Love
and
Marriage
and
Marriage
MARITAL CHANGES
Two Becoming One
A marriage is “two becoming one.” It’s like a glass of plain water with added honey to make it taste sweet. In other words, the water is no longer plain and tasteless; it has now become “honey water.”
Change
“Two becoming one” means change. A marriage changes the life of a couple for better and for worse forever. Yes, marriage means “change.”
So, what exactly is change?
Buddha’s perspective of change
According to Buddha, the water flowing in a river is like a progressive and successive series of different but unified movements of water, all joining together to create the impression of only one continuous flow of water. Likewise, your existence is only moment-to-moment, with each moment leading to the next. This may give you the illusion that the “you” in this moment will be the same person in the next moment, just as the illusion that the river of today is the same as the river of yesterday. The truth of the matter is that you are changing every moment, and so is your marriage partner-especially now that the two of you have now become one.
Even from a scientific point of view, Buddha’s perspective of change is true. Body cell division takes place continuously in each living being: old cells die and are continuously replaced by new ones. In other words, you’re constantly changing, even though you may not be aware of it, and the change within you is a continuous process, just like the flowing water in a river.
The truth and the reality of change
You’re living in a world of constant change: everything is changing with every moment, and it remains only with that very moment. That’s the truth.
The reality is that change is inevitable in life. Any good relationship doesn’t remain unchanged over time. Everything in your married life changes: your appearance, your emotions, your intellect, your reasoning, and even your spirituality.
So, you must acknowledge and recognize any change, explore the reality of change, and then accept and initiate the change, whether you like it or not.
Personality Change
Your personality plays a pivotal role in your marriage because it affects positively or negatively your relationship with your marriage partner, as well as that of your children and close members of the family.
What’s personality?
Personality comes from within. Personality traits are the characteristic patterns of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that uniquely define who you really are. Some of the most common personality traits are:
·Conscientiousness is the looking forward or the planning ahead to do the right things. This personality usually begins in the 20s of an individual and then slows down in the 30s and 40s.
·Agreeableness is the showing of warmth, kindness, generosity, and helpfulness to others. This personality accelerates usually in the 30s and 40s in a person’s life.
·Companionableness is the being of sociable and energetic, always knowing what to say and how to say it.
·Distressfulness is the frequent displaying of worrisome and temperamental behaviors by an individual.
First and foremost, you must be aware of your own personality, and then make some change to adapt your personality to that of your marriage partner, as well as to adjust it to all the changes in the new life of “two becoming one.”
Understanding Personality Development
Understanding personality development may throw some light on how you can change own your personality at any stage.
According to the famous psychologist Erik Erikson, your personality has evolved through several decades of changes and experiences, resulting in being who and what you’ve now become.
So, understand how those changes in your life have occurred and shaped your own personality. Now, adapting and transforming yourself to those changes may still benefit your marriage life in the long run.
According to Erik Erikson, there’re eight life stages, through which you may have gone through to become who and what you’re right now. These eight psychosocial development stages are as follows:
Trust and Mistrust
In this first stage, from birth to age one, you might have experienced and developed trust or mistrust, affecting how you might feel about the benevolence of the world around you.
Do you always have low trust or mistrust in others around you?
Independence and Doubt
In the toddler stage, you might have begun to develop your own self-trust, which led to your independence. With self-trust, you began to learn how to walk. In this stage, however, you might also have developed self-doubt that led to shame later in life. That might be the underlying cause of failing to take risks later in life, missing some golden opportunities to improve your life, and thus making you often feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
Are you always self-confident in whatever you do?
Creativity and Guilt
In preschool years, you began to exercise your mind to acquire initiative and express creativity. The capability to express freely your own initiative and creativity might have helped you develop the playful and positive side of your nature. Under restraint, on the other hand, you might have developed guilt, lack of self-confidence, and inability to get close to others.
Are you always creative and imaginative in everything you do?
