Ten Commandments of Marriage
Marriage is the sum of all its many parts. If any of those parts is missing, the marriage
is missing something essential. Here are those necessary parts:
1. Friendship:
Ideally, before you marry you become friends. You really take the time and make the effort to
get to know one another. In time that friendship begins to take on an innocent intimacy
because you feel free to discuss personal issues you would only talk about to a true friend.
2. Relationship:
Over time the friendship develops into a relationship. You begin
to know one another more closely and, in time, there is an exclusivity about the two of you
and others know that you are together and becoming one.
3. Love:
As the relationship grows, love replaces like and there is
sentimentality about the relationship that goes beyond acquaintance and becomes longing
and need. You want to spend all your time together.
4. Commitment:
Becoming engaged signals a commitment, one to the other,
which, at the proper time, is solemnized with a ceremony meaningful to both parties and you
have now become husband and wife with every intention of making the bond inseparable and
permanent.
5. Fidelity:
This is what you pledge when you marry -- forsaking all
others and having an exclusive relationship wherein there is trust, constancy, shared
vision and unquestionable loyalty to your mate.
6. Individuality:
Each of you bring your own, individual and unique
strengths and weaknesses into the marriage. While the act of marrying implies a melding
of these, you each fell in love with the individual you are now married to and while a
marriage is full of compromise, each must retain the individuality that made you fall in
love in the first place.
7. Independence:
Each of you must be available for the other to lean
on occasionally but not to smother. Ideally, when times are difficult you lean together
to combine your strengths. Neither should be wholly dependent upon the other but each
should be able to depend on the other. Maintain the delightful independence which brought
you together while working together for the common good.
8. Equality:
Each of you must give 100% to the marriage and to each
other, and more. No one of you is more important in or to the marriage than the other.
Neither of you is subservient to the other. Both of you have equal responsibilities and
equal rights within the marriage and your lives together.
9. Mutuality:
In all things you must present a combined front to the
world. There will be many things that may wear on or tear at your relationship but if you
face them, strong and united, they can never prevail against you.
10. Spirituality:
Whatever your independent and individual beliefs,
marriage is a uniting of the spirit as much as it is of the flesh. If you have no
spiritual belief in and bond to your marriage, you will be lacking that which sets us
aside from the beasts of the field.
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