- The most important decision of your life will be who you marry. You will spend almost all of your time with this person. You will raise children together, which is the purpose of life. All of your meaningful life experiences will happen with this person. If you choose wisely, you will have a rich and joyful life. If you choose poorly, life will be miserable.
- The purpose of marriage (and of all living creatures) is to have children. Marriage is supposed to provide a guaranteed mother and father who will care for and love and raise children in a safe and healthy environment. Marriage is the most successful and enduring social construct in human history.
- Most of your time should be spent with your spouse. A curse of modern life is the factory job system where spouses don’t see each other most of the day. In marriage, you and your spouse should develop closer together by spending lots of time together. If you spend time apart, you often will drift apart and this will cause divorce. Your career is not more important than your marriage. Making money is not more important than your children.
- Marriage priorities list: 1) Direct family members (children) 2) Direct family safety 3) Direct family wealth. 4) Extended family. Your selfish goals with personal friendships, personal careers, and personal hobbies should all be further down the list.
- Each person in a marriage needs to try their best to treat their spouse well. If you mistreat someone, they will mistreat you. You both will be miserable.
- Marriage requires someone to be a leader as there will be times of disagreement and a decision needs to be made. Each person can be a leader in certain areas of the marriage. For example, Laurel leads in family and child things and I lead in financial and outside world things. Each person in the marriage should always completely listen to what the other person wants and talk to them about it even if they want to lead in another direction.
- Selfishness will destroy marriages. Both spouses need to always put the children and the family first. Once you commit to a marriage and to having children, your life is no longer your own. Your time should be spent having kids, raising and teaching kids, bonding with your spouse, building wealth and power for your family. Your time should not be spent on video games, watching tv, doom scrolling your phone, going out with friends, drinking, or even spending lots of time with other people.
- “Open relationships” is just an excuse for cheating. “Ethical polyamory” is cheating. Cheating is selfish and marriage fundamentally cannot be selfish.
- The purpose of marriage is not sex – it is to have children. But sex is a fundamental and exclusive element of marriage. If either partner wants sex, the other needs to do it and make it good. This is a core requirement of monogamy. If one party holds out sex to try to get something from the other person or just because they don’t feel like it, it creates a lot of hard feelings and can destroy a marriage quickly. I have had friends who had marriages where sex was not given when requested and all of these ended in divorce.
- Marriage is a partnership, not a Disney BS story. Marriage is not based on emotions. Emotions come and go, sometimes you feel lovey dovey, sometimes you feel hatey-fatey. Marriage is a promise to stay together for better or worse, richer or poorer, sick or in health. Be realistic. Some days will be great, some days will suck. Hold to your promises no matter what.
- A short memory and quick forgiveness are essential to a good marriage. Holding grudges is a recipe for disaster.
- Thank your spouse for the work they do whenever you see it because you probably only see the tip of the iceberg of everything they do for the marriage.
- Keep no secrets. Talk openly about everything, even embarrassing things or things that hurt.
- Your body is an amazing chemical machine that is optimally tuned to run with just food and water. When you take mind altering drugs (yes, this includes alcohol and even caffeine and tobacco), you are making your brain worse off. Mind altering drugs are at best selfish and extremely destructive. You lose patience, you are more likely to fight, and when you fight the fights are much worse. Stupid things seem important. Your body often becomes sick. Your marriage will be far better if both you and your partner avoid all mind altering drugs, especially the nastier ones.
- Don’t escalate in fights. People often want to be the one on top in fight, but that never turns out well in marriage.
- Most of your life is made up of habits. Do you have habits to treat your spouse well and say thank you? Or are your habits to criticize them?