Industry and Inferiority
From age five to eleven, you might have experienced fulfillment in accomplishment or disappointment in failure. That was often a result of acquiring the society’s work ethics. You might begin to believe in your abilities and feel motivated to work hard. On the other hand, if you became lazy, you might develop poor work habits that might adversely affect your education and careers later in life.
Are you always puttering from one job to another, always procrastinating and never meeting your deadlines?
Identity and Diffusion
In adolescent, you might begin to explore yourself, finding out who you really are and what you want out of your life. You might have channeled your energy into a field you love, and derived great pleasure from seeing what you’d accomplished. This growth in your sense of self determines whether or not you might have an “identity crisis.”
Are you always in search for a meaning and a purpose in your life?
Intimacy and Withdrawal
In early adulthood, you began to develop intimacy, which is a quality of an individual, and not the couple. The ability to develop and maintain a long-term relationship with someone is an asset. However, many may also experience difficulty in achieving closeness with others, or even in maintaining a long-lasting relationship, resulting in inner loneliness that might have caused doubt despite your own remarkable accomplishments in other things in your life.
Is your life worth living when it comes to your relationships with others?
Compassion and Selfishness
In middle age, you might become more connected to future generations, as evidenced by being parents, mentors, and supervisors. However, you might also become too self-focusing, alienating yourself from the next generation, and thus creating the “generation gap.”
Do you spend much time focusing on your own needs, instead of those of others?
Ego and Despair
In old age, by letting go of the ego, you might accept both your successes and failures, and thus having healthy perspectives of your life in general. However, you might also look back at your own past experiences and the world in general with disdain and regret, and thus making you feel despa
Is your life worth living when it comes to your relationships with others?
Compassion and Selfishness
In middle age, you might become more connected to future generations, as evidenced by being parents, mentors, and supervisors. However, you might also become too self-focusing, alienating yourself from the next generation, and thus creating the “generation gap.”
Do you spend much time focusing on your own needs, instead of those of others?
Ego and Despair
In old age, by letting go of the ego, you might accept both your successes and failures, and thus having healthy perspectives of your life in general. However, you might also look back at your own past experiences and the world in general with disdain and regret, and thus making you feel despaired and unhappy.
Do you think you already have a fulfilled life?
Changing Personality Traits
If you don’t like some of your personality traits or those of your marriage partner, can you still change them?
Yes, you can, but it’s not that easy.
According to Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, some of the personality traits of an individual are already set in stone by the age of five of that individual.
So, how to change the personality traits of an individual?
·Show and express the desire and the determination to change the personality.
·Change the habits and behaviors related to that personality trait by doing the opposite. For example, if you’re shy and reclusive, then join a crowd and start talking profusely.
·Focus on the effort or the doing, rather than on the thought or the thinking. For example, say “I was successful because I worked hard on it” instead of “I was successful because I was smart and talented.”
·Set goals to change your self-beliefs through repeated self-affirmations.
The reality
Your happiness has much to do with your personality development throughout your life. In other words, your life experiences and your own perceptions of those experiences not only define but also shape your personalities, which are uniquely yours.
So, it’s impossible to say why some people are happy, and why others aren’t. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian author, said in the beginning of his novel “Anna Karenina”: “Happy families are alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.”
Emotions and Feelings Change
Emotions and feelings are two sides of the same coin. They’re closely related to each other, but they’re different in that emotions create biochemical reactions in the body, affecting the physical state, while feelings are more mental associations and reactions to emotions.
Harmony and Disharmony
According to the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), we all have qi (?), which is the internal life-giving energy circulating within each of us, giving us internal balance and harmony. Emotions are energy states, which may either contribute to or deplete our own internal life-giving energy, causing harmony or disharmony, and thus leading to positive or negative emotions and feelings.
Diseases and disorders
The truth of the matter is that any “excessive” emotion or feeling may become the underlying cause of many health issues.
Dr. Caroline B. Thomas, M.D., of John Hopkins School of Medicine, discovered that cancer patients often had a prior poor relationship with their parents, attesting to the pivotal role of emotions in the development of cancer.
