Marriage is more than a Wedding

There are different approaches to marriage. There are the people that feel you need to date for a specified length of time, followed by a long engagement, then have a big splash of a wedding. Another segment believe that time is irrelevant to love and a brief acquaintance is enough before a wedding as long as it feels right. My personal belief is that either method can be successful depending on the approach of the two people making the marriage commitment.

My parents so far have been married for 61 years, they dated for about six weeks and were engaged for three days prior to their wedding. They are happily married. Now mind you, they are very different people. They met right at the end of college and both were in the right place for getting married. My father had his Engineering degree and my mother her teaching degree. However, with my father having a job in Boston and my mother's teaching job in North Dakota, she passed on her teaching job and moved with him to Boston, where they had their honeymoon. There were some initial struggles as the adjusted to each other, but they came from similar back grounds. What they both had was a belief that the marriage commitment was forever.

My husband and I dated for a year and were engaged for 3 months, I was 18 and he was 22 when we got married. We are closing on 40 years of marriage and are also happily married. We've had some really tough poor years, as you can imagine happens when you marry at 18. My husband was and is a skilled carpenter and I was intelligent enough but unknowing of what I wanted to be when I grew up. We also married with the belief that you didn't consider divorce as an option, you just powered through all obstacles together. I know we've been luckier than most, not having had some of the most horrible marriage challenges, the death of a child, illness of a spouse, or some accident or illness that causes a complete personality change in a spouse.

As a 57 year old woman who has observed marriages and talked with people in happy marriages, sad marriages, horrible marriages, ending marriages and marriages that were destined to end, I've drawn my own conclusion on factors that I think help make a marriage last and factors that make for a certain end to a marriage.

First and foremost is the factor of not going in your mind to divorce anytime that things get rough or anytime you are upset with your spouse. As an example I worked with a young lady who had just gotten married, she'd just arrived back at work from her honeymoon and she was telling me about a fight with her new husband, she was telling me she was SO mad at him she took off her ring and threw it at him and wasn't wearing it that day. I think she was expecting me to sympathize with her. I did about the argument, but I expressed to her that I felt that taking her ring off and threatening divorce on one of first fights was ridiculous and a bad omen for her marriage. Sadly her marriage didn't last two years. This might be a gross example, but a true one. The more often you consider divorce as a option, the more likely it will occur.

Over the years I've chatted with so many people about their spouses and it saddens me how many people speak meanly of their marriage partner. I fully believe that if there is anyone in this world that shouldn't speak badly about me, it's the person that proclaims to love me more than anyone, my husband and as a firm believer in the golden rule, I strive to never speak negatively about my husband. Here is the interesting part of this, speaking your negative thoughts aloud makes them more real and more felt and having people agree seems to make these issues seem more grievous.

Another way in which to help a marriage to survive the long haul is to make sure you do special things for the person you love. It doesn't have to be costly, it just has to show that you are thinking of the person. Remember their favorite foods, bring them a coffee or a hot chocolate on a cold day, an icee on a hot day. Make sure you tell the person that is your help mate in life how important they are to you, how much you appreciate how hard they work, compliment the things they do. Don't ever take what they do, who they are for granted. I once brought water balloons to my husband and his work crew on a hot summer day, cost me almost nothing and 25 years later he still remembers it, plus the kids had a blast too.

Marriage is a partnership. I'm going to get really real here for a moment. Women we do not and should not control the sex life like its something we ration out, men shouldn't do this either. Sex is something that continually bonds a married couple. It is a need in life that only your marriage partner should be fulfilling, so unless you like someone else using your needs as a barter, don't do that to your spouse. I know sometimes a person isn't in the mood, but fake it until you make it, ie usually once you start, you'll wanna finish. It is not always going to be like when you first get married. There are times during your marriage where you might co-exist more like friends other times where you are passionate lovers. This part of a marriage is very cyclical. I believe some people get to a down cycle and decide that they have fallen out of love and start casting an eye outward. Casting an eye outward never fixed a marriage. Please just hold on, do special things, compliment your spouse, take a vacation, remember that marriage isn't just about the two people who took the vows, it involves children, parents of spouses, siblings and friends. A divorce rips open the heart of so many people.

So those are Just a few of my basic bits of Wedding/Marriage Hints, if they help anyone then I'm really please.