Leo Tolstoy said, “Unhappy families are interesting because each member is unhappy in a different way. On the other hand, happy families are uninteresting because they are all happy in the same way.”
As we all know, sudden changes in our lives are interesting and gradual changes are uninteresting and boring.
In a broader context, as Tolstoy said, this is equally applicable in families.
Changes in unhappy families are often sudden and those in happy families are often gradual.
The experience of sudden and gradual changes in terms of love, family, and marriage is quite interesting.
I’ve experienced some of them through my single life and married life with a lot of ups and downs.
Changes after marriage
I got married many years ago and it was basically an arranged marriage.
Over the years, I’ve noticed something quite interesting about our marriage.
This is a learning experience in my life.
All the patterns about our marriage were consistently about correcting our shortcomings, these were pretty much what we should not do in the years to come rather than any other things.
We were always focussed in changes and a lot of them were sudden changes rather than gradual. In reality we were more excited for sudden changes than any other things after our marriage.
We’re quite excited even to make plans for sudden changes without thinking a pinch about the implementation part.
Here are some examples.
I will not be so choosey with my vegetables from tomorrow.
I will listen more carefully when my wife talks starting today.
I will limit myself to two cups of sugary tea in a day from tomorrow.
I will talk more time with my old parents starting next Saturday.
I will stop complaining immediately.
I will not send a confrontational email whatsoever starting immediately.
Once our first daughter came into our world, everything changed in our married life.
First time in my life, I realized that I have someone other than me as the most important person. Absolutely different feeling.
Even if sometimes I and my wife would fight in different ways, I would stop immediately just by thinking I shouldn’t do this.
I have a daughter at home now.
In other words, the arrival of our daughter changed the course of our relationship.
Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, authors of “Boundaries in Marriage” say, “You have the power to confess, submit, and repent of your own hurtful ways in your marriage.”
Not only the responsibility but also my humility grew unknowingly after my marriage.
I don’t know how.
It didn’t happen immediately though, it happened very gradually.
When I was single, I used to talk about myself a lot.
After marriage, it decreased significantly, little by little at a time, and, of course, unknowingly.
Nowadays, rather than just talking about myself, I prefer to let my daughters and wife talk about themself.
I didn’t train my mind that way but it started to happen automatically.
I love just to listen them.
Again, it didn’t happen at once with intention, but gradually over many years.
I realized now how the love of children changes us enormously.
Three kinds of love
After more than 15 years of my marriage, I experienced mainly three kinds of love.
All this experience came gradually, naturally, and most importantly, with mental maturity.
First is the love of the people who gave us security, comfort, courage, acceptance, and help.
They always bolster our confidence and guide us in so many different situations.
They always remain behind us as pillars morally, financially, and emotionally.
Probably, this is why nature taught us to love our parents unconditionally whatsoever. If you really want to know line between unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, watch the TedTalk “Love, no matter what” by writer Andrew Solomon.
Second is the love of people who depend on us for all the same reasons that I mentioned above.
These are the people for whom we want to live, we want to lose, we want to sacrifice, and we want to push them ahead rather than go ourselves ahead.
This is why we as parents always love our children.
Third is romantic love between husband and wife.
This love is nothing but the idealization of the next person as a husband and wife in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.
In my experience, this idealization is a very long process to bear fruits in our lives.
Idealization as a husband and wife is the downplaying of each other’s limitations.
This is the only reason we celebrate marriage anniversaries; 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, and so on.
I believe romantic love between husband and wife helps to accumulate strength and connection for both parental and children love as mentioned above.
From One of my favorite books “Getting the Love You Want” authors Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt say “Above all else, we seek the sensation of feeling fully alive that is triggered when we experience connecting.”
Marriage appears as a critical juncture of these three kinds of love.
This is because, up to this point, I remain only as a son or daughter of my parents but once I become parent myself my mind started to work in a completely different way.
Marriage is evolutionary and essential process for the understanding of love because it is such a holy combination of all three kinds of love: parental, children, and romantic under the same umbrella.
When I think back, my marriage happened suddenly but its growth, of course, took a very long gradual process.
Marriage provides the capacity to love and be loved as a core strength in our lives if we compose it one step at a time.
One fact is that love through marriage flows out of parents, children and romantic partners like a river and they soak it up like sponges all the time.