In another study by Dr. Richard B. Shekelle of the University of Texas School of Medicine, it was found that depression patients were not only more cancer prone but also more likely to die of cancer than the other patients. If emotions play a pivotal role in cancer, by the same token, negative feelings may also adversely affect the symptoms or the prognosis of any human disease. Thoughts and feelings of anger, despair, discontent, frustration, guilt, or resentment are instrumental in depressing the physiological processes, including the human body’s immune response-a formula for promoting the development of an autoimmune disease.
So, an unhappy marriage may negatively affect your mental and physical health.
The seven emotions
According to the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there’re seven emotions which are the underlying causes of many internal diseases, and these emotions are: anger, anxiety, fear, fright, joy, sadness, and worry. Because Chinese medicine is all about internal balance and harmony, these seven emotions may even affect different human body organs. For example, excessive anger impairs the liver, causing headaches, while even excessive joy dysfunctions the heart, leading to mania and mental disorders.
Anger
Anger or rage is an ineffective and inefficient way to resolve any issue or to make any problem go away. Anger is a disruptive emotion that may often lead to depression, and worse, the breakup of a marriage or a love relationship, especially if the anger isn’t properly addressed and controlled.
So, how to change your disruptive emotion of anger or rage?
·Take a deep diaphragm breath, and just feel your anger as you breathe in.
·Look at your anger in your mind. Then review the situation, and ask yourself one simple question: Can your anger change the situation or anything?
·Accept that you’re now angry, and then breathe it out. If necessary, use your arm like a sword cutting through your feelings of rage, while saying: “I can see my anger: it is as it was!”
Don’t hold your anger in; instead, let it go, by breathing it out. Don’t let it go as pain; instead, let it go as your own acceptance. But your acceptance should be viewed not as a sign of your own weakness but as a statement of your own communication to yourself that getting angry will never solve the problem anyway or right away.
·Then, remind yourself that anger is always present to serve a purpose to release some deeper issues, problems, and internal conflicts that you may be carrying in your own bag and baggage all these years. It’s always better to release anger than to turn it around to destroy yourself.
But suppressing your anger is also self-destructive, as the negative energy redirects itself back into your own body. Anger is always a path of destruction. Resolve anger by developing habits that may release internal conflicts in a constructive manner before it can be released as rage.
Joy and sadness
Any positive emotion, such as joy, in excess may also become negative. It’s not uncommon that many people experience winter blues right after Christmas and the New Year celebration.
Worry
Of all the other negative human emotions, worry is the least useful, and serves no purpose at all. Worry is about the future and the unknown.
The reality
Your emotions and feelings are cherished and nourished by the traits of your personality. So, change your personality as much as possible, or at least adapt and adjust it to comply with that of your marriage partner. Marriage is about change, including that of personality.
Remember, the world always reflects your actions. If you change, the world around you will also change. In the same manner, if you lash out in rage, then the world lashes back at you with that same rage causing you internal pain or grief that still has to be addressed and resolved. That’s the reality of living a married life with anger and rage.
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
To get your Getting Married to Make You Happy?, click here to get your paperback copy, and here to get your digital copy.
Two Becoming One
A marriage is “two becoming one.” It’s like a glass of plain water with added honey to make it taste sweet. In other words, the water is no longer plain and tasteless; it has now become “honey water.”
Change
“Two becoming one” means change. A marriage changes the life of a couple for better and for worse forever. Yes, marriage means “change.”
So, what exactly is change?
Buddha’s perspective of change
According to Buddha, the water flowing in a river is like a progressive and successive series of different but unified movements of water, all joining together to create the impression of only one continuous flow of water. Likewise, your existence is only moment-to-moment, with each moment leading to the next. This may give you the illusion that the “you” in this moment will be the same person in the next moment, just as the illusion that the river of today is the same as the river of yesterday. The truth of the matter is that you are changing every moment, and so is your marriage partner-especially now that the two of you have now become one.
Even from a scientific point of view, Buddha’s perspective of change is true. Body cell division takes place continuously in each living being: old cells die and are continuously replaced by new ones. In other words, you’re constantly changing, even though you may not be aware of it, and the change within you is a continuous process, just like the flowing water in a river.
The truth and the reality of change
You’re living in a world of constant change: everything is changing with every moment, and it remains only with that very moment. That’s the truth.
The reality is that change is inevitable in life. Any good relationship doesn’t remain unchanged over time. Everything in your married life changes: your appearance, your emotions, your intellect, your reasoning, and even your spirituality.
So, you must acknowledge and recognize any change, explore the reality of change, and then accept and initiate the change, whether you like it or not.
Personality Change
Your personality plays a pivotal role in your marriage because it affects positively or negatively your relationship with your marriage partner, as well as that of your children and close members of the family.
What’s personality?
Personality comes from within. Personality traits are the characteristic patterns of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that uniquely define who you really are. Some of the most common personality traits are:
·Conscientiousness is the looking forward or the planning ahead to do the right things. This personality usually begins in the 20s of an individual and then slows down in the 30s and 40s.
·Agreeableness is the showing of warmth, kindness, generosity, and helpfulness to others. This personality accelerates usually in the 30s and 40s in a person’s life.
·Companionableness is the being of sociable and energetic, always knowing what to say and how to say it.
·Distressfulness is the frequent displaying of worrisome and temperamental behaviors by an individual.
First and foremost, you must be aware of your own personality, and then make some change to adapt your personality to that of your marriage partner, as well as to adjust it to all the changes in the new life of “two becoming one.”
Understanding Personality Development
Understanding personality development may throw some light on how you can change own your personality at any stage.
According to the famous psychologist Erik Erikson, your personality has evolved through several decades of changes and experiences, resulting in being who and what you’ve now become.
So, understand how those changes in your life have occurred and shaped your own personality. Now, adapting and transforming yourself to those changes may still benefit your marriage life in the long run.
According to Erik Erikson, there’re eight life stages, through which you may have gone through to become who and what you’re right now. These eight psychosocial development stages are as follows:
Trust and Mistrust
In this first stage, from birth to age one, you might have experienced and developed trust or mistrust, affecting how you might feel about the benevolence of the world around you.
Do you always have low trust or mistrust in others around you?
Independence and Doubt
In the toddler stage, you might have begun to develop your own self-trust, which led to your independence. With self-trust, you began to learn how to walk. In this stage, however, you might also have developed self-doubt that led to shame later in life. That might be the underlying cause of failing to take risks later in life, missing some golden opportunities to improve your life, and thus making you often feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
Are you always self-confident in whatever you do?
Creativity and Guilt
In preschool years, you began to exercise your mind to acquire initiative and express creativity. The capability to express freely your own initiative and creativity might have helped you develop the playful and positive side of your nature. Under restraint, on the other hand, you might have developed guilt, lack of self-confidence, and inability to get close to others.
Are you always creative and imaginative in everything you do?
Industry and Inferiority
From age five to eleven, you might have experienced fulfillment in accomplishment or disappointment in failure. That was often a result of acquiring the society’s work ethics. You might begin to believe in your abilities and feel motivated to work hard. On the other hand, if you became lazy, you might develop poor work habits that might adversely affect your education and careers later in life.
Are you always puttering from one job to another, always procrastinating and never meeting your deadlines?
Identity and Diffusion
In adolescent, you might begin to explore yourself, finding out who you really are and what you want out of your life. You might have channeled your energy into a field you love, and derived great pleasure from seeing what you’d accomplished. This growth in your sense of self determines whether or not you might have an “identity crisis.”
Are you always in search for a meaning and a purpose in your life?
Intimacy and Withdrawal
In early adulthood, you began to develop intimacy, which is a quality of an individual, and not the couple. The ability to develop and maintain a long-term relationship with someone is an asset. However, many may also experience difficulty in achieving closeness with others, or even in maintaining a long-lasting relationship, resulting in inner loneliness that might have caused doubt despite your own remarkable accomplