'America's Marriage Doctor': 5 Keys to a Stable Marriage

By Jeff Schapiro, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, July 19, 2011

It's wedding season and Dr. Jacqueline Del Rosario, also known as “America's Marriage Doctor,” is out to help couples and their marriages succeed.

Everyone, she said, goes into marriage with a “vision” for what it should be like, but when things don't go as planned many couples end up divorcing.

Del Rosario spoke to The Christian Post on Tuesday about marriage and offered some key points for maintaining a stable marriage.

"I think that most people start off with a vision for their relationship,” she said, “but they don't know how to bring that vision to manifestation. They lack the skill. They lack the knowledge. And they just lack the tools to make those manifest."

She suggested that that the typical American view of marriage is not what God had in mind for the union of a man and his wife.

"I think that God's vision for marriage is one that's not polluted or diluted by the mystified concepts that we have that are all around passion and romance,” she said. “God's vision is really about commitment and love ... So commitment has nothing to do with how I feel, it has to do with my intentions. And then love has to do with sacrifice and selflessness.”

There are five keys to creating and maintaining a stable marriage relationship, Del Rosario said, and they are as follows:

1) Compatibility – "That's the absolute, ultimate key,” she said. “Being congruent with your mate; being a suitable, compatible mate for a lifelong relationship.”

People should check to see if they're compatible with their mates before getting married, but they should also continue to do so even during marriage. “We can purposefully and wisely ensure that we're navigating ... through some of those channels of life, or courses of life, in unison.”

2) Communication – "Communication is sharing, talking, stay on the same page."

3) Authenticity – "Authenticity is just being yourself,” she said. “I think that we need to be able to be loved as the person that we really are. And we remove a lot of the barriers when we're just really ourselves and we give a clear picture of who our mate needs to love."

4) Intimacy – "Intimacy,” she said, “is becoming a lost art with Twitter, Facebook, and texting. People are forgetting how to connect. Intimacy is about building value and closeness ... on that level that transcends flesh. Those are the types of encounters that we must continue to populate our marriage with."

5) Acceptance – "Acceptance is accepting people for who they are, and accepting things for what they are, and they're not always ideal."

People don't know how to go about making the vision for their marriages become a reality, Del Rosario noted. Her mission is to help those people by giving them the tools they need to have successful relationships.

"I want to heal families, and I want to do that by healing marriages because I think that we've let go of a lot of great relationships because we didn't know how to maintain them. The burden of my heart is to address marriage so that we can have healthy families,” she said.

Many people find it difficult to access help for their marriages, often due to a lack of time or transportation, so Del Rosario is offering a number of resources on her website, BestMarriageKeys.com, in order to help alleviate some of those inconveniences.

Dr. Jacqueline Del Rosario is the creator of The Marital Constitution and The Marriage University. She also does one-on-one marriage coaching, and can be found on Facebook (Jacqueline Del Rosario) and on Twitter (#BestMarriageKeys).