CEG\'er
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443 |
Originally posted by JaTo:
There's simply no substitute for time in a budding relationship; though it, you get to experience some small subset of how each of you will react towards happiness, tragedy, day-to-day change, stress, etc., etc. Not to be trite, but a whirlwind engagement followed by a teen-age marriage usually doesn't allow for any of this to take place and even if it does, it's usually meaningless since the majority of people don't become comfortable with themselves until their mid 20's anyway...
Marriagebuilders teaches the above concept as one of the core fundamentals of any successful relationship. Those fundamentals are:
1) Policy of Undivided Attention - minimum of 15 hours per week investing in the marriage - or as JaTo said, TIME with each other. The single biggest mistake married couples make is to stop prioritizing their time together. Time together makes deposits into the "love bank" which creates the "in love" feelings people want. Most people early on in dating become infatuated with each other because they spend tons of time together, and their time together trumps pretty much any other priority consistently, and they both consciously and unconsciously overlook flaws in each other that oftentimes become a problem later on when the infatuation period ends. Once people get married, for some reason, some spouses stop prioritizing their time together as "life" intrudes, and everything else becomes a more important priority. Over time, this drains the love banks in both spouses if they do not continue to invest significant amounts of time together.
2) Policy of Radical Honesty - be as honest as possible at all times with your spouse. There is NO room for dishonesty in any relationship. Dishonesty destroys relationships, it's just a question of how long it takes. Spouses leave things unsaid until one day there's nothing left to say to one another. The truth shall set you free. People don't grow apart, they just fail to grow together. There are many adages built around the principle of honesty to drive home it's importance.
3) Policy of Joint Agreement - spouses must enthusiastically agree to anything within the marriage. If no agreement can be reached, negotiate until an agreement can be reached, in the meanwhile, do nothing without agreement. This is the concept that gets the most flack, however it is critically important because it means that a spouse cannot do or not do something that will intentionally hurt their mate. A lack of agreement produces feelings of resentment and anger that produce lovebusters which make withdrawals from the "love bank" and can lead to people falling out of love with each other very quickly.
There are many other concepts such as Lovebusters, the three states of mind in marriage (intimacy, conflict, withdrawal), emotional needs, instincts/habits, the giver/taker, that are also very important and are integral to learning how to communicate respectfully within a relationship and in learning how to meet your spouse's emotional needs. It is the meeting of emotional needs that makes love bank deposits and creates the emotional in love feelings. When our spouse does anything that meets one of our emotional needs, love bank deposits are made and we "feel" more in love with our spouse. Making such deposits requires the above listed policies, time, truth, and enthusiastic agreement.
In general, the top ten most common emotional needs are:
Affection
Sexual Fulfillment
Conversation
Recreational Companionship
Honesty and Openness
Physical Attractiveness
Financial Support
Domestic Support
Family Commitment
Admiration
The quickest way to make withdrawals from the love bank is to hurt our spouse, or lovebust. The most common lovebusters are:
Selfish Demands
Disrespectful Judgments
Angry Outbursts
Annoying Habits
Independent Behavior
Dishonesty
If you're interested or any of you are having problems in your marriages/relationships, I wholeheartedly recommend Marriagebuilders as a great place to get educated and to learn how to be a better spouse.
Overall, people who've had a great example of how to behave as a person, both alone and within a relationship, who've had good examples of how to handle conflict, how to negotiate productively, how to communicate respectfully and effectively, and who've been taught that time spent meeting their spouse's most important emotional needs by example, will most likely make a marriage work no matter how old or young they are. I agree with JaTo that 19 is a bit on the young side these days, but it's not impossible.
Generally, our youth these days are much more "protected" from the responsibilities of the real world than the Greatest generation and before was. It's hard for us to imagine that in the 1800's boys and girls were out working in the fields and learning how to feed and support a family from a very young age, and most were married by age 20 at the latest, some much earlier than that, and out and doing their own thing to boot well before age 20, even the Greatest generation saw many early marriages along this line well into the 1900's that are still around today. Only recently, as we've moved from an industrial economy to an increasingly service/informational economy, which requires much more education, has the "age of reason" moved up the age brackets a bit. I've often heard people say that kids these days are 12 yet they behave like they are 21. I disagree. Most 21 year olds these days behave much like the 12 years old of days past from a real life/personal responsibility standpoint at least in my view. Why? Because they never had to grow up and support/feed a family at a young age. Modern medicine also plays into this since we've cured a lot of the diseases that killed a fair amount of people very early in life, so our lifespan has increased markedly over the past 100 years. A hundred years and more ago most folks could count on maybe 50 years of life on average, if that. These days people assume they're going to be around well into the golden years of retirement to at least 80 years of age, which means you've got more time for marriage and kids later in life, so what's the rush, if they're even interested. If you got the flu back then, there was a good chance you died from it. Imagine that in today's world? We're sorta kinda worried about this with the bird flu, I'm sure many of us have given this fact at least some thought in the backs of our minds, but it's not "real" just yet for us.
In any case, the society we live in today does indeed view marriage very differently than previous generations, at least in part, I feel, for some of the reasons I just mentioned.
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