How to Keep a Happy Marriage?

When I was a young single girl, Love was the most sacred sentimental words in the vocabulary, and the pursue of my life. However, now I realized that language confuses us, if we replace love with the appropriate synonyms it becomes much clearer - desire and control, or mercy and compassion. A marriage is bond by mercy and compassion, and ruined by desire and control.

We have been cultivating desire and control all our lives - it is part of our human nature. Remember the gorilla and human genes are 98% identical? The trait is built in the design of every species, to prosper the species. It is selfish mindset because a species can only survive if every individual survives, and can only grow if the stronger win. Both our nature in gene and our society grow us to be selfish, greedy, desire to control, desire to win, and it is not our fault. It is the law of the universe.

However what makes a species survive is basically animal nature, and may cause human sufferings, may make a marriage miserable. What differentiates us from a gorilla is mercy and compassion. If we desire to live a happy human life, we have to apply the emotion that is unique to human beings to our spouse. Here we come to the eight words from How to be Happy again: I am always positive and helping other people. The first person to help is your spouse!

The happy couples are all similar, and miserable couples have their distinctive issues. The mission of a happy marriage is to help each other to be come a better person, to live better life. You and your spouse are both human beings and both have flaws, and if you ever noticed how difficult it is to change yourself, you can understand it is hard for your spouse to change. The only way to accomplish the mission is through mercy and compassion, understanding and patience, influence your spouse little by little without annoying him/her. Stay off anger, argument and finger pointing, those emotions and behaviors are generated by desire and control, will push your spouse away from you.

Mercy is the word I borrowed from Bible, Compassion is the word from Buddhism, both refers to a feeling we have for all sentient beings, same origin as our sympathy for poor people and abused animals, our pleasure watching happy kids and pets. The mild sadness when we observe suffering and the mild happiness when we observes happiness, when the subject is distantly related to ourselves. No matter where your spouse comes from, your spouse's life is not easy just like yours, is not perfect just like you, can't control own behavior and fate, just like you. After all the initial excitements of a big wedding and sentimental honeymoon, in the end you are just two people trapped in this planet under the same roof, trying to help each other to make each other's lives more livable, influence each other to be a better person which result in a better life for both. Think about what will make your spouse a happier person, and always focus on it, never focus on yourself.

To help another person to be happy, you have to be a better person first, you makes half of your marriage. If you are a happy person yourself, you will never criticize your spouse, always speak gently with understanding and patience, influence with your behavior. If you want your spouse to wash the dishes, wash them yourself and wait for the moment of change. If you want your spouse to change for better, change yourself first.

Every person is different and every marriage is different. When people are married, they are blind to see flaws in each other. After they are married, they are blind to see merits in each other. The society is cultivating a big ego for everybody since their birth, which resembles a balloon we carry around, when two people are so close, the balloon we each carry will squeeze each other and that is called conflicts. What is in our balloon? Our values, our viewpoints, our behaviors, our taste, our style, our blind definition of who we are including our bad habit, anger, desire, greed and ignorance. If you want to avoid conflicts, take a needle and poke your own balloon to deflate it, your spouse will feel much more happier than before, if the happiness of your spouse is all you are concerned about.

Wait a moment, where is yourself if you lose your ego? It is time you read Who am I? if you haven't got a chance to do so - Your ego is not yourself. Don't worry about what you will get from your spouse in return. After all you picked the one and only from the big crowd, I believe your spouse will do the just sensible thing - think about how to make you happy in return. It is the law of the universe - we receive what we gave.

If you want to delve more into the secret of marriage, Buddhism has a one size fits all solution - recite sutra. It is like casting secret spells in the household, you can be the only person who practice it but everybody in the household simply enjoys a smooth and happy life without knowing what is going on. If you think that is for you, you can explore further.