“Once you get married, your life is over.” You might have heard this old doom and gloom statement before. But is it really true?
Is marriage the end of your life?
It all depends on the way you and your spouse decide to look at it, and if you do the work to create the kind of marriage you both desire.
Two questions you can ask each other are:
- What kind of marriage do we want to have?
- Where do we want to go with our marriage?
We believe marriage can be the best thing to ever happen to your life!
Rather, it can be the beginning of a whole new world of growth.
“When I was younger I thought once you got married that’s it, your life/hopes/dreams are put on hold for your husband and children.
Now that I have grown, and I have learned this way of thinking is not only unhealthy, but detrimental to a healthy marriage and your mental health.
I was simply observing an environment that had a lot of religious dogma and stereotypes. I decided I wanted to marry a man who would treat me as an equal, a partner, and a team mate.
Someone who would value my opinion and input. I didn’t settle for any less.” – Ash
Your past experiences, and the environments you grew up in will set the tone for your marriage expectations and what is “normal” in marriage. This can be good, but it can also have negative effects.
What you have to do is decide what kind of life you want, and find someone who also wants to live that lifestyle, then put the work in to make it a reality.
If you love to travel and your spouse or future fiancee hates traveling and you both can not come to a compromise; it’s probably best you wait a bit on the getting married thing until you can work that out.
The reason being that you don’t want to go into marriage without resolving conflicts you are aware of before you say “I do”.
In marriage, you will have to make sacrifices and compromises, but you should never lose who you are.
Marriage should not be the end of your life!
You should always be improving your character and growing as a person, but still be true to yourself.
Your life will be impacted in many ways by being married.
How does marriage change your life?
1. It challenges you to learn new things to grow, and become selfless.
2. It gives you that person who is your support when you need it. Someone to rely on when the rest of the world around you is falling apart.
- Someone to enjoy the good times, bad times, and share experience and weather the storms with you.
- Someone to take care of you when you need it, and in turn you’ll be there for them.
- Someone who will be honest with you, trusts, appreciates, and knows who you truly are.
3. Someone you can start a family with if that is your desire; this has a whole list of benefits of it’s own!
4. A spouse should be a best friend, lover, and life partner all in one!
All of the above impacts are positive.
The right partner can help you become a better person if you’re willing to do the work. Only you can change you. But the right partner can help push you out of your comfort zone giving you the opportunity to choose to do the work and be better.
If you choose your spouse carefully and you both work hard to keep your marriage a priority, these are just some of the good results that can come from it.
Anyone who has a bad view on marriage and sees it as a negative thing, hasn’t seen many great marriages. And the effects these great marriages have on society.
What you have to realize is that the quality of your life, and your marriage, is up to you.
You can choose to settle for okay, or decent, or you can make it great.
You have to keep moving towards achieving your life goals and leaving a positive impact in the lives of those around you and society.
Your turn:
How has marriage made you a better person?
How has marriage made your life better?
Image courtesy Menita
