Marriage is the Greatest Seminar You Will Ever Experience

Marriage is the best seminar you will ever attend.  It offers opportunities for growth that no other relationship can offer, that is, if you are both in it, playing “full out”.  If you are not both in it, it can be the loneliest, saddest place you will ever be.

 

For most of my younger life, I thought I had made a conscious decision that I was never going to get married or have children.  I just never imagined I would find a man that I would want to spend the rest of my life with.  And I definitely didn’t want a “husband” based on the role models I saw growing up like the “husband” in “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver”.  22 years ago, I found myself meeting a man without whom I could not imagine not spending the rest of my life.  Imagine that!  So here we were, getting ready to get married, me, having never been or even really wanting to be married before this point, not knowing that I didn’t know the first thing about marriage; him, having been married twice before, knowing more about what he didn’t want a marriage to be than what he did want it to be.

 

The past 20 years have been such a rich journey of learning about marriage, from actually being married, to creating personalized ceremonies and officiating at marriage ceremonies, to doing pre-marital coaching and workshops for couples, to doing marriage enrichment workshops and marriage counseling.   I have learned some very important things about marriage.  I have learned, “Why get married?”  I have learned what makes a healthy, happy “Whole Heart” marriage.  I have learned that there is a difference between “Till death do us part” and “Till the end of our forever”.  I understand the statement “Till death do us part, as long as it’s working for both of us”. And I have learned that we must re-choose our partner and our marriage many times throughout our lives because if we are really changing and growing our relationship is constantly evolving.  I have learned these things through my own experiences as well as the experiences of hundreds of couples with whom I have worked and the research from experts I have studied.

 

One of the most important things I have come to believe is that as we process through relationships on our path toward finding the one we choose to marry, we pick up one relationship right where we left the last one.  It’s like we’re really having one relationship our whole lives with different people in different bodies.  And the truth is that the one relationship, the biggy is with ourselves.  Each person that we interact with mirrors aspects of ourselves.  We are multi-faceted individuals, with many different parts and sides, just like a prism.  As each person touches us, they ignite something in us, cause us to glow in a certain way, glow, sparkle and shine.  And sometimes they block our light or the block the light from us.   That’s when you know something is wrong; when your light is no longer shining.