A quick disclaimer is necessary here: I am not a marriage counsellor. I don’t have any particular degree nor qualification on marriage counselling, but I have all my life, been around marriages and I have always understudied them. I have however, discovered that, most marriages built on mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual appreciation, mutual understanding, shared-vision, and mutual commitment, fared or fare well. The mutuality of those characteristics is very important. They cannot be from one end, they must be from both ends.

Before I proceed, again, this piece is a personal view because I understand that marriage is a very sensitive aspect of our lives.

MUTUAL RESPECT

“Respect is reciprocal,” so they say. It is important in life that we respect everyone around us and most importantly, our spouses (after our Creator and parents). They are the people that we intend to spend the rest of our lives with. To this extent, no one should get married to whom he or she does not respect. Human beings are prone to treating people they respect fairly and conscientiously. Again, I repeat, no man or woman should be married to anyone he or she does not have a huge respect for. This is a very important factor in choosing a spouse.

However, the respect must be two-way. If you respect the person and he or she doesn’t respect you, walk out of the relationship before it gets too deep. You don’t want to be at the receiving end of an arrogant spouse. Such relationship is always very brittle and combustible; it is ready to explode any moment your respect for such arrogant spouse evaporates, because it would someday – it only depends on the elasticity of your tolerance for his or her arrogance.

A spouse who respects you puts a premium on your feelings. He or she doesn’t want to hurt you, he or she would be sensitive to your plight, he or she would always choose his words and be very polite to you, and he or she would be willing to overlook petty issues out of respect for you and out of the understanding that we are humans and we are prone to mistakes. Indeed, mutual respect cannot be over emphasised in a marriage.

MUTUAL TRUST

Trust is a big deal in every marriage. It shouldn’t be compromised for anything and for any reason. Dictionary.com defines it as “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.” Those words say it all. Very powerful words, indeed. Our spouses must be someone whose integrity measures minimally as ours or above, and not less. Otherwise, we would be second-guessing their words and actions.

Every party must not toy with the trust imposed in them by the other. And this brings me to why I feel people shouldn’t indulge in too much jokes nor too much surprise packages. Or after every joke, one clarifies that “it’s a joke ooo,” lest your spouse took it too seriously. Too much of jokes won’t let your spouse know when you are serious and subsequently won’t make your spouse take you seriously or act seriously when you need them to.

While we expect that our spouses should be trustworthy, we must be willing and ready to demonstrate that they can rely on our own higher level of integrity, strength, ability (to deliver on our words) and surety. When we promise, we must try our best to fulfill our promises, and if we couldn’t (due to no error/intention of ours), we should sincerely apologise and explain what went wrong. Trust is built on honesty and sincerity; trust is destroyed by deceit.

MUTUAL APPRECIATION AND UNDERSTANDING

Intrinsically, mutual appreciation and mutual understanding are inseparable. They are like two wings of a bird, without one, the bird remains grounded. Marriage works when both parties recognise the good qualities in each other and focus on them and celebrate them. That is why it is always good to marry a spouse that shares a great deal of moral, cultural and faith values with one, because it is easy to appreciate the level of effort she/he has put into being decent, disciplined and grounded in those aspects of life. Such similarities form the foundation upon which mutual understanding is built as life would mostly be viewed from almost the same perspective albeit different hues.

They form the bases upon which you gauge each other’s utterances and actions and measure the seriousness or otherwise of such utterances and actions. For example, if your spouse said something that you felt slighted by, you would only be able to judge the sincerity and seriousness or otherwise of such words base on the morality of your spouse. If you don’t appreciate that people use slangs or dirty street languages around you, then you don’t marry someone who is found of using such slangs or have an understanding with him or her to drop them before things get too serious between you both.

It is important to appreciate our spouses for who they are, and vice versa. We must be willing to tolerate their shortcomings and/or work on them together to help them improve and grow into better persons. They should also reciprocate same to us. That is only when we can understand ourselves and live in harmony.

SHARED-VISION AND MUTUAL COMMITMENT

Marriage is a very serious “business” and no one should go into such business without securing a buy-in into its “mission and vision” from his or her spouse. What are the principles that would guide the marriage and the family you are about to build? Upon what foundation are we building it? What do we hope to achieve with this marriage? What are the conflict solving mechanisms we have in place should we disagree on issues? Proffering sincere answers to such questions and many more you can think of, would put a wife and her husband in synchrony. It would make them have a shared-understanding that every step, action and inaction must be towards the shared-vision they have for the family.

Having agreed on the vision for the family, there is a need for complementing and mutual commitment towards achieving such vision. Every member of the family must be supported to reach their full potentials. On matters that have encompassing consequences on the family, there must be a buy-in into the steps and procedures to be taken to address them; while on matters that affect a member (especially an adult member) of the family, other members can and should only advise and give opinion, the decision should solely be on the person. In that way, she can own, accept and take responsibilities for the results of her action. However, when things go wrong, no one should castigate and condemn, everyone should encourage and support the other to see past the disappointment and focus on the positive sides of the result and lesson learnt.

Marriage is beautiful when a woman and her husband respect themselves, trust themselves, appreciate themselves, understand themselves, support and encourage each other to be who he or she wants to be.

NOTE: This article was first published on jidezubair. on 30/12/2014