New on DVD: Why Did I Get Married Too?

Trust is like a car engine. If you take good care of it, it'll take you wherever you want to go. If it breaks, it won't. Here's the catch: A neglected engine doesn't always break down all at once.

No, it wears down ... through abuse, through misuse. And then one day, it just stops, leaving you stranded and alone.

The couples in Why Did I Get Married Too? feel their marital engines sputtering. Terry wonders whether his wife, Dianne, is having an affair. Angela--worried about the same thing with her hubby, Marcus--is peeved because he won't give her his cell phone password. Troy's trust issues are more about himself--can he trust himself to find a job and provide for his family?--than they are about his wife, Sheila. Meanwhile, Sheila longs for Troy to trust her more, as hardship in marriage is a burden that should be shared. And then there's Gavin, who wonders whether wife Pat can trust him--or anyone--enough to let them in. Ever since their son died 13 years ago, she's been emotionally distant but insists that everything is fine. 

And so these four couples head to the Bahamas for a vacation that's part marriage retreat, part reunion. It's a trip that will culminate in a beachside confessional, where each couple recalls why they married their spouses, and why they're happy that they did. 

It seems an ideal site to tinker with those marital engines. 

But that scheduled maintenance gets interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Mike, Sheila's ex-husband. Seems he owns part of a time share for the group's lavish beach house, and, by golly, he's going to join his ex-wife and ex-friends in the festivities. Mike promises disingenuously that he won't be trouble. Don't worry, he tells the other vacationers (in so many words). I'll be good. Sweet, even.

Yeah, sweet like sugar in a gas tank. 

Last year, I talked with director Tyler Perry about his film I Can Do Bad All By Myself. During

the interview, which involved a handful of other Christian outlets, Perry was asked why all his films have almost irredeemable bad guys. 

"Part of it may be my own personal thing, in dealing with the years and years and years of my father being this person as dark and evil as he was to me," he said. " Maybe I'm waiting for him to change so I can see some other people be redeemed. I don't know." 

I can't say whether Perry's father has changed. But it seems, perhaps, Perry has. 

In Why Did I Get Married Too?, we do not have a prototypical Perry villain. Instead, we see something that, to me, strikes closer to reality: flawed people making mistakes. Sometimes terrible, life-changing mistakes. 

I know many people who've gotten divorced, as perhaps you do, people who said their relationships weren't worth the trouble anymore. Sometimes those splits were amicable. Sometimes they were bitter. A few involved a real villain--someone who was violent, abusive, deceptive, mean. But far more often, the relationships simply eroded over time. Somewhere along the line, something when wrong. Couples stopped talking, stopped listening, or both. 

Perry's movies, like marriage itself, are always filled with the "better" and "worse." Married Too is filled with crass language, sexual situations and some scenes that made me want to look away.

But in the midst of it all, he also tells us that marriages are worth fighting for, no matter how far gone things seem. And so we should fight to see our unions through their own periods of better and worse, of sickness and health, of highs and lows. In short, we should embrace every precious minute.

Because with careful attention and regular maintenance, Why Did I Get Married Too? insists, a good marriage can run for a very long time.