You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan launches a new series exploring the theoretical framework of marriage that informs how he engages and works with couples.

Dan sets the stage for this series by

talking about these marriage quadrants as a system of classifying patterns and

structures that are highly complex. While no sorting system is all encompassing, Dan

believes that these categories offer clarity and direction about what it looks

like to engage marriages of all types.

For an image laying out the quadrants Dan describes here, look for this episode on our blog at thealandercenter.org.

Let me give you some idea what we're about to accomplish and how we'll do so.

What I want to do is to think about marriages in the context of how do we understand the unique

patterns that come to play as two individuals come into a relationship.

We're something of the nature of how we relate creates a new

entity. You've got an individual, another individual, in this paired relationship of intimacy,

covenantal commitment. And what comes of it is almost a third being, something beyond an individual

with another individual, in that sense that every marriage is way more than additive. In fact,

it's way more than multiplicative in the sense that if you open up each individual's past,

their family of origin, the people who have influenced their lives for good and ill,

from meaningful relationships to harm like abusers, to lovers,

as you take into account in one sense, socio-economic status, class, race, ethnicity, level of education, eon in which the marriage is existing, and what developmental stage each person is at by virtue of their age, but by virtue as well of their emotional age, as you blend

in the possibility of a second or third marriage. The moment you begin to talk about the nature

of what's true about a marriage, you're really talking about something that's exponential in its complexity. And that's why

I began developing a kind of nocological system to try and organize something of the complexity.

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