Marriage | Commitment #betterYOULandL

Happy Tuesday! Keri Maughan is back this week with some great marriage advice! My favorite line from this entry ” When you step over the threshold together, into your new life as a married couple, make sure you shut the door tightly behind you and remove the doorknob!”

“Four Foundational Elements of a Committed, Happy, Loving, Marriage!”

By the time I was 16 years old, I’d received seven marriage proposals and was a senior in high school.  I couldn’t figure out why a bunch of guys wanted to get married – marriage wasn’t attractive to me at all.  All the marriages I knew about were, damaged or doomed.  When I whined and complained about my predicament, my mother’s only suggestion was that I take a night class at the local community college on marriage. I took her up on it, not knowing it would give me a thirst for studying relationships and a curiosity about what does or doesn’t make them work.  I’ve been married, to the same man, Hal (the wonderful), for almost 38 years and have coached hundreds of couples over the past 20 years and learned a lot from them, from my own experiences and education.

When couples ask me “what is the most important thing in a marriage?” I like to smile and say, “The two individuals and how they define Commitment most often determine whether or not they will have a happy, loving, lasting marriage.”  So, let me share what I have found to be “Four Foundational Elements of a Committed, Happy, Loving, Marriage!”

It’s all about Commitment.  When you step over the threshold together, into your new life as a married couple, make sure you shut the door tightly behind you and remove the doorknob!  If either of you believe there is a back-door, or a way out available to you, you haven’t jumped in both feet! That’s not commitment and it takes COMIMITMENT to make a marriage work!  These are the Elements of Commitment:

Shared Perspective:  A long-term perspective that allows partners to weather the inevitable ups and downs in marital satisfaction: Every human being changes over time and in response to new environments. How we will change, is unknown. As partners, each of us can recognize this truth and anticipate that change; choose to embrace it; and find joy in the new again.

Shared Core Values:When spouses commit to governing their relationship from their Shared Core Values, with mutually agreed upon definitions, there is solidarity, unity and foundation for all decisions to be made as a couple.

Shared Future:

When a couple dreams together, and puts in place plans, goals, and details, what their future will be like together; that is what signifies commitment to a Shared Future as a couple.

Shared Choice to give up SOME Choices: For example:

Making the choice, as partners, to choose happiness over “being right.”

Making the choice to give up control of all of my time.

Making the choice to give up control of all of my finances.

Making the choice to give up control of…some of my choices.

I love this quote by Scott Stanley, PhD, from the University of Denver:

“It is the formation of commitment—a clear series of decisions about choices and the future—that brings security to a relationship … commitment brings evidence that one can actually trust that that security exists.”