Positive Choices For A Joyful Marriage (eBook)

Introduction

Where is your life-path taking you?

This book will help you discover the smart, positive choices you need to consider for a joyful marriage and tremendous happiness. As many have said: Everything you have learned and experienced, and everything you have ever done in your life, has brought you to the present moment. Right now, are you happy? Every day? Is your spouse happy? Are the people around you happy? Do you know what brings heartfelt delight to your marriage? There are many topics covered in this book, but the general theme is one of discovering, discerning, and deliberately living a joyful and meaningful life by making positive choices to improve your marriage.

It seems as though every nation and religion has a different answer to the eternal question of “How should we live our lives?” Sure, life will always be a bit of a maze, a puzzle, and an enigma, but we can identify and pursue positive outcomes if we choose to. So, the question is: What do we know about how to have a joyful married life—filled with happiness?

Most people would agree that pursuing success is a sensible goal. While success covers a broad range of achievements, I believe any definition of a successful life should begin with everyday happiness. And, while career markers like money, titles, trophies, material possessions, or momentary pleasures are temporarily satisfying, they are not necessarily a life-path of or to happiness. Sure, they can appreciably add to your life, but without everyday happiness —what good are they? Worse is tying your happiness to a material possession like a painting or jewelry that can be lost—yikes! Plus, this career, money, and possession quest will limit your acts of goodness and personal growth. Okay, you need enough money to live on, but even if you are destitute, a simple attitude of being happy every day matters. Which would you rather have—an Olympic gold medal that you win once every four years, or happiness every day? Yes, both would be nice, but without everyday happiness, what good is the medal? Pop says: You really need to know what your next goal is after you reach your current goal, and what you risk losing along the way. (Pop is one of my nicknames and “Pop says” is used throughout the book to emphasize points.) A basic premise of this book is that the intrinsic benefits of happiness as witnessed in gratifying, meaningful relationships far outweigh the extrinsic benefits of things like being wealthy or famous.

I believe I can show you a logical life-path to a joyful marriage and significant happiness. By the way: One easy step in the right direction is to just decide to be a happy, lovable person with fabulous smiles, heartfelt gestures, and genuine laughter—rather than a sourpuss and a complaining, grouchy grump disappointed with life. Which person do you want to live with?

Almost everyone has had dreams of romantic love, marriage, and happiness. And why not? Love relationships are at the center of our happiness. Normally, we know the love we want, and we know how love is supposed to be—well, maybe. Our dreams do not provide any help with the nuts and bolts of finding, improving, and enjoying love and happiness—and the goodness that surrounds it. Nor do they explain the sincere and continued efforts required to avoid misunderstandings or to detect the miscues within a relationship. This book will help you by giving you specific actions and ideas for personal development to improve your marriage, other relationships, your love, and hopefully help you challenge and maybe change some of the cultural mandates, beliefs, and behaviors that can ruin your life.

There are multiple life-paths to love and happiness. Two of the key ingredients suggested here are simply:

1. Being grateful—acknowledging those who have helped you, and all that you have been blessed with.
2. Demonstrating deliberate acts of goodness.

When gratefulness and goodness are a part of who you are, you will make more positive choices and positive connections. Many people will prefer a life-path through a religious figure or teaching, but my argument is that any life-path must include gratefulness and acts of goodness to enjoy the happiness life has to offer.

I have identified four criteria for creating an environment where happiness can flourish.

1. Inner Harmony. This is an intrinsic liking of who you are and interpersonal process values of who you are becoming. It includes good physical and mental health, how you engage with life, balanced financial management, and knowing as you reach for your goals, you are focused on the process of being grateful, compassionate, and kind along the way. An important part of inner harmony is having the strength, hope, and optimism necessary to make positive choices, to cultivate a sense of self-worth in order to have the self-control to say “No!” to those things that compromise your values and “Yes!” to the positive choices that improve your life. Additionally, inner harmony requires meaningful people connections—social harmony.
2. Social Harmony. Having authentic involvement with awesome, loving relationships with your spouse, friends, and family. Plus, making contributions to the social infrastructure and enjoying the marketplace comfort of local retail outlets and services available.
3. Environmental Harmony. The physical and cultural world of where you live—residence, location, community, access to everything you need and want, freedoms, crime/safety considerations, politics, and living conditions—obviously affects what we think, believe, and subsequently act out.
4. Purpose Harmony. This is finding meaning, value, and fulfillment in your life. A feeling of purpose is where you are working on or being part of something that piques your interest and is personally meaningful and enjoyable. This can be doing something for family, your marriage, your career, a hobby, community service, yourself, etc. And in life and in marriage, part of your purpose is the process of being a kind, grateful, and loving person completing acts of goodness. To expand your purpose choices:

1. You must seek additional information about what a good purpose is.
2. Have an environment that will support your new purpose.
3. Have the will and grit to develop your purpose.

Happiness or well-being is not a single destination you can pinpoint. However, when your needs and wants of these four harmonies are sufficiently realized, marriage harmony and happiness can blossom.

There are a multitude of variables on this planet we have little to no control over, and they can certainly limit happiness. After adjusting for bad luck—culture, family, environment, genetics—virtually all of your unhappiness can be sourced from a lack of harmony in your life and especially poor relationship skills.

These harmonies are realized as we develop our awareness. Conscious awareness or awareness thinking is a key behavioral ability enabling us to grow, flourish, and adapt as a person. Four types of awareness are discussed in this book: self-awareness, social awareness, environmental awareness, and purpose awareness, but, as I will suggest many times in this book, nothing good happens without the sincere effort to prepare yourself for a life filled with happiness. Of course, without a minimum level of financial security for food, medical, and housing—happiness and harmony are extremely difficult to achieve.

For just about everyone, happiness can be accomplished regardless of their current situation, behavior, genes, and bio-chemical balance (the natural and foreign chemicals in your body). The first step is to accept personal responsibility to learn and understand what will improve your life.

As Socrates said: “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

Or here’s my modern, positive version:

Being curious enough to examine your life choices will make your life and the lives of those around you considerably more enjoyable. And nowhere is a joyful, happy marriage more important than with children.

Save your Marriage—Save your Children

In the United States, about twenty-three percent of children under the age of eighteen live with one parent, and about forty percent of all first marriages end in divorce. The emotional, financial, and social costs of divorce and distressed marriages are disastrous for children, family, friends, and the world. One book is not going to solve this problem, but it is obvious we need to do a much better job.

If every engaged, cohabitating, and married couple would spend more time studying ways to improve relations, our children would be happier and better prepared for all the challenges they will face. And, it is well documented that children raised by married parents do better educationally, socially, and economically. And yes, some marriages need to end immediately for the sake of the children.

While this book will provide you with practical ways to improve your marriage and happiness, it will be of no use unless you are willing to look at who you are and who you can become.

The basic belief that positive choices can and will improve our life is essential to our well-being. Positive relationships require specific skills, but we do not have to learn all of them the hard way. The first hurdle is: How responsible are you for your next decision or...