It is very evident that these days people are more concerned about the euphoric idea of marriage, rather than understanding the purpose for marriage and why the marriage in the first place.
The reason why there seems to be alot of issues with marriage is that the ideal word “preparation” is the missing piece of the puzzle. These five essentials are core areas you either have to know before marriage and prepare for it, or it comes out of the blue to you while in the marriage leading to stress in handling them. The five essentials you wish you knew before getting married are :
1. Falling in love is not an adequate foundation for marriage:
Studies have shown that the average life span of this “in love” euphoric experience is two years for couples, and automatically they start coming off the emotional high. And now, there has to be or the couples have to transition into a second stage of romantic love, which is the intentional love. Learning about this would help keep love alive in the relationship.
2. The old saying “like parents, like children” is not a myth:
If you want to know what he would look like in 10years look at his father, if you want to know how she would look like in 10years, look at her mother. Now, someone might reason and say, “So are you saying I must be like my father?”. No, but studies have shown in psychology that parents are the biggest influence in a child’s life while growing up. You can pick up behavioural pattern from your parents, internalize them and few years down the road, they start manifesting. So if you don’t want to be like your father, identify areas where you don’t want to be like your father and study those areas to make sure you don’t take such route. For example, if your father is an Alcoholic and you don’t want to be like that, you have to study about alcoholism, why people turn to alcohol and learn a different way to handle stress so that you don’t get wrapped up in that, because if you just do what’s natural, you’ll wind up like your father.
3. Solve disagreement without arguing:
You know when you’re in love, you don’t think you are going to have any argument, you obviously don’t think you would have differences. Someone once said that “Being emotionally high in love is like being insane”. But the issue is you have two years to get off that emotional rollercoaster, and after that, reality sets in with your differences staring you both on the face.
However, you have to learn to listen to each other, treat each other like humans, let them have thoughts and feelings that are different from yours, don’t condemn them from seeing differently, try to understand the world through their eyes and listen with empathy.
4. The financial plan:
There are only three things you can do with money; either give it away, save it, or spend it. But you have to have a plan on how much you’re going to put into each of these categories, otherwise you’re going to have a big conflict over money in your marriage. Infact, some researchers have found out that conflict over Money is the number one area of conflict in marriage. So talk about money before you get married.
5. Spirituality is not to be equated with going to church or mosque:
The question are; Are they really committed to their religious beliefs? Are they really Christians or cultural Christians? Are they good and practicing Muslims? Endeavour to see that they’re practicing Christianity or Islam, not just professing Christians or Muslims.
