Making a wise choice of mate: The first step towards building a strong, healthy marriage

Marriage is a lot more than outward appearance. It is good to make sure that one has good character traits, not superficial features. Bear in mind that looks change over time and are a bad indicator of whether you will be compatible and happy together as a married couple. People gain weight, lose hair, grow hair where it didn’t grow before, and develop wrinkles. Accidents can cause disfigurement, illness robs us of our healthy skin, and gravity forces everything to bend and sag. So be sure to define what you want to see inside a person, not outside! Then the next time you become involved with someone and start to feel yourself getting serious about them, take out and review your lists.

Use them to evaluate whether this person has more traits on the “can’t live without” list or the “can’t live with” list. And don’t be too eager to compromise - remember you made these lists after careful self-analysis and experience over time. Don’t be unreasonable, but don’t concede important points just because you want this to work out. Realise that most of the problems that occur after marriage are caused by issues that were apparent beforehand. We often choose to ignore those little ‘red flags’ when they appear. The jealous husband was also the jealous boyfriend - you just made yourself believe that he ‘cared’ so much about you. And the ‘high maintenance’ wife demonstrated those ‘same the world revolves around me’ tendencies when you were dating. But back then you just considered her charming qualities to be entertaining and endearing. So, choose carefully! It takes two to make a marriage work but it takes only one to destroy it. The bottom-line is to work on yourself before you marry to ensure that you are ready to assume the responsibilities of marriage. Be sure that you can make and accept decisions which are in the best interests of your new family, rather than just yourself. Be sufficiently mature enough to forgive, and be prepared to leave the past in the past, and effectively communicate with proper control of anger when a problem arises. Be a confident, secure, well-adjusted individual who is truly prepared to share his/her life with someone else, but doesn’t need a relationship in order to feel valuable. You are valuable as you are. Make a wise choice of mate by really getting to know one another before hand. Spend plenty of time together in various situations including stressful and challenging ones. Be clear about your expectations of marriage and of one another. Discuss finances, children, religion, career goals, family traditions, and household responsibilities. Look for any areas of incompatibility because I can assure you they will come up again! Attend counselling sessions for married couples in order to gain a more objective view of your relationship. And most of all, be honest with one another, be yourselves, and don’t try to do your best just to make a good impression. You can’t keep up pretence for your entire life!