Successful marriages don’t just happen, they need to be created. A successful marriage is built on trust, respect, commitment and love. The most important of these aspects is ‘love’. Love brings with itself compassion, humility, hope, serenity and gratitude. A relationship built with ‘unconditional love’ makes for a successful marriage.
The key factors required for a successful and happy marriage are listed and briefed below.
· Love yourself – To love someone else, you need to love yourself first. Before you think of giving love, it is imperative that you have it for and within yourself. If you don’t love the way you are, you cannot even understand the love that somebody else has for you.
· Own your relationship – For a relationship to work, you need to own it. When you own something, it becomes completely yours. You put in everything for anything that belongs to you. So when you own a relationship, you give everything in the form of love. Giving love, and not demanding, is the key to having a fulfilling relationship.
· Appreciate and Acknowledge – Appreciate or acknowledge your partner for even the littlest of things that he/she does for you. Constant appreciation gives a feeling of recognition and the spouse tends to do better each time. This is a healthy practice to create a happy marriage.
· Be honest – It is extremely important to be honest to your partner to create oneness within the relationship. Honesty creates trust and also strengthens the bond that a couple shares. Dishonesty is sooner or later unveiled and does massive damage to the relationship.
· Make time – Take time out from your busy schedules to make your spouse feel wanted. We tend to take our spouses for granted after a couple of years of living together. This fades away the spark and starts making space for negative emotions such as boredom or ignorance.
· Listen to your partner – Communication is an essential key to a healthy relationship. Communication also involves active listening, i.e., to be present and actually listening to your partner. Active listening reduces misunderstandings and enables the partner to express feelings in a better way.
· Respect disagreement – Disagreements are normal. Handling disagreements gracefully is what is needed. No two people can have the same thought process. Every individual is different and it is very important to respect individuality. When it comes to our partners, we often forget that a spouse is a different entity altogether and he/she can also have different opinions.
· Accept – Never try to change your partner. You accepted and married your partner the way they were. Criticism and nagging should always be avoided. Understand that people always do better when they are appreciated and not criticised.
· Add intimacy – Issues often also arise due to lack of intimacy. Intimacy and romance is absolutely important for a healthy marital life. Love is shown in different ways and one of those ways is intimacy, specially for men. While most women connect emotionally, a major section of men connect through sex. Though intimacy can also mean having a great conversation or just cuddling, accept that it is extremely important, be it in any form.
A lot of people understand but find it difficult to implement the above mentioned measures when it comes to real life. They may be having doubts or just not be able to connect them to their personal scenarios. For any doubt or issue not getting resolved, a person can anytime approach a Relationship Coach. Relationship Coaching is a little different from conventional marriage counselling or couple counselling. They are experts in delving deep into all the possible aspects and emerging out with positive results. A lot of people lose hope too early unaware of the fact that they are just about to start a new journey. The patterns of relationship remain the same - be it relationship with self or with the world outside or even career. Remember, it is only you who create a relationship and nobody else.