My biggest influence, and the reason I have taken on the challenge of saving marriages, were my parents, who just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. And their influence wasn't because of anything they ever said to me, but what they did, stayed married. What makes this more important was they had the typical marriage of couples of their generation, full of fights, but the managed to stick it out. They taught me that divorce was not an option, that quitting was not the path to take.
My mom actually had my career mapped out when I was a kid to be a priest, something I took very seriously. I was an altar boy (no, I do not have any stories) and studied the bible intently. Although I haven’t read the bible since I was a kid I have used a lot of what I learned in my book. And then I discovered girls.
Although my career was extremely successful I never met a girl who lit up my passion, until at the height of the stock market (I worked as a Wall Street analyst) in 2000 I met a girl I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and then we started arguing. Towards the end we went to a therapist looking for help solving our relationship troubles. When I realized he wasn’t really helping I decided to tackle the issue myself, although that relationship ended. Writing this book was my cathartic reaction to that pain.
When I met this girl I had worked for 5 years as a semiconductor analyst on Wall Street. So I studied like a Wall Street analyst, reading over 100 books in a period of 10 months, which equates to 2 ½ books a week, straight for 10 months. I believe this may be one of the most researched books ever written. And at the end of this research my confidence in my ability to solve the relationship problem resulted in the book, after 9 months of writing.
The bottom line is a professional psychologist could not have written such an expansive book as “Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage” because of the limitations of the industry. My joke is the 100 books read included nearly 2 dozen relationship books and the only books read that were fiction were the relationship books. In fact, the first title concept I came up with was “Men Are From Earth, Women Are From Earth” to demonstrate just that point.
by Tim Kellis
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