How Do You Keep Your Marriage Strong?

I am not going to sit here and act like I know everything about marriage. Because I would be lying to you if I did. But I have been faithfully married for seven years and have gone through almost all of the big marriage pitfalls that destroy most modern marriage’s. I grew up in a family which was not perfect before I could even remember my parents were divorced and I grew up with my Mom dating and marrying different men.

There are tons of different pitfalls that destroy marriages in this day and age. The biggest struggle in marriage is over money. Most marriages will fall if you cannot safely talk, discuss and plan money in a marriage especially if you have kids. The next marriage killer is Faithfulness or cheating in a relationship. This one is growing exponentially in the upcoming years. Society has destroyed the true meaning of what it means to be married. The last thought to think of is your not just marrying your spouse you marry their life.

The biggest struggle in marriage and the most destructive argument that ends marriage’s is how to handle money. First off keeping money separate does not work when you marry someone you become one entity. So, splitting money and doing everything half and half is what friends do not a married couple. Having this philosophy is what me and my wife started with but soon we found that it became an argument almost every day on who had what and whose money belongs to who. Also, just because for most of the years I was the bread winner doesn’t mean all my money goes to me. The best way I have found and this has solved all of our money issues is to come to an agreement of how to manage and spend money on a monthly basis. The way it works for us is we sit down one time a month with the mindset of having a business type meeting of how we are going to handle the next months income. This does several things. It makes both of us aware of what money is coming from where. It tells both of us what money has to go out to bills. Lastly it tells us what money we have to survive on until the next month. When you break it down like this you learn to work as a team for your budget instead of feeling like one person is telling the other how we as a family is handling money. As you may see this stops a lot of arguing before it even starts because both of you leave this monthly meeting one with a structured plan and a plan both of you came up with. So, if this plan fails you accept failure as a team and try again next month. If you succeed as a team not only does it make you happy but it brings you closer as a team. Also, this also makes you as a couple to talk things through short term and long term saving goals. If you work as a team marriage will work.

The second big problem is faithfulness in your relationship on both sides. If you cannot trust your spouse you might as well not even try being married at all. With out trust a marriage will never work. Also, you and your spouse have to have the same worldviews or be equally yoked as some would say. If you do not believe and share the same morals as your spouse you will end up searching for this else where because as human’s we crave this in a relationship. If we do not believe in the same worldview we will argue about everything to the point we will actively search for someone else who will fill that hole inside you that is missing. If you marry someone with the same morals that hole inside is filled with your spouse and likewise the other way around. The way you know a marriage is genuine is that you both feel whole as one. This is not to say you cannot have your own opinions no that is something different. We all have our own opinions but our core morals and faithfulness should be the same and we should trust in each other. I have faced this one big time. I went off to truck driving school and got my license and my wife accused me non-stop of cheating because I was always away and these negative trusts thought she entertained. Soon it consumed her to where that’s all she thought I was doing was sleeping around even though 24 hours a day I was driving big rigs across the US. To sum up the story I had to make a choice and I chose to give up this career and go back to 7.25 an hour job. This obviously did cause more issues but it saved our marriage and showed my faithfulness to my family and crush what had consumed her. This is how important trust is to a relationship and even the thought of unfaithfulness could kill even the strongest marriage.

Last thing to wrap this long post up is that you do not just marry the person, you marry their life. I mean this in several different ways. You marry their whole life from their family all the way down to the crazy people they all interact with. I decided to marry my wife even though her parents hated me and I learned a huge lesson I was not ready to learn. I was not only looked at in a bad light but because I was an average middle-class man I had to prove to my in-laws that I could provide for my wife and kids. It did not help that I was an avid gamer which they did not understand but games are what I use to lower stress and to blow off steam. I did fail them several times I lost jobs and I also did good things like graduate college. Still no matter what I was not accepted until about three years after being married when they gave up and knew I was not going anywhere and started to mend our relationship. Surprisingly me and my wife stayed married through all of this but we did have times where we were going divorce and I even left one time but came back. So just to shed some light My wife’s family hated me and thought I could not hold a job and was not providing. However, I was working two jobs and I had government disability coming in from my military disability. So, it was like having 3 incomes but still we struggled due to a downed economy. On top of this a grandparent sued us for full custody of my step son because of child neglect on the grandparent’s behalf. So, in the first three years of our marriage I struggled with DSS investigations and accusations of not providing and of being a child abuser. All of this could have broken down our marriage but with counseling and strong love and belief in each other we made it through all of this in our first three years of marriage.
So please learn from my experiences and make sure these three things are something you could do with your spouse before getting married. Make this your marriage checklist and always use this and add more to this checklist before getting married to make sure you are successful.

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