The Number One Reason Why Your Marriage is Hard
Cars need gas to run. You regularly fill them up with gasoline that costs money. You expect the car to regularly need gas, and prepare for when it runs out or comes close to it.
Yet, you don’t approach your marriage with the same methodical approach.
This is the number one reason why your marriage is hard. Because you have yet to accept the fact that a marriage requires regular maintenance. Sexual maintenance, spiritual maintenance, intelligence maintenance and excitement maintenance. If you’ve been arguing, don’t feel the same about your spouse, or find that your spouse is intimately tied to many of your personal problems, your relationship is on fumes.You’re just running on the mere establishment that is “a relationship.”
Get out of the mode of thinking that marriage is easy and natural. Marriage is probably the most unnatural institution on the planet. Two people committing fidelity, combining resources and sharing space for the rest of their natural lives together? Think about it, if someone offered that deal to you with a random person, you wouldn’t take it without a one-time payout to be awarded via direct deposit.
But because you share meals and a bed with someone for an extended period of time, its supposed to be different? Not at all. In fact, the difficulty in marriage is that people expect to know each other, and to have mastered idiosyncrasies that are always under construction.
Reality is that you need to recognize two important things before you get married and while you are married. One, that marriage is nothing sweet. The great moments you have with a spouse are created, not happenstance. Committing to listening, laughing and patience never pay off immediately, but they do reap long term benefits of trust and satisfaction.
Two, you need to understand that bad thing are going to happen, and you can’t take it personally. It’s natural to feel like marriage is a mistake and you made a wrong choice when you are in the heat of an argument, but it’s usually just that; one argument. Problems are usually solved when you aren’t yelling and screaming at each other,rather, in random statements of understanding and affection.
Marriage is hard because you think it should be easy. The harder you think marriage is, and the dedication that you show daily to make it easier, will make your perspective completely change.
