- Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again, and it’s what you get when you don’t get what you want.
- Marriage isn’t supposed to make you happy – it’s supposed to make you married. Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.
- Bad marriages don’t cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.
- For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be there to know what we have done for those we love.
- Divorces run in families. If you didn’t know what good marriages looked like when you were growing up, find people who are married well and find out how they do it.
- Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don’t want to hurt one another’s feelings, and they don’t try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another.
- Arguments are a natural part of any relationship, but cruelty is not. Above all, happily married partners see each other as allies, not as adversaries.
- You can’t be right and married at the same time. If you’re trying to be right and prove your partner wrong, you’ve stepped outside the marriage. Stop it immediately.
- To go without sex is to endanger the relationship. It’s very easy to build up an incest taboo in a marriage. If you go without sex, your instincts recognize this person as part of the family but cease to recognize the person as a sex partner. The response can kick in surprisingly quickly – in as little as six weeks. People make a terrible mistake in being angry with their marriage partner and cutting them off sexually as a way of arousing great passion. It used to work in the ninth grade. But it doesn’t work in the third or even the ninth decade.
- Caressing and contact are always good things. The great thing about sex at this age is it ceases to be great, and it becomes funny. It feels good, but you never know what’s going to work and what’s not. Which brings up another trait that long-lasting marriage partners often share: a sense of humor.
- Humor is vital, but it is vital to be happy, too. A happy marriage is a marriage between two happy people.
- You’re not going to be in love all the time, but if you want to recapture that magic from when you were in love, be loving. Being loving to your partner makes you feel so good about yourself, it doesn’t matter if you’re in love or not. The marriage is making you feel good if you are loving in it. If you want to feel what love feels…DO what love does.
One Final Note:
Just a gentle reminder that we can always use your help. If there is room in your year end giving plans, please consider 24kGoldMarriage.org before January 1, 2016…today is the day and we now accept PayPal.
Happy New Year!
