Open Mind Hypnotherapy
In less than one week I am lucky enough to be getting married to the man I have spent the last ten years of my life with.
I have never been more sure of anything in my entire life.
After nearly a decade together I think we know each other pretty well. There are surface-level similarities (we share a mutual love of Top Gun and Bryan Adams) and differences (I would happily go vegetarian, he loves meat). And on a deeper level, whilst we come from quite refreshingly different backgrounds and upbringings, we are congruent in our values and beliefs about the kind of life we want to live and how we want to raise our girls (apart from the zombie apocalypse one – that’s all him!).
I love and admire him for his (almost) unending patience with me when I plead for “just one more photo” and his ability to recognise what it is I need even before I do. He reminds me that life doesn’t have to be so serious and planned-out-to-the-minute all the time.
We have been through rough patches, house moves, births, deaths and job changes together, and we have not only survived, but we really and truly have grown stronger – both as individuals and as a couple.
I’m not totally naïve and idealistic though – I know that saying “I do” doesn’t magically make everything perfect. A marriage requires work.
Being married isn’t something you ‘are’, it’s something that you ‘do’.
Together.
So I thought I’d ask you all to share with me your advice for what helps to keep a marriage strong. I’m curious – what works for you? It doesn’t matter if you relatively recently tied the knot, if you have been together for 30 years, or even if you are divorced – I’d love to find out your thoughts and feelings and ideas and guidance for making a good thing even better.
In return I promise I’ll post a couple of wedding pictures for those who are interested 😉
Leave your comments in the box below.
Thank you!
Phone: +44 (0) 7794 595783
Email: chloe@openmindhypnotherapy.co.uk
Your blog made me think…and for me a happy marriage is a conversation which always seems to short! I (as u know) will have been married for ten years next year and it certainly hasn’t been without its ups and downs, at times I really have ridden the roller coaster! As my marriage has evolved over those years I’ve learnt that one of the things to a successful marriage is to talk to each other, but I don’t mean about ‘how’s work? Or how the children are?’ I mean really talk! Talk to each other, set aside time for just the two of you to talk and talk about anything and everything but be honest with each other, laugh about old stuff you have done together and talk through the good and bad, someone once said to me when I asked for marriage advice ‘do you talk to each other?’ And I answered ‘of course we do every day’ but it took time for me to really analyse what they were saying and in truth we didn’t ‘really’ talk, the pillow talk we once had every night had slowly slipped away into a mix of work, chores, children and everyday life. It is so easy to get lost in life sometimes and routine and since we have made time to talk again we are much more of a team, a partnership than we have ever been. So my advice would be to have that conversation at night that by the end of it you wished had gone on longer, after all the couples that are meant to be are the ones that go through everything that’s designed to tear them apart and come out even stronger!