The Three Crises of Married love and thier resolution - The resolution to the crisis of Tolerance - Bishop Fulton Sheen

The Happiness of the beloved - If one is ever to mount to a higher love, there must now intervene sacrifice for the sake of the beloved. Both Husband and wife are suffering from mediocrity; it is the stage which God condemns: 'Thou art neither hot nor cold; therefore I will vomit thee from my mouth.' No one ever escapes out of dulness or mediocrity without sacrifice, or the purification of ego. To repeat, both now suffer from mediocrity. Spiritualization consists not in reforming the other, but in reforming self. All attempts to reform the other deepens one's own egotism, for they are based on the assumption that the reformer needs no reformation. One's partner must never be an instrument of one's will; rather, in marriage, the partner is a limit to one's will. The other person is not to be regarded as being like a subjugated colony, in which one may suppress governments and customs by one's own will. This is egotism, and egotism in marriage is assassination. Purification is not to be had just by silence, for silence is egotism. The taking of love's stronghold comes after the siege of self, in which individuality and selfishness are crushed.
Love now means not to own and to possess, but to be owned and to be possessed. It measures life, not like a wine to be drunk, but like a wine to be poured out; its greatest jealousy is the fear of being outdone by the cherished rival in the least advantage of  self-giving; its greatest joy is to serve; and its noblest symbol is that of the Cross which has arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.
There begins to be an interpenetration, more spiritual than physical, once each ego is killed; one lives for the other; there is an indwelling, a fusion of two, which is closer and less intermittent than any physical unity. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in which Boaz spoke about the death of the woman he loved: 

How long it is since she with whom I lay
O Lord, has left for thine my widowed bed;
Yet still our spirits mingle, as our clay,
And she half living yet, and I half dead.

Very few married people understand that life is a criss-cross pattern; the threads of the fabric go awry early in marriage, and during the second crisis they cross in the opposite direction. In the beginning of love, in the sex period, it is dinners, dances, rides, parties and cocktail hours, which prove the cement of love. Now in the second stage the cement is totally different but it is equally real, namely, misfortunes, children, sickness, sorrow, trials, and bereavements. Pleasures do not unite people as much as pain and sorrow can. Soldiers on a battle field are more closely united than people viewing a scene in a movie theatre.
Purification leads to a de-egotization of self which has proceeded through these stages:

I seek my happiness through another.
I seek my happiness with another.
I wish the happiness of the other.
I suffer with the other.
I rejoice with the other.
My happiness is in the other.

The Three crises in married love and their resolution - The crisis of Tolerance and its resolution - Bishop Fulton J Sheen

The Crisis of Tolerance - Even the discovery of personality brings its crisis, namely the divergence of interests. This is the civil-war period of marriage. What has happened is not that the personality which was discovered is lost; rather, it is rendered opaque by egotism of each.
The second crisis is due to a series of complex causes, both physical and psychical. There is no longer anything to be revealed; mystery is ended. Discovery and revelation, which were essential for the unfolding of love, are gone; there is nothing left to be told that has not been told. There is not a mood or thought of one that is not known to the other; every idiosyncrasy, deformity, habit, gesture which was once hidden is now placarded and evident. the woman feels herself less beautiful, not only because of years, but also because she is loved less tenderly, for love does help create beauty. The husband, on the other hand, feels that others would be more devoted to him if they were given a chance. There are moments when each wishes that he or she could start life all over again. In the heart of each are the words: "You say that I am not what you thought, but then you yourself are not what I thought."
Love is not transformed into comradeship, union into juxtaposition, and marriage into an exchange of egotism from force of habit. Taine, the French Historian, sarcastically said that marriage was made up of three weeks of curiosity, three weeks of love, three years of argument and 30 years of tolerance. Though this formula is an exaggerations, marriage is really likely to settle down to as state in which husband and wife live independent existences unless there is a purification of love; they may sleep in a common dormitory, they may eat at a common refectory, they may meet their children in a common hall but there is no internal unity. Each agglomeration of atoms demands considerable tolerance, allowing him to do whatever he pleases, this being the surest way for each to preserve his own egotism.
There are many indications when couples are living in the period of tolerance; the one who walks ahead on the street is the one who is mad; in the car, he occupies the front seat, and she sits in the rear; she inquires why he cannot be clean in the house like Mr. Brown; he in turn wonders why she can't be thin like Mrs. Green. Each looks for perfection in the other, though the reason they married was because each confessed to being imperfect without the other. It is curious that when a man buys an automobile he never complains because it does not cut the grass, nor does a woman blame a new hat because it does not sprout a garden. But in the age of tolerance, a man expects a wife to be something which she is not, for example, pretty at forty-eight, when he married her because she was a good cook. And if she married him because he was rich, she still manages to blame him becasue he is not the romantic type.
To escape the tolerance, the indignity of being 'put up with' each goes his separate way, and the escape is generally found in some kind of service away from one another and the home. Egotism is transferred from the individual, where it was in the sex period, to the social arena. This transfer from individual to social egotism makes a man dedicate himself to business, profession and making money and makes a woman devote herself to politics or reform leagues, parties, fashion and bridge clubs. Both have 'expansive feelings', but there really is no charity or love for anybody in them; the expansive feelings is nothing but a boil on the neck of their egotism. Altruism of this kind is an escape from futility; though their deeds may be disguised under the name of philantrophy, there is no sacrifice of ego.

