Having been married almost three decades and being mostly successful in the second two, perhaps I can share my thoughts to bring value into your life around serious relationships and marriage?

Thinking about being involved in a serious relationship takes some planning. These are a few ideas I know you need to be very sure of

• Willing to spend your life with a person who happens to have their own life
• Not needing someone else to validate you and your life
• Whatever faults and flaws you do not like today will become worse in future years
• The person you wish to be serious with will never be a perfect partner for you
• Children will put a terrible strain on many relationships

If you are under thirty and thinking of getting married, you have a long life ahead of you. You may well be sharing each others company for forty or fifty years. While in written form forty years is easy to dismiss, it is longer than you have been alive. That is a very long time.

You must be comfortable with yourself, and do not need someone in your life to make you feel complete. You are contemplating building a life together, not merging into one body. Building a life together means just that. It does not mean that the special person in your life is going to spend their life admiring you. You are a great person, but everything has its limits, even admiration and hero worship.

It is extremely important to know what you can live with and what you can not. What you find mildly annoying today may break your marriage in five years. Knowing your future partner at their worst should be a state you can live with for longer than a few minutes. You must be able to understand and tolerate them at their worst. Anything less is not enough.

What you see and appreciate in the other person today may not be present five years from now. We are constantly in a state of change. What we are at this moment is being changed by internal and external forces. Friends will come and go, new activities will come and go. Life is a sea of change, and both of you will change with the times.

What beliefs are not open negotiation? We all have sacred areas in our lives that are not open to compromise. The person you wish to share your life needs to have identical or at the very least similar views.

The other half of your life time commitment is present to observe and note your journey through your life. They are not there to surrender their own life to take care of or cheer for you. The other person has their own life and it is your responsibility to observe and note their journey though their life too. Cheering and sharing of course is strongly encouraged.

Children have been observed tearing apart perfectly good relationships. It is important to understand that children may appear in the future. Children in their first years are self indulgent and self centered. They wreak havoc on many relationships, and stretch them to the breaking point and beyond.

Much of what you look forward to in your life journey is put aside while you do your part to properly raise your children. When you come out the other side you are both really different people than you used to be.

Shared life fundamentals are so important. Serious life long relationships like life are a series of ups and downs. Sometimes it feels more down than up, that is the way it is. It is not always easy or fun. What makes it worth the effort is knowing the foundations are in place before you start and you share the same finish line.

Other posts that may be interesting to you:

Change, change, and change some more

Relationships that last are not shallow to begin with

Three things that hurt in a new failed relationship