KITOTO: What I wish I knew before I said “I Do”

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person” states Mignon McLaughlin. How possible is it that we can fall in love many times with the same person? Many get into marriage with myths, wrong beliefs and unrealistic expectations, only to discover that the reality is quite the opposite of what they thought they knew.

Marriage is a mystery that must be unravelled by the couple. Asked by CBN, “What things do you wish you had known before you got married?”

Gary Chapman, the renown writer on marriage said:  “I wish had known that the in-love experience is not an adequate foundation for marriage.”

Marriage is founded on love, trust, honest communication, full disclosure, patience and many more. We have this wrong movies’ idea that, you fall in love with somebody, and it’s so wonderful, so euphoric, and it is going to be that way forever.

Later to discover that this was far from the truth. Marriage is more than feelings of love. There are nights you would be asking yourself, “What was the hurry all about? May be I should have waited!”

Sometimes the euphoria associated with dating and getting married can be totally removed from real life. As a result, after getting married, many couples come down from that high on the wedding day feeling disillusioned, cheated and wishing their current reality is a  dream that will surely pass. In that case, it does not take long before one begins to notice things about their partner that irritate and hurt.

“I was okay when I was single … I led a normal life … until he or she came along.” With time, such feelings will lead to deep seated guilt that seems to point the finger. “I married the wrong woman … if she was the right woman, I don’t think I would be having these bad feelings”.

In my counselling experience, there are many things spouses wished they knew before getting married. Robert Schubert states, “Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.” When we do, we will find the need to stick together a much needed effort.

Conflict does not arise to tear a couple who are friends apart, instead it provides an opportunity for growth, learning and maturation of the friendship and the couple. If well handled, it can make a spouse or the couple stronger.

So, instead of shifting blame, running away from it, fighting and calling each other names, we need to embrace conflict positively and work through it.

RESOLVING CONFLICT

“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict”, states Martin Luther King, Jr. Therefore, your partner cannot stay silent or neutral where family morals are being subverted.

Our truest self comes out when we sharpen each other. One time, while standing at the banks of a river, I reach out and picked a very smooth stone from the water. Nearby, lay several other smooth stones.

As I felt this stone in my hands, I noted how smooth it was. I though to myself, “What made this stone this smooth such that I love to hold it in my hands?”

Soon it dawned on me, it is the knocking of one on another that did the job. In retrospect, marriage partners are like two pieces of rock being thrown up and down through the through waters of this life.

As they knock on each other, under the force of the water, the stones smooth each other, taking away the rough edges they bore. Marriage will find itself in the river that may take the couple through moments of facing decimated absolutes and decaying morals, joy of getting a new baby and the pain of waking up in the night to feed the baby. This river never stops.

It through this river that we are fashioned by trouble and good; adversity and pain. In the end we glow because we have a better understanding that trouble comes to make us better not bitter. Couples need to embrace conflict and refuse to relate to each other through the lens of unresolved issues. We must develop a culture of talking through our areas of conflict.

Free disclosure that desires to keep the communication open, even when hard issues are being confronted should be key.

FINANCES IN MARRIAGE

The third thing couples wished they knew is that talking  about finances in marriage is hard. Money is one of the hardest things to learn how to share.

Accountability on how much money comes in and how it will be used has led many marriages to collapse.

Marriage requires full disclosure on finances (income and agreed up expenditure). In marriage, money is a ‘we’ affair not a ‘me thing’ or ‘me versus you.’

When spouses relate to each other based on what they earn, posses, how they look or where they stay, they miss the whole point about marriage.

The fourth thing most couples wished they knew is that great sex is not always automatic. Knowing that sex is the culmination of a journey, helps you realise that, “It’s okay if it did not work today.” After all, we still have many years together to make this right!

Many start marriage with false hopes like, “I will have sex every night … may be three times a night … Whenever I want, I will get!” Then you get married and you realise there is a lot more to marriage than sex.