The Three crises in married love and their resolution - First Crisis and resolution - Bishop Fulton J Sheen

The first crisis is The crisis of sex. The first crisis comes when what was one loved in a dream is at last possessed in reality. One is never thirsty at the border of a well. As soon as we get the things we desire, we begin to take them for granted. As in the mechanical order there is a loss of energy by friction, so, in physical love, constant proximity brings a decline in intensity. Indulgence produces satiety, and purely carnal love begins to exhaust itself in dull repetition. The loneliness from which one sought to escape by communion with another is now more intense than ever. The union one expected has not lasted; the goal of mystic incorporation with the other has not been achieved. Union is replaced by disunion, fragmentation, solitariness.
The passion for a crescendo of intimacy until oneness is achieved cannot be completely satisfied in the physical order, because  after the act of unity, two separate personalities remain, each with his or her individual mystery. The paradox is clear: the souls of lovers aspire to unity, but their bodies, which are momentary symbols of that unity, cannot attain it. The flesh is inadequate for that kind of unity which alone can satisfy the spirit. No marriage is free from the tension which this produces.
Physical love does not continue with the same ecstasy. If flesh is the only medium of married love, then marriage must suffer the penalties of flesh: transience and death. As life goes on, a greater stimulus is required to produce and equal reaction to sensation. The eye can soon becomes used to beauty, and the fingers to the touch of a friend. The intimacy which at first was so desirable now becomes at time a burden. The " I wasnt to be alone feeling" and the " I think I will go home to mother feeling" come when the eyes are relieved of their rose -coloured glasses. Bills coming into the kitchen make love fly out of the parlour. The very habit of love becomes boring because it is a habit and not an adventure.
The assumption is that life is a perpetual honeymoon, and that the present moment is eternal. The thrill of holding hands, or watching waves roll on a moonlit beach, will never end. This false romantic idea is fostered in part by movies, where a plot is worked up to an arbitrary climax in which the boy and girl are married. This is assumed to be the end, when actually it is only the beginning. There is not the slightest suggestion that there will ever be bad cooking, too much Irish stew, and diapers to wash.
Marriage is thus interpreted in terms of sex. Love is identified with sex adjustment. rhinoceroses are sexually adjusted, but they do not love. Sex is only the frosting on the cake of love; it is the self-starter on the motor of life, but it is neither the highway nor the voyage.
At this point within two years after marriage, many marriages end. Because the biological side of marriage lacks a thrill, it is assumed that love no longer exists. Even a hot water bottle loses its heat after a time, but we do not throw away the bottle. The purpose of a vow is to enable couples to stay together amidst the emotional changes of love. A soldier may not retreat just because he meets opposition. The law now applies: Love can avoid destruction and death only by surmounting itself. There are certain beautiful things in life which cannot be captured permanently. At the Transfiguration, when he face of Our Lord shone as the sun and His garments were as white as snow, Peter wanted to capture the glory thereof by building a tabernacle round Him. But Our Lord reminded Peter that, before that glory could come in a permanent form, he would have to descend the hill of Transfiguration and mount the hill of sacrifice called Calvary. Love is glorified by pain and sacrifice. In the spiritual order, St. Theresa spoke of the various stages of the spiritual life as mansions; one passed from one mansion to another only after considerable purification. As one does not climb a mountain without passing through various stages of peril and hardship, so one does not mount the peak of love without first enduring succeeding crises.
The crises of sex are transformed by the discovery of personality.  The body was leading the soul; now the soul leads the body. the mere fact that the biological becomes less automatic, less violent, less imperative and less animal enables each partner to discover that opposite him is, not sex, nor sexuality, but a personality. Interests is concentrated less in the pleasure, but more in the person who gives the pleasure. new attitudes are directed to the person, such as admiration, esteem, good will, confidence, and friendship. The vital forces are revitalized; each begins to live a different way. Sex is replaceable; but love is irreplaceable. No one can take the place of a mother or a brother, neither can anyone take the place of a wife or a husband. The change in the relationship corresponds to the physical crises of youth and is just as real as what happens when a child becomes a man. The will to love replaced the automatism of love: epidermic conflicts give way to a communion of personalities. before, love was like an electric switch; now it is deliberate, like shaking hands; the will is less passive and more active. gestures, acts of tenderness, sympathy not take on a new meaning - they are bearers of something spiritual, messages from a personality, a soul. There is less libido, and less desire; less selfishness and more consent. Instinct now gives way to the will which supplies a new force, higher than the force which comes from the glands. Love becomes less primitive and more educated.