Marriage is an institution
I also experienced that marriage is also an echo for me and my wife that sends signals to my parents, and our children.
It moves through intimacy, encouragement, and connectedness.
And the happy part is that marriage has the capacity to combine all of them.
Groucho Marx says marriage is not an event, it is the beginning of an institution, and I totally believe in it.
As stated earlier, marriage has evolutionary blessings and it has emotional and material benefits that we all can share with our own experiences.
After more than 15 years of my own experience, I know that marriage is a process that continuously takes love as a formula to simplify the complexity of life.
Marriage, of course, does not bring fulfillment all the time because I’ve seen others’ marriages crumbling.
The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part to institutionalize the process of marriage and simplify life.
This is the biggest door through which the meaning of life transcends on us and goes to our children.
This institution flows love which can enter through ourselves to spouse to parent and children.
Few years ago, one of my very good friends suffered from mild stress and depression.
He was quite unhappy with his life, he would love loneliness more than anything else, he decided to get married and changed his lifestyle after some minor counseling.
I don’t know what caused it but after some years his depression disappeared as he stated himself and I also noticed from my eyes.
I have read in books that good marriage helps to remove depression which readily spirals downward in our married life.
As my friend told me, “a depressed mood is like a demon that makes negative memories come to mind more easily and these negative thoughts create even a more depressed mood, which in turn makes even more negative thoughts accessible, and so on.
The solution for this is to increase positive emotions to start an upward spiral of more positive emotion”.
Marriage, of course, became the source of positive emotion for him.
It may not be the same for others but for him marriage became a medicine.
From my friend’s experience, I can say that positive emotion broadens and builds the intellectual, social, and physical well being.
“Marriage recirculates positive emotion which leads to exploration, mastery, and the discovery of our core strengths”, my friend added.
My eyes saw a depressed friend growing into a very successful school principal after adopting marriage as an institution.
Research on marriage
In one of the studies, researchers asked widows to talk about their late spouses.
Some of the widows told happy stories, some told sad stories, spouse fights, and they also complained a lot.
Few years later, researchers found that the women who had told happy stories were much more likely to be engaged in life and dating again.
This is just one example of positive emotion, how it works in our lives.
The happy life successfully encompasses the positive emotions about present, past, and future.
Positive emotions means bodily pleasures and higher pleasures like comfort and gratification that indicates the activities we like to do again.
There is a difference between a good life and a meaningful life.
Good life uses our core strengths to obtain maximum gratification in the main part of our life. But meaningful life uses our core strengths in the service of something much larger than we are.
Successful marriage helps to reinforce a meaningful life because it is a cumulative force grown over time.
We humans are more like cars on a freeway.
We see most cars are going a little higher over the speed limit. In that situation what we generally do is go with the flow with the traffic.
We know we shouldn’t do this but we still do.
So please, don’t make your marriage just like the flow of the traffic on the highway.
In this situation what we need is automatic tools to manage vehicular traffic and an improved cruise control.
Exactly the same way, the best marriage needs more flow of love around the marriage umbrella: love of children, love of parents, and love of conjugal partners.
At the moment, I’ve three kids, so for me, marriage is not just a flow of what I see around: get married, have kids, and move in life.
Marriage is an evolutionary innovation which runs through love.
Conclusion
My ending note is slightly different.
If marriage is such a nice thing then why do half of all marriages now end in divorce?
From my personal experience, nowadays, divorce is a very good psychological option in our lives.
When things go wrong in marriage, blaming the whole marriage and finding a new alternative arrangement becomes an attractive option rather than understanding the gradual process of good marriage.
Of course, the gradual process is uninteresting, time consuming, and boring.
It’s up to us what we prefer, a gradual process or alternative process.
Remember, the day we get married, it begins with love, joy, and optimism.
But if we don’t respect the process of its gradual mutual growth, it falls apart into pieces because each partner sees only the weakness and bitterness of the other partner.
The most empowering way to transform a marriage is to change the way we view our spouse. Our spouse is our mirror that can show us some parts of ourselves.
Let’s accept our differences with our spouse as a cause of our celebration and enjoy and nurture mutual growth.
Mignon McLaughlin, the author of “The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook” says beautifully, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
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