HOW TO PREPARE YOURSELF FOR A LIFETIME RELATIONSHIP

Why get married at all?
So if the odds are against you if you are contemplating marriage and the end is so ominous, why bother getting married at all? The right reasons to marry are quite simple to list. These are unfortunately not always the reasons that are considered at the time. The main reasons why people want to get married are for love, for companionship and for security.
The reasons people get married are often quite different:
•          rebound situations
•          social pressures
•          tradition and religion
•          boredom
•          'shotgun marriages'.

As you can see, there are more wrong reasons to get married than there are right ones. Doesn't it make sense then, that to improve your chances of having a successful marriage, you should avoid marrying for the 'wrong' reasons rather than be blinded by the 'right' ones? This doesn't just hold for marriages: it applies to all other forms of relationships as well.

Falling in love
Most people have experienced some form ofbeing in love'. This is the feeling you get when another human being takes over your thoughts and changes your way of life. You may fall in love after just once glimpse of the other person (better known as 'love at first sight'), or even after hearing a voice over the radio or reading an article about the other person.
More commonly, love arises from continued contact with another person. This feeling may become extremely strong, to the point of insatiability. Even sharing each other's company, making love and spending long hours talking are not enough to satisfy your desires. You feel 'butterflies in the stomach' when you see this person; you have a quickened pulse rate and a feeling of intense excitement. These feelings usually grow in intensity the longer you spend away from your partner.
This is the most common chain of events that very quickly leads to nuptial agreements and lifelong commitments. For the lucky few, these feelings are sustained to some degree for a long time. For some, they get stronger and stronger throughout their life together. For others, these feelings very quickly change and decrease. However, for many couples, what they feel at the time of their marriage is different from what they feel several years later.

Life after falling in love
How many of you have feelings for your partner that are stronger now than they were when you were first married? How many of you feel the same way as when you first 'fell in love'? What's different? Of those who feel different, is the feeling better or worse?
I can confidently say that 100 per cent of you who are reading this chapter would agree that things are not the same as they were when you first got married. A proportion would say life is better, and many people would say it's worse. However, all of you would say that some components of the relationship have changed. Perhaps there are aspects of her character or personality that you learned about your partner after your marriage that you dislike and have never gotten used to. We can't expect to be happy with everything about our partner. It's not possible. Further, what makes us happy now, may irritate us tomorrow, and so on.

How do you know if your relationship is successful or not?
How do we define whether our marriage or relationship is successful or not? One way of defining it is to analyse how compatible we are with our partner. Try asking yourself these questions:
•          Since you got married, what is it about your partner that you still like as much as you did the day you were married?
•          What is it about your partner that you now like more than you did when you just got married?
•          What have you desired and received from the relationship since you got married?
•          What have you wanted to achieve in your marriage that you have not been able to?
•          What is it about your partner that you used to like, but now dislike?
•          What is it about your partner that you dislike more than you did before getting married?

For most of my patients, what they now love about their partners is usually not what they loved when they first were married. The flowing blonde hair with the smooth suntanned skin, the long thin legs and the succulent firm breasts are now gone. The ignorant, submissive, doting personality of your 22-year-old bride is now the streetwise, independent, experienced mother of your four adult children.
And what about yourself? If you are now a man of 50, you're no longer the muscular, long-haired, pot smoking, laid back hippie of the 60s. Instead, you are more likely to be an overweight, over stressed, balding executive with the huge financial responsibility of feeding and educating your children. But your wife still loves you, although not all of you and not all the time.
                                                                                                                        *65\4*

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