People often see marriage as this state of perfect happiness between a man and a woman. They couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I think we would have fewer divorces if people would stop looking for these fairy tales in our novels. I stopped reading romance about twenty years ago, so I can’t give many examples of what’s out there today. But I remember what I used to think about marriage and adulthood when I was younger and read a lot of Barbara Cartland, an English author. It wasn’t an exact concept and at various stages as I grew and experienced life and observed those around me, I received several unpleasant surprises. Marriage was not a fairy tale! And love took work… I’m not sure if the misconception stemmed from our innate need for love to be perfect or the fact that novels always ended at the point where the two characters professed their love for each other and we we stayed assume they lived happily ever after. Sometimes the novel even told us that and then we had to imagine how.

A wise and happily married man once told me: “Marriage is the ability to tolerate each other.” Now, that wasn’t very romantic, was it? That was almost terrifying for someone like me who was newlywed at the time, but it was sound advice and it was true. This came from a man on his sixteenth wedding anniversary even though he had been with his wife twenty years. They are still together and they are strong.

I have a slightly different spin on marriage, though I communicate the same basic message: “It’s not a walk in the park.” I believe that marriage is the ability to focus on the positive aspects of a person and minimize the ugly things about them, so to speak; The Negatives There is no perfect person. Some of the things that you consider to be flaws in your partner are exactly what another person is looking for, while some of what you consider to be their best qualities are the things that other women don’t care about. It really is about compatibility. This is why it is imperative to make sure that before joining such a person, you have enough qualities that are important to you or so-called deal-breakers. In those moments when you feel like packing it all up or just can’t go on, these are the things about your partner that you’ll need to remember to work out and keep trying to make it work. And this works both ways.

Why else would someone be married for two months and then divorced? If you’re honest with yourself, you knew you should never have married that person. You did it because yes! We need to pay attention to these issues before we get married. After you are married, these same problems that you ignored before the marriage will appear in your head and will be in your face. Then you will have to deal with him but without much bargaining power because you never approached him before or maybe not enough.

I believe that many divorces would be avoided if we stopped imposing unnecessary burdens on our partners and wanting them to be our everything. We all have to do our part to make it work. We must be a team. Marriage is a wonderful union, but only when you have a correct perception of the relationship and it requires work, like any good thing in life, like wealth, a career or a business, etc. Love alone is not enough. It is the foundation on which we build everything else. By everything, I mean trust, patience, tolerance, kindness, selflessness, and the ability to admit when we’re wrong. These then lead to the longevity of the relationship.

Marriage is not a step we take on a weekend in Las Vegas. We have to think it through before we take that step and join another human being. A good marriage does not fall into your lap. It doesn’t just happen. You create one.

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