In fact, there is so much going on that sex is the last thing on your wife’s mind. Sadly, we think it will be just like we see in the movies. “Perfect couple meets and has amazing sex on the first night.”

In fact, bedroom life does not just happen. It is tied to the many stuff that happened during the day, and the day after and even last week … including what happened in the office.

Sharol Josephson in her book, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex says that, if you take women who had lousy sex on their wedding night, and women who had great sex on their wedding night,  and have them rate their sex lives ten years later; for many of them, it makes absolutely no difference. The issue here is, no matter how great or awful sex on the wedding night was, sex years later will be determined by your attitude and desire to learn through the experience.

We soon become as good as our adventure and discovery can take us in creating our own intimacy.

The fifth thing couples wished they knew is that the vows we make on the wedding day are as real as daylight. The marriage vow commits us to a lasting union — a forever time, until death does separate.

Speaking to one couple, she said, “I wished I had grasped the meaning of forever.” I have come to discover that it means taking one step at a time for a life time. Getting into marriage requires mean understanding that marriage is about how we live, love, solving our issues and serve each other each day.

It is a journey. One day you wake up and the days have turned into weeks, the weeks into months into years. Little things matter in marriage. It is these little things done each day that sum up to become the life time marriage.

Spending your forever in a blissful manner will only happen if your partner is also your friend. That is why one person said, “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Friends are those people you carefully choose because you share many great areas in common.

For many people,  forever turns into a nightmare because they never gave it serious thought. Thinking of forever, calls on us to think about the little details in life that would fill our days, and ask whether that is where we want to be and with who.

Marriage is constituted by the details; the tears, the laughter, the angry moments, the reconciliation and thereafter, the fun and enjoyment.

That is what makes the forever meaningful.

The other thing a couple wished they knew is that, “for better for worse’ part” is not just a phrase. Do we ever think that this phrase will one day come to pass in our marriage, literally.

The phrases in the vows we make are beautiful, heartfelt and tear drop inducing. But what happens when we have to live them out on a day to day in the marriage. When we think of the moments we want to leave because of conflict or pain, we have to be reminded that those vows were meant to be a bond that would keep our together regardless of the issues.

When we connect with the power behind those words, we learn not to point fingers at others but instead do whatever we can to keep the promise alive.

Every unmarried person needs to know that these phrases come alive at some point in our journey of marriage.

They are meant to be binding, because they are a promise. For better or worse means that I will love my spouse at their worst and celebrate them at their best.

This truth seems to come alive when the marriage is facing the toughest of times; calling us to take the lead and stand with the husband who has lost his job, or wife who needs support because she is ill and can’t wash herself.

To some, this may mean doing everything around the house or taking a day off from work to give the needed support.

IS MARRIAGE 50/50?

How many would wish they knew that marriage is not 50/50 but 100/100. In marriage we give all we have for our partner. Wisdom says that we don’t enter marriage thinking:

“I will do my share and my partner will do theirs”.

If you start marriage measuring who does more than the other, you will discover that your partner doesn’t measure up. That is because we all have different strengths, weaknesses that are followed by our unrealistic expectations. Since we are making realistic exceptions of each other, we will find that they never do enough.

Growing means that we have to get over this whole idea that we each bring half the effort. God made us complete beings with both gifts and abilities.

We need therefore to think of bringing 100/100 of what we have been blessed with. For many marriages, the trouble is finding that partner that is willing to pour their all. We must all come to the marriage table with a dedication of making the marriage work.

Although we may often find that marriage seems to appear to be a 60/40 or 80/20 deal, lets work at meeting that other person wherever they are  at the time. It could just be that in one issue they are at 20 and in another there are at 80.

The more you care for the marriage the more it will flourish and produce the desired fruit. God calls us to be absolutely and totally selfless at how we work at the relationship.

I have realised that, great victories came when I learnt to lay down my life for my wife. In turn, she has poured out her all to me. It is much more like 100/100.