“A friend loves at all times”. (Proverbs 17:17)
Be good friends. Don’t marry a stranger and hope you’ll become compatible over time. Start with a solid foundation of love, shared values, common interests, and trust.
Don’t expect your partner to change. People do change, but not in predictable ways. So if your partner has a drug problem, assume he’ll always have one. Suppose you’re marrying someone with a drug problem, not someone who will, with time, stop taking drugs, and ask if you can live with that. If she doesn’t want children, assume she’ll always not want children. If he has a temper, assume he’ll always have a temper.
Communicate consistently and communicate about everything. If you have a big secret in your life that you’re not comfortable sharing with your partner (a fetish, a crime you committed, a friend you betrayed), this will likely cause problems down the road. Get it out into the open, now, and lay down a foundation of honesty. Fart in front of your husband. Tell your wife about your latest poo.
Sometimes people say, “I woke up one day and my husband was a stranger.” But he didn’t become one overnight, even if it seems that way. People change gradually. It only feels like they change quite suddenly when they don’t continually talk. If your wife is slowly becoming depressed or dissatisfied, it shouldn’t take you by surprise. You should know about all the stages, through constant talk. There should be many, many opportunities for intervention.
Make sure you can honestly discuss sex, money, children, in-laws, careers, politics, and religion. These are the contentious subjects that can drive uncommunicative couples apart.
My Dear Singles, marrying a stranger you meet in the market is a road map to disaster because “Marriage in the market, will always ends in the market”. The first criteria is to be friends before you commit into a relationship. Marrying a stranger will be like two corpses sleeping on one bed.
BE BEST OF FRIENDS BEFORE MARRIAGE
When you jump into a relationship without being friends first, all types of issues and challenges occur. You begin to expect more from the person and sometimes set unrealistic expectations. By putting friendship before a relationship, you can easily decide whether he is the right partner or not as there will be no pretensions and more open space to talk about things that matter.
When you develop a genuine friendship, there are no expectations. You can be yourself, he can be himself. You can learn everything you want to know about each other. You don’t have to worry about pretending to be someone you’re not.
He can relax in knowing that he can be himself and not worry about if you’re going to ask about a relationship. Basically, you put the ball in his hands and you give him the opportunity to lead. Developing a bond of friendship before a relationship is definitely better than just letting attraction get the better of you and discovering later that you can’t even be good friends.
Written By Jabari & Sally McDimar