I’ve been thinking about marriage lately, and thought I would share my thoughts on what I have discovered to date.*
Basically, if you aren’t fully happy and fulfilled when you get married, and have some inkling of hope that you’ll get married and find happiness, you weren’t really ready to get married in the first place – and probably should have waited.
This is because, as we have discussed, lack of happiness is a sign of incompleteness in a person. So what happens is that you take two people who are incomplete and are looking to each other to complete themselves, and in due time find that they aren’t happy (which they never were!) and that the person that they married is missing something big (because they always have been!).
So with that in mind, most everyone who gets married, isn’t ready to get married. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, but it is what it is. What else is there to do but get divorced – or be like the other 75% of unhappily married couples that stick it out until the bitter end – death.
But let’s say you wanted to come up with a paradigm that would ALMOST promise success for the most important decision in your life from the beginning, how would you go about it?
The answer is simple.
Be a whole person before you date, and only accept a spouse who has also learned the truth of these words.
By a whole person we mean someone who has discovered absolute happiness and peace in the world, which comes about through self-discovery, self-alignment, and finally self-acceptance on the personal development side, as well as solid family relationships, intimate friendships, and professional achievements on the social development side.
The problem is that all of these things take time to achieve, and most of us have a natural desire to get “attached” before we are whole, resulting in the entire divorce conundrum.
But here is the point, if you (and your spouse) are can achieve wholeness before you get married, marriage moves from a pit that you are looking to fill (taking), to a mound of excess that you are looking to give away (give). Meaning that the other person serves as a vehicle to make yourself bigger, because you have grown as much as you possibly can within your own finite self, and have a natural urge to connect with something bigger than yourself. And you are willing to give in order to have that privilege. And giving is what marriage is ultimately all about.
P.S. Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about all different aspects of this post, and bringing out these ideas in more detail, but since it is always good to start with the end in mind, I thought I would go ahead, and post, one of the many conclusions that I have arrived at in my discoveries.
* This is just a beginning thought on things, and I might retract it later, but I think it is better than nothing, which is what I had before.