How To Make A Marriage Work

Here’s something I rarely talk about, but it’s something I think we really need to cover.

How to make a marriage work.

For those of you who know me, you’re probably thinking, what the fuck does David Wygant know about how to make a marriage work? He’s not married anymore.

He’s been married, and it hasn’t worked out.

That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to make it work. That doesn’t mean at all that I don’t understand the dynamics of a relationship.

I may have been married a few times, and it may not have worked out, but I did learn a lot and I grew a lot. I understand the dynamics of how to make a marriage work.

You don’t need to be successful at something to learn the lessons that are being presented to you, in ways that you need to start embracing things.

You don’t need to be married 50 years to give marriage advice. Whenever a relationship doesn’t work out, you’re being presented a valuable lesson.

A lesson that you need to embrace and learn and grow from. You change beliefs and mindsets and expand and learn how to make things work the next time.

So, I do know how to make a marriage work. My mistakes, or the things that I did wrong, definitely taught me how to make that marriage work.

The Hedonistic Stage

Think about this. You go into a marriage with high hopes and aspirations.

If you think about it, you’ve been together for a couple of years. You go through the relationship stage that I call the hedonistic stage.

With just the two of you. You’re both together and you’re doing fun things, like going on vacation, getting to know one another and you’re having lots of great sex because that’s what we do when we first meet somebody. We have lots of amazing, great, fun sex.

So, then you have this sexual high, the emotional high, the hedonistic high, you make a decision that you think you can spend the rest of your life with somebody.

You believe that you can, so you ask that person to marry you. You say yes to a man’s proposal.

Then, you go off into planning the wedding, making the wedding day great, making the honeymoon great, deciding what your future’s going to be like.

Then reality kind of sets in. You probably have three to five years of this hedonistic period, then all of a sudden, you have a kid.

Bringing a Child into a Marriage

The problem is, so many people don’t ever talk about what it’s going to be like when they have a child.

How you’re going to get the child to sleep. Do you believe in sleep training?

How do you envision being a family together?

Is one of you an airy, fairy type of parent that believes in attachment parenting where they want to have a family bed and you all sleep in it?

While the other one is a “put the kid in it’s crib and teach them how to cry it out and sleep train them that way” kind of person. You’ve got to figure out what this is all about because the minute a kid comes, you’re signing up for an 18 year commitment to one another. It’s no longer just the two of you. You’re no longer in the hedonistic stage. Neither one of you is number one.

The kid is number one.

You have to put yourselves at number one, because if you don’t put yourself and your needs and your desires and talking care of yourself first, you’re never going to make a great parents, and you’ll never make a great partner.

I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes people make when they’re getting married in the first place – they don’t really know how to make themselves fully happy so they’re relying, in a co-dependent way, on somebody else to make them happy. But in reality, we’re only responsible for our own happiness.

Let’s say for instance you both have your own happiness, and it’s great, how are you going to co-exist together for the next 18 years when you have children. How are you going to do it?

How are you going to make everything work? What about common goals for the future?

What about common ideas?

Talk about the Long-Term

Relationships tank because no one ever talks about the long-term dynamics of how you envision things to be when it’s no longer just the two of you in the utopia of the hedonistic stage.

Talk about your duties in the relationship, your duties as parents, your duties for each other.

When you don’t talk about this stuff, you’re not going to make the marriage work.

Whenever a third party enters, all chaos seems to break loose. The kids start controlling, taking away the moods, taking away the hedonistic period, and you find out that both of you have totally different parenting styles. The way you parent is different than the way they parent. It’s pretty hard to co-exist if one member of Parliament is not talking to the other member of Parliament.

These are things that people don’t think about. You see, people always say it’ll work itself out.

Try running a business on that theory and tell me how much money you make, how successful you are, how every single day you’re just winging it. You’re not really talking to your business partners at all and planning things out. Businesses don’t just find a way of working themselves out. They tend to crash if you’re winging it.

So I may not be married right now, but I strongly know from all of my experiences that we need to have discussions while we’re still in the euphoria stage so we can see our future together.

You need to realize you’re on the same page as the person you’re with, because you need to align in order to have that future that you so want.