Marriage needs children

All marriages go through a crisis, writes Msgr Cormac Burke who, as a retired judge in the Roman Rota, has reviewed thousands of cases of marriage annulment from around the world. The following is partly adapted from his book "Covenanted Happiness".

This crisis usually takes place at about two to five years after a couple gets married. Hence, he writes, a couple's biggest and most frequent mistake for their marriage is to postpone having children until two to five years after they are married.

It is at this point of time that the romance and love between a married couple begins to fade. It is, according to Msgr Burke, nature's plan for married couples to have children as the support for their marriage at this point of time. But because many married couples choose to delay having children, the support for their marriage does not exist when they need it.

Many young couples want to enjoy themselves to each other for a number of years after getting married. Despite whatever reasons they give, "to have a good time together" is not much of an ideal for two people to share, and is definitely not going to be enough to hold them together in love for a lifetime.

A couple that plans for a marriage with sacrifice reduced to a minimum and, if possible, totally eliminated, is a couple who wants a marriage where they will eventually lose respect for each other.

One reason that is given that the couple wants to mature first before having children, not realizing that it is in the process of raising children together that they mature. I am sure that you can think of many young men in the army who are hardly mature simply because their parents have protected them and prevented them from undergoing hardship throughout their lives. These parents are not doing their children a favour, they are damaging them, spoil-ing them.

In the same way, a married couple that avoids having children under the pretext of maturity is, in fact, preventing their marriage from maturing. They are damaging their marriage deliberately, they are spoil-ing their marriage and themselves.

People have always cried out, "We want to be able to enjoy marriage without the Church telling us what to do. We don't want to be weighed down by the rules of the Church." It is ironic then that the people who pay least heed to the laws of the Church are the ones who are finding least happiness in marriage. What is more ironic is that they now blame the Church for giving them a guilty conscience which led to their unhappiness in marriage. That is one sign of immaturity in a person - the refusal to take responsibility for one's own mistakes. Immature people are always looking for a scapegoat for their problems.

For love to exist and withstand the trials of life, there must be sacrifice, because sacrifice is part of love. To plan for a marriage with the least amount of sacrifice possible is to plan for a marriage with the least amount of love. It is to plan for a marriage that is most likely to breakdown.