If ever, midway through a bottle of good wine, you’re brave enough to bring up the topic of marriage and home building, it’s a sure bet the conversation will be dominated by tales of failed projects. As any architect or builder can attest, the field of home building is littered with the bodies of marriages that simply blew apart during the building process.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Home building can equally well be an experience of relationship building, and the simple truth is that most couples do survive their house projects, often coming through much stronger than they began. In the very best cases, they succeed in creating an abode that will nurture the relationship for years to come.

What is it that determines which couples survive building and which don’t? I am convinced that the single biggest factor has nothing to do with the house. Rather, there’s an underlying flaw or missing piece in the marriage, and building the dream house is somehow supposed to make up for everything that’s wrong in the relationship. It’s a lot like teen mothers who get pregnant in order to feel important. Problem is, the strategy just won’t work—the enthusiasm of the big undertaking will override the problems for a while, but sooner or later reality is going to come crashing in. In fact, the rigors of decision making, money, and timeline will actually tend to magnify a couple’s issues.

 

If a couple has paired up out of neediness, insecurity, loneliness, or a weak sense of self, they’ll be building a house on shaky ground. Such emotional deficits will tend to translate into indecisiveness, a debilitating fear of not getting what each person wants, ill-conceived compromises, and a scratch-each-other’s-back attitude that will rob the project of energy—in particular, that creative, forward-thinking energy that makes for great houses.

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