| What makes a successful marriage? What keeps it on track? For a car its simple, constant adjustments with the steering wheel. But what's the equivalent to a steering wheel in marriage? For that matter what is the equivalent of the windshield from which you see where you are going and in which direction you should turn the wheel? Looking back on my marriage I will attempt to answer these and other questions. A successful failure: I failed at my marriage after a few years. It was several years after we were married before I realized I was failing at my marriage. I didn't realize that my marriage was like a bridge. I did all of the work to build it, marveled at it and then left it alone too long. A bridge needs constant maintenance or it decays and will collapse. I let my marriage stagnate and was content to let it be on autopilot while I attended to other things. I didn't know that I needed to keep planning the bridge and replacing different spans that were aging, adding width to accommodate a family etc. This is meson's story of learning how to have a successful marriage. We've been married 23 years and in not too long it will be a quarter of a century. I think we have a successful marriage right now. A few years ago, I couldn't have said that. We talked about divorce. I might think I have a successful marriage now but one can never be sure. Considering the numbers of marriages that still break up after 25+ years, I think a marriage can only be called a success until the death do us part is met. And even then the spouse that's left may cover up for a bad marriage anyway and waiting it out. The point I want to make is that communication is not always good and people change and that change may not be communicated well if at all. From now on I want to maintain vigilance on the state of our marriage to keep it healthy. After an exchange with Drerio about posting about healthy marriages some time ago, I have been giving thought about posting my story but I didn't want to jinx it. Recently SimplyAmorous decided to share her story and started off with some of the issues they had to work through. Two of them were issues we faced in our marriage also. This resonated with me and I concluded that really these issues were normal and it's the navigation of them in addition to keeping the marriage bridge maintained that makes a successful marriage. I want to share what I did to repair my marriage and kept it from collapsing. Thanks Drerio for the nudge and SimplyAmorous for the inspiration. My wife and I met in graduate school 30 years ago. It was not a significant meeting, there was no instant attraction. In fact I was engaged to be married to someone else and she had a boyfriend. I had just arrived at graduate school and was setting up a place to live, learning about what classes to take etc. My future wife volunteered to help with the orientation of new graduate students by being a student advisor. That is a fellow student who tells the incoming students exactly what it will be like. At our meeting she told me that the work would be much harder than I think and especially Quantum Mechanics. I was a bit too ****y and had a superior Quantum education in college by a well published Nuclear Physicist so I was skeptical and told her so. She thought I was over confidant and said so. But other than that I didn't think much of her until I ran into her again at her boyfriend's group house where I was staying as a guest while I looked for a place to live. I had found an apartment the previous day so my work was done and I was bored hanging out at the house. Her boyfriend didn't know we had met before and he introduced me to her and we had a short conversation about plans for the day. I mentioned I had a place and would leave the next day but would hang out for the day having nothing else to do. She suggested that I help her wash her car which I agreed to but her boyfriend needed to do something with an experiment at the department so he had to leave. I can practically hear the objections from TAM posters. Wait!!! They are both in relationships and are spending alone time together, it can only lead to infidelity. Both of us were impacted by infidelity which had latent effects on our subsequent marriage. | |||
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