You're Best Isn't Good Enough

The likelihood of you fitting perfectly with another soul is radically low. The truth is, it is almost impossible. Marriage is a relationship locked in an insane asylum, on crack, drowning in a thousand feet of water with your hands and legs tied together.

There is absolutely nothing you have encountered yet in life that is anything like marriage.

Commitment is not enough

I get it. You’re in love. You’re dedicated to do whatever it takes to make your relationship work. This is the best-case scenario (most don’t have this type of commitment) but the truth is, you have no idea what it’s going to take. Your commitment has little context.

I’ve counseled a lot of couples that refused to look closely at their flaws as individuals, but instead held on to a belief that their marriage should be working because of how hard they were trying. It simply doesn’t work that way.

Pushing a car uphill while the transmission is in reverse will negate any effort you are making toward going forward.

You absolutely need all the effort you can muster, but you also need preparation and knowledge.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

According to “The Science of Cohabitation”, couples that start off living together end up in divorce at a 33% higher rate than those who don’t live together before marriage.

Furthermore, second and third marriages fail at the rate of 67% and 73% respectively. Most people believe their first marriage failed because they married the wrong person. The truth is, most marriages fail because we enter marriage woefully unprepared.

Sometimes we are either too optimistic (everything will work out fine mentality) or we marry for the wrong reasons: money, sex, attraction, need.

Bad Habits

We are habitual creatures and the habits we form, healthy or unhealthy, stick with us for a very long time and just like going to war, you have to go into marriage trained and ready for what you will encounter. No matter how good of a person you are, those qualities you deem to be good may or may not help you in marriage.

Habitual lying, anger, deception, refusal to resolve conflict, poor communication and many other poor character traits will lead to destruction in a marriage.  It is difficult for a single person to overcome a bad habit, it is even more difficult when married and you have the distraction of the other person’s faults or constant barrage of complaints about your habits.

A Different Beast

The wonderful character traits that you currently have may or may not work well in marriage. For instance, if you’re a great communicator that’s a great skill but knowing how to communicate with another person on an intimate level in marriage is very specific.

If you’re a very patient person that’s a great skill, but if you’re also sensitive and your feelings are hurt easily you’ll find that the well of patience runs dry a lot quicker in the confines of marriage.

The Right One

That’s why it’s so important to marry the right person along with being trained in the skills that are necessary for marriage. Remember one out of two marriages fail. That number is alarming and it’s even more alarming considering most people don’t get married to fail.

Why spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding and give up within the first three years? Why commit to one, give up the opportunity to date and find someone better, just to eventually file for divorce? No one in their right mind would do that yet so many couples throw their hands in the air and scream “Enough! I’m done, I’m finished, I’m running for the hills! Get this crazy person away from me!”

You must understand, as beautiful as marriage is, it takes a lot of work and a lot of preparation.

Romeo and Juliet

Let’s quickly concede that anyone who gets married wants to be married, so when they give up and say they don’t want to be married anymore it’s because the idea they had in their mind of what marriage would look like is not their daily reality.

Marriage can be the most blissful and beautiful state of being that two souls can ever encounter, connected in a way that only God could have engineered. When it’s done right and when proper preparation has been taken, you will have success.

However, most of us were raised with the idea of marriage being a fairytale. Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, heck even Beyoncé and Jay Z promote an ironclad bond and romanticized image of marriage. While full of hope and allure, it is extremely misleading.

It is incredibly flawed thinking to believe you can walk into a marriage unprepared and still succeed.  Even your “best self” is not good enough to succeed in a marriage. You don’t believe me? Go back to the statistics. Stand in the room with ten couples. Of those, five will fail, two will stay together in misery, and one will start out miserable and eventually co-exist with no passion. Who’s left? That’s the math.

The Upside

Learning how to coexist with someone in a beautiful way takes practice. Learning how to share your life, your dreams, your ambitions, your failures, all takes practice. When you consider individual backgrounds, pains, hurts, deficiencies, those two people coming together in a harmonious way is difficult to say the least.

But there is hope. Perfecting skills like communication, patience, love, conflict resolution, how to be angry and not be mean, how to have intimacy beyond sex, knowing the importance of physical, emotional and spiritual connection, how to fulfill a man’s need for respect and a woman’s need for love, how to integrate children (new children and children from past relationships) are crucial to ensuring a successful union.

I firmly believe that every engaged couple, or couple in a relationship looking to be married, absolutely must go through some type of premarital counseling. If you do not, you’re begging for trouble and setting yourself up for imminent failure.  I prefer one-on-one counseling sessions, but if you don’t have the money or can’t find the time, find a good book. It doesn’t matter if it’s mine or someone else’s. I wrote a book called “14 Days to the Best Marriage Ever” that will give you the tools are resources you need. You can get it here or peruse Amazon for other titles. There are a lot of good choices out there.

If you want to bask in the riches of marriage you’re going to have to work in the dirt of preparation.