Chatan ClassesIntroMazal Tov! You are getting married, or maybe you want to get married. If you were to be an investor we would be considering you a reckless gambler. Why? Well, you’re investing your life, which is all you got, and the odds are not in your favor. 60% divorce rate, and many more are not even happy. This will either be the best or the worst decision of your life. You should know that. But the good news is it’s up to you. You control this ride, this life. How are you going to play it?Only you can answer that question. Why is there such a high failure rate in marriage? I’ll give you two reasons, which are my opinion:When you want to be a neurosurgeon, you have to go to 12 years of primary school, 4-5 years of undergraduate school, another 4 years of medical school, 3 years of general surgery, another 7 years of specializing in neurosurgery. And you don’t coast through these years. You have to be willing to give up your life. To become a successful neurosurgeon, you need to do two things: 1) have many many years of instruction and 2) a lot of hard work. There must be nothing short of blood, sweat and tears. With that context, as hard as neurosurgery is, it pales in comparison to the difficulty of marriage. To be a great neurosurgeon is one thing, but’s it’s a much more difficult to be a great husband or wife. Unfortunately, there is a poverty of knowledge of marriage is. The art of how to treat your other has been lost; the way of a soul mate has been forgotten. Furthermore, our generation lives in a generation where instant satisfaction is the dominant form of satisfaction, where we search for the high without even wanting to put the effort of going on our tippy toes, we look for excellence in marriage without the effort of trying to be a person of excellence ourselves. And no matter how deeply you know the truth of these ideas, all of us to some degree suffer from this. We don’t want to work in the one are in life that definitively requires strain. The job of this book is to give you the instruction. Your job is to give the blood, sweat, and tears. The Art of Marriagehttp://new.steinsaltz.org/essay/two-languages/Building a marriage is not the same thing as building a vacuum. Therefore, it inherently requires a qualitatively different type of instructions. Or we should say, instructions are not sufficient for building a successful marriage. Marriage is also about character.Marriage also an art. High StandardsLook at Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Shareholder letter 2018 (all of it)Recognition and Scope What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope. Let me give you two examples. One is a sort of toy illustration but it makes the point clearly, and another is a real one that comes up at Amazon all the time. Perfect Handstands A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be – something this coach understood well.You have to know what a good marriage looks like? Fights abolsutely! But not hate. What the expectations are: if it takes 6 months for a handstand and lots of bruises, it takes a lot more fora good marriage and in both areas.Set your expectations of what marriage is; people have the wrong expectations about marriage (maybe from the movies, wrong expectations about love, that it is getting not giving etc. ) so they give up. Marriage has many many difficult periods. It can’t be all pain because then it’s not marriage. But if it’s all pleasure it’s definitely not marriage, maybe an aquaitance. Covenenant not Contract http://rabbisacks.org/the-politics-of-hope/; Must also look at Rav Baars (look at his ebook, actual book, and Aish.com)In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So, for instance, when I buy something from you, yougive me the item or the service I want, and in exchange I pay you. That’s a commercial contract, and that’s what makes the market economy.Or, I pay taxes in return for the services provided by the government. That’s the social contract, and it creates the state.But a covenant is different. The simplest example of a covenant is a marriage. Two people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty andtrust, to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another to do together what neither can achieve alone.A contract is about interests, but a covenant is about identity. It’s about you and me coming together to form an “us.”The difference is huge. The social contract creates a state. But the social covenant creates a society. A society is about all the things that bind us together as a collective group bound to the common good, without transactions of wealth or power. In a society we help our neighbours not because they pay us to, or because the state forces us to, but simply because they’re part of the collective “us.”- I think I should come up with a list of traits that are needed for a good marriage. Actually, marriage tests all traits but there is a certain subset that really plays out the most:o Kindness o Judge Favorably/no sinat chinamo Humility o Forgiveness o Not bearing a grudge/revengeo Wisdom Know which battles to pick  TechniquesMarriage is Not