Marriage is complex and has been part of human life for thousands of years. Romance is exciting and activating, but lasting partnerships rely on something deeper: The interplay of human instincts, cultural norms, and intentional alignment.
This blog series breaks down the key insights about Marriage from our newest white paper: Marriage Instincts and Best Practices for Alignment, Connubial Bliss, and Next Steps to Do Today. In it, we explore how couples can cultivate enduring connection and fulfillment.
Key Points
- Instincts: Humans naturally seek partnership and cooperation, just like many of the socially wired animals, and marriage can be easily understood as an instinctive behavior in the context of our lives that has a massive influence over our lives at multiple levels that we each just accept as being the right thing to do, because it's aligned with basic instincts at relevant and important levels.
- Culture: Culture shapes how we act on our instincts, reinforcing shared values and commitment, and we need to understand our cultural factor on marriages and how to get the best overlaps between those cultures and our lives to have that behavior plan and pattern give us lives that we accept and enjoy and benefit from a high percentage of the time.
- Alignment: Strong marriages combine instinct and culture through shared goals, support, and intentional choices, and we'll be better served as people and as married couples if we understand the intersections that exist between those factors and steer them to the best behaviors for our own lives.
Why This Matters
Understanding these forces and acting accordingly can help couples move beyond reactive behavior to build intentional, fulfilling relationships that give people better lives and better interactions with the other people in their lives.
We now know some basic things about marriages that we can use to improve that part of our tool kit and make it more effective for us as people in the multimedia and artificial intelligence world we live in today.
Next Steps For Marriage We Can Functionally Do Today
- Make your spouse your friend in a very warm, intentional, and caring way. Be clear as spouses about what you're doing, and then do it together in the most respectful, appreciative, and caring ways that feel right to each of you at this point in your marriage, and continue to work over time because the reinforcement that happens from that approach is very much in the right direction.
- Commit in your marriage to win-win as a belief and a behavior, and as an intentional way of interacting. Make that commitment now and as a future way for you to interact with one another.
- Enjoy and appreciate each other sexually, because marriages should be a pathway to romantic and sexual interactions with each other. Figure out how to make those interactions a positive and ongoing part of your life, because it's so good for each person when that happens.
- Take five minutes often to reflect on what personal and direct “alignment” currently looks like in your relationship and how you can improve that alignment by doing the right things to make that happen.
We Marry For Life
We have many component parts of our lives, and we should each commit to each other in both love and conviction to learn how to have each other as life partners to make our commitment something we appreciate, celebrate, utilize in good ways, optimize, and very intentionally enjoy.
Be very honest with each other about what you want your marriage to be and do, and then work hard in joyful and friendly ways to make that happen.
Read our Inter Group Peace pieces, commitments, strategies, and approaches to help make that happen.
If you are destined and committed to being married, there’s no reason not to do the right things to make your marriage an extremely positive and beneficial part of your life.
Peace works and life is too short not to enjoy more of it with marriage as a reality to enjoy and appreciate in the process.