The Grand Essentials Of Happiness

Successful Marriage

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person”

~ Mignon McLaughlin

My second brother and I went in person to invite one of our relatives to his wedding. We printed more than 300 cards and took few of them everyday to deliver it to our relatives. It’s one of our traditional thing and we still follow it. We don’t prefer mailing the invitation card because people take that as an insult; they might call us and say that we didn’t respect them and didn’t care enough to pay a visit. The relative who we went to invite had an arrange marriage and have 2 children. His is name is Wil and his wife is not that pretty. I shouldn’t talk about appearance, but most of the people look for good looks when it comes to marriage.

It is very hard to find happy couples in our culture; even if it’s a love marriage. Doesn’t really matter what kind of marriage they had, couples start to fight right after they have children for their own. After seeing many failure marriages to others, I didn’t really believe in that sort of stuff. All the houses we went, people didn’t get excited about marriage due to their own failures, at least that’s what I think. But Wil seems to be happy for my brother. He started to talk about his marriage life. I didn’t pay attention to his words at the beginning, but after a while I was dragged into his uplifting speech about marriage. He started to share his secret of his successful marriage. He said “How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us.” Believe it or not our culture is double standard and always towards male domination. But Wil seems to be very forward in his thinking. He said that he never fight with his wife. Whenever they get into arguments even if they like it or not, he just stop talking and listen to his wife on what she is saying. He steps back and looks at the situation in other person’s perspective. When one of them stops and listen the other stop arguing and pay close attention to the underlying problem rather than clouded by the emotional breakouts.

When the problem is bigger, he takes his wife to a fancy romantic dinner and slowly reveals what it is that’s bothering him. In our culture, men or women don’t like to talk out loud in public. Without raising their voice they find solutions to the problem. According to him, clear communication is the tool for a successful marriage. Men say something and women understand it differently and vice versa. Since my brother or I didn’t have any experience about love or marriage that time. It was very useful to my brother on his upcoming marriage. I told him to pass the wisdom of marriage to future generations as well. No body in our culture goes to marriage counseling, they either fight everyday without getting divorce or one manages to sing along with another. Divorce is a cruel word to us, so they try to change their habits and behaviour to satisfy the partner.

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half sorrow. Sharing your life with someone who cares the most about you is a gift. Every couple should know how to solve the conflicts without arguments.

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” ~ Aristotle