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Making the right choice may sometimes involve some pain.  However, if the pleasure principle is the main guiding principle of one’s life, then if one’s spouse does not bring one pleasure, discard him or her for on who does.  This teaching, of course, wreaks havoc upon society’s most basic institution, the family.  As a matter of fact, however, eighty-six percent of unhappily married people who stay together find that five years later their marriages are happier.  And three-quarters of people who have characterized their marriages as “very unhappy” but have nevertheless remained together report five years later that the same marriages are either “very happy” or “quite happy,” meaning that permanent marital unhappiness is surprisingly rare among the couples who stick it out. (Bennett, William The Broken Hearth Doubleday, New York 2002 p. 158.)  However, guided by the pleasure principle, therapists all too often have advocated dissolution of marriage if the partners did not seem “happy.”

The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory, Roberta M. Gilbert, M.D., page 106