11 Rules You Won’t Learn in School About
Marriage
Rule 1: Marriage isn’t about your happiness. It’s not about you
getting all your needs met through another person. Practicing
self-denial and self-sacrifice, patience, understanding, and forgiveness
are the fundamentals of a great marriage. If you want to be the center
of the universe, then there’s a much better chance of that happening if
you stay single.
Rule 2: Getting married gives a man a chance to step up and finish
growing up. The best preparation for marriage for a single man is to
man up now and keep on becoming the man God created him to be.
Rule 3: It’s okay to have one rookie season, but it’s not okay to
repeat your rookie season. You will make rookie mistakes in your first
year of marriage; the key is that you don’t continue making those same
mistakes in year five, year 10, or year 20 of your marriage.
Rule 4: It takes a real man to be satisfied with and love one woman
for a lifetime. And it takes a real woman to be content with and
respect one man for a lifetime.
Rule 5: Love isn’t a feeling. Love is commitment. It’s time to
replace the “D word”—divorce—with the “C word”—commitment. Divorce may
feel like a happy solution, but it results in long-term toxic baggage.
You can’t begin a marriage without commitment. You can’t sustain one
without it either. A marriage that goes the distance is really hard
work. If you want something that is easy and has immediate
gratification, then go shopping or play a video game.
Rule 6: Online relationships with old high school or college flames,
emotional affairs, sexual affairs, and cohabiting are shallow and
illegitimate substitutes for the real thing. Emotional and sexual
fidelity in marriage is the real thing.
Rule 7: Women spell romance R-E-L-A-T-I-O-N-S-H-I-P. Men spell
romance S-E-X. If you want to speak romance to your spouse, become a
student of your spouse, enroll in a lifelong “Romantic Language School,”
and become fluent in your spouse’s language.
Rule 8: During courtship, opposites attract. After marriage,
opposites can repel each another. You married your spouse because
he/she is different. Differences are God’s gift to you to create new
capacities in your life. Different isn’t wrong, it’s just different.
Rule 9: Pornography robs men of a real relationship with a real
person and poisons real masculinity, replacing it with the toxic killers
of shame, deceit, and isolation. Pornography siphons off a man’s drive
for intimacy with his wife. Marriage is not for wimps. Accept no
substitutes.
Rule 10: As a home is built, it will reflect the builder. Most
couples fail to consult the Master Architect and His blueprints for
building a home. Instead a man and woman marry with two sets of
blueprints (his and hers). As they begin building, they discover that a
home can’t be built from two very different sets of blueprints.
Rule 11: How you will be remembered has less to do with how much
money you make or how much you accomplish and more with how you have
loved and lived
By Dennis Rainey
Found this on Family Life and wanted to encourage you all to hang in there! Marriage is stinking hard sometimes but so worth sticking it out. Hugs my friends!
