So much of our lives are based on good fortune. If you’re fortunate, you have parents who respected and admired each other, whose value system and priorities were similar before their relationship began. Living on you own or going away to college prior to starting a serious relationship is a great learning experience. You can learn who you really are by being on your own. If you know yourself and are self-reliant you bring more to the table. Also, not having unreasonable expectations of each other is a key factor in how you walk down the road of life together and ultimately how the surviving spouse deals with the aftermath of the death of their spouse.
Life has a way of sending you bumps, and how you deal with these challenges can dictate how your life works out. Not losing a job, not becoming really ill, choosing to be monogamous, not being in a car accident, and not getting divorced are but a few of the bumps you can encounter.
Most couples can never recuperate financially or emotionally from a bad divorce. And, sometimes parents use their children as weapons against each other with disastrous results that can have long term effects on how well their children’s lives play out. Shuffling children back and forth between parents is unsettling to say the very least.
Today, our lives are moving at Mach speed and we are not designed to thrive in that sort of environment. There are so many things that distract us from what should be our priorities. You must keep falling in love all over again with your spouse or significant other, again and again. The only way I know how to achieve that is to slow down and look into the eyes of your spouse every chance you get and reaffirm your commitment to each other.
Remembering the reasons you fell in love, the joy you felt when you first met and how you couldn’t wait to see or touch each other at the beginning and end of each day. Validating one another for the gifts you bring to your relationship is critical. If you bought a kitten or a puppy, you would be praising it each time it displayed good behavior. If you did that consistently, you would have a well behaved animal that only gives you unconditional love 24/7 and the same thing is true in people.
If you do not have expectations of others, you cannot possibly be disappointed. If you pick someone who has good habits, respect themselves and others, says what they mean, and mean what they say, you have a much better chance of living happily ever after just like in the fairy tales we read as children.
I love happy endings, and we are all writing the scripts of our lives. If you’re not happy, go into re-write mode.
