10 Tips : Happy Marriage

Tips : 1 

Marriage in one of the most rewarding yet challenging areas of our lives. Here are a few tips for a truly satisfying marriage.

• Have realistic expectations about marriages:
  Do you expect your marriage to be like the ‘happily ever after’ in fairy tales or an endless succession of warm and colourful family functions like Hindi movies?
  
  Do you expect your future husband or wife to be perfect – consciously or subconsciously- like the characters in cinemas or novels?
  
  Or, if you are ‘in love’ with the person you are going to marry do you expect the euphoria of romantic love to last forever?

• One of the major reasons of unhappy marriages is having unrealistic expectations.
  
  These unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment and heart-break because real life can never live up to them. For example, it has been scientifically proven that the euphoria of romantic love is temporary. Successful couples are able to replace the romantic love with a more long lasting kind of love. And no matter who you marry, s/he will never be perfect, and s/he would certainly not be thinking about you all the time. And your marriage is bound to have ups and downs.

This does not mean marriages cannot be happy: they can. However, to make it so, both partners need to approach it with the right attitude and make persistent efforts. And having realistic expectations is the first component of the ‘right attitude’.

To be continued .....