Choosing A Compatible Partner
Yes, I know it’s not terribly romantic, but wiser individuals than I have repeatedly pointed out that love is not enough.
To be sure, love is an indispensable part of a healthy marriage, but all things considered, you’re better off marrying someone you like but don’t love than someone you love but don’t like. The art form here is how to have both, how to find someone to love who, over the long run, you’ll still really like, thus having the best of all worlds.
The Three Essentials: Finances, Arguments, and Sex
When couples come to me for premarital counseling, they’re often surprised by my first question: �How do you two handle your money?� According to the best research we have, the number one reason for divorce in America is irreconcilable differences in how couples deal with money. In simpler terms, if you’re a saver and he or she is a spender, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands, a built-in, marriage-long argument. So the number one question on your checklist needs to be: Can I live with his or her style of handling money?
Keep in mind that with this question and, actually, with all my checklist items, you don’t have to be in 100% agreement. After all, you hopefully didn’t fall in love with a clone of yourself besthookupwebsites.org/sugar-daddies-usa/az/. Some differences are to be expected and can actually enrich a relationship. Consider that you might just be either a little too uptight about money or a little too easy-going about it. Perhaps your new partner may help you develop a more realistic flexibility that still allows you to essentially maintain your core values and beliefs around money. I’d like to suggest that while my checklist, especially these first three items, is very important, there is some room for flexibility and compromise.
The second item, arguing style, is also crucial to a healthy relationship. If the two of you cannot disagree and argue to a solution, you are relatively unlikely to stay married for any significant length of time. Realistically, no two human beings are going to spend sixty-plus years agreeing about everything. How you solve – or don’t solve – your disagreements is crucial to the health of your marriage.
This brings up the point that to solve a problem, you do have to discuss it; you do have to communicate. Here again, I would expect the two of you to have some style differences. Quite often one partner wants to argue things out, while the other tends to either get defensive or go hide rather than face a confrontation. The key is that both of you must modify your communicating/arguing styles enough that you can argue to a solution or be comfortable agreeing to disagree. �If the two of you cannot disagree and argue to a solution, you are relatively unlikely to stay married.�
Sex is a key component of a healthy, life-long relationship. Do you and your partner have, in general, the same interest and desire for a life-long sexual relationship? Can you adapt to the changes children, job-stress, and the daily routine of running a family will have on your physical relationship? Are you both capable of making the extra effort it takes to keep romance in your marriage? This one deserves careful thought as your sexual relationship is critical to a healthy marriage.
Before we proceed to the secondary, but still very important items on our checklist, let’s consider two crucial points. First, what you see is, and isn’t, what you get. Confusing? Consider the fact that almost all of us act healthier than we are while we’re dating and that our behavior during the initial infatuation stage of a relationship may not be exactly the way we will behave during the next sixty years (which is probably a very good thing). We need to expect some changes in our behavior, and in our partner’s, between the initial phase of our relationship and the point where we get married. On the other hand, be very, very, very careful of someone who promises to change a behavior you don’t like after you get ple, a promise that �I’ll quit drinking after you marry me� should be viewed with a lot of skepticism. You need to see behavioral changes in undesirable behaviors before you make a commitment.