Summary – Expect things to change in a marriage

Wife: You always carry my photo in your purse Why?
Husband: When there is a problem, no matter how impossible, I look at your picture and the problem disappears.
Wife: You see how miraculous and powerful I am to you?
Husband: Yes, I see your picture and say to myself, “What other problem can there be greater than this one?”

/end joke

To tell you the truth, I don’t think the above joke is funny. But if you surf the net, you will find a whole genre of jokes all devoted to describe how marriage is the ultimate torture.

Marriage is some of the most beautiful gift given by Allah to us. How can it be a torture? Where could it go wrong? There are so many ways, and this is (in my opinion) one of the major factors.

When we get married, we sometime make the biggest mistake of thinking our life will be the same. It is not. If before we always have time for ourselves, reading books, surfing the net.. after marriage we must make room for our spouses. Everything will change, but for people who know this fact beforehand, they will gladly make the change, to live happily with the spouse. Instead of enjoying their time alone, they can now enjoy them together. These are the people who delighted to give room and compromise for their spouses and often can live the fairy tale end of happily ever after.

But to those who expect things to be the same, they will feel choked with all the room taken away from them. But instead of thinking on ways to compromise, they will blame the spouse entirely. They can’t read their favorite books, or go out with friends and they assume it is all because of their marriage. That’s why they will never find happiness.

The secret to all this is to compromise. Compromise means we try to meet at the middle when there is conflict. For example, the husband likes fishing but the wife doesn’t want him to go, However the wife likes to jog but the husband are just too lazy to do that. Maybe they can come up with a compromise, that the wife will have to make peace with the husband’s hobby of fishing in return, the husband will have to accompany her jogging. That is a good compromise. Try to strive for win-win situation.

This is our wife or husband we are talking about, It must always be our intention to make them happy. So please be considerate. We are all new at this, so give each other a break once in a while. 🙂 The most important message here is that expect things to change in a marriage… all we can do is to adapt and compromise. We WILL live happily every after.

How About you? How did you handle conflict alike?