I met my wife 20 years ago and knew immediately that she would be the woman I would marry, I even told my best man so the minute I laid eyes on her as he related to our families at our wedding. I got lucky that way.
When you fall in love with someone it’s easy to get along. You don’t look for fault, in fact you’re blind to it. Then one day you come to your senses, she isn’t the ideal you fell in love with, nor are you the perfect man she thought you’d be. You’re both imperfect human beings. If you’re lucky and you’re smart, you begin to look for and find other qualities despite the imperfections. In addition to love, which can be fickle, comes respect and admiration and that makes all the difference.
No one told me this, but I learned that marriage is much more a partnership than a love affair. Long weekends on the cape are easy since you have one goal, to have fun together. Marriage has many goals, some conflicting. Work, school, children, money, dishes, laundry, sex, chick flick or film noir, everything is a negotiation. You both had better be at least in the same book, if not on the same page if you want to have a successful marriage. If you want 15 children and your spouse wants none or if you want quality of life in Maui and he or she must be in NYC, you’re probably screwed. Compromise has it’s limits, so know who you are marrying. It’s been said that women marry men expecting to change them, men marry women expecting them not to change, both are disappointed.
Commitment is everything. If you are truly committed to being happily married, you do those things you don’t want to do, laundry, chick flicks, to make it happen. A load of laundry does not a marriage make, but if your spouse wants to know if you have his/her back, clean underwear is as good a place to start as any. Commitment also means you don’t do those things you may want to do. If you’re single college buddies are flying off to Vegas for a bachelor party, as a married man it may behoove you not to attend. Will anything untoward happen there? Not if you don’t go. Commitment means that even when it would be really easy to blow this pain in the ass relationship off, you don’t. You do the work and clean up your messes. Commitment means that failure is not an option, when it creeps in as an option you are no longer committed.
