinded with love. We come to the realization that we are stuck with the marriage we have and the only way out is divorce. We can choose to survive or endure our current marriage or we can choose to get out. Some choose to endure because they have accepted the idea that this is the way life and marriage really are. Others choose to end the marriage and refuse to accept the idea that life and marriage should be this way. There is another alternative that we have not discusses yet. Take control of life to create a Happily Ever After marriage. Every second of every day, we can choose support our Happily Ever After marriage. Learn and follow The 10 Laws of Happily Ever After. Happily Ever After is possible if we choose to have it. It does not matter how good or bad your relationship is right now. The 10 Laws of Happily Ever After is the key to maintaining or recreating a marriage full of love, passion, satisfaction, and bliss. The choice is ours. The choice is always ours if we are in control of our lives. If we forfeit our agency, and automatically react to life, we give up our freedom to create the life and marriage we want. We can blame our unhappiness and misery on work, money, kids, sex—or the lack thereof—but when it comes right down to it, it is our choice to create the marriage we want or to forfeit our agency to our environment and hope that it gives us what we want. Happily Ever After can only be achieved by making the choice every second of every day to support our Happily Ever After.