Is marriage really this state of perfect bliss between a man and a woman or is it just a figment of our imagination; a fallacy? I look around and I see real people living real lives with real problems. Many a time, it looks nothing like the Barbara Cartland novels I used to read back in the day. Do I hear someone ask, "Who's that?" Lol. Well, she used to write a lot of romance novels back in the day and I grew up on it; same as Mills and Boons and all the rest of them for those of us who grew up either in the UK or countries colonized by them. (If you grew up in America, don't even try to find out who Barbara Cartland is or what the Mills and Boons series stands for!)
I digress. Many years ago, a happily married man told me on his 16th anniversary (he had been with his wife 20 years but married for 16), "Marriage is the ability to tolerate eachother." Now, that didn't sound very romantic, did it? No. But it was true. And I have never forgotten that advice, because that's really what it was.
Marriage is not a bed of roses. What you experience in marriage is very different from what happens while dating. A lot of times, it's the ability to focus on the good in a person and minimize the ugly so to speak that keeps a marriage going strong. If you go into marriage expecting everything to stay the same as the dating days when you had no kids possibly and life had not really started to happen in it's true sense, you will be in for a rude shock.
I have not been married too many years, but I am an excellent observer. And I strongly feel that a lot of divorces (not all obviously) are based on unreal expectations of marriage and of the next person and possibly expecting them to be our "everything," an unrealistic burden placed on another human being. What do you think? Please leave a comment. Educate us on your experiences; personal or otherwise...Thank you.
A slightly different form of this article was published on Ezinearticles.
I feel that Marriage is one of my many "Jobs". I say this because just like i have to work everyday at my real job i also have to work everyday at being a better mother and a better wife/spouse. I believe that if you feel that you have nothing in your mariage to work on or improve then you must think that your marriage is "perfect" and I personally do not believe that anything in the world we have created for ourselves is "perfect". I beleive that if you marry someone thinking that they are going to be/act/look the same way 10-15 years from now then you will end up disappointed and probably in a divorce. People change everyday. I have changed in so many ways and so has my husband which I have been married to for almost 10 wonderful years and we know that we each have our faults along with issues that we brought into our marriage from our past, but we understand that to stay together and be able to live together happily there must be compromises along the way. I believe that if you dont work at making your marriage better each day then eventually you will wake up one day and ask yourself. Why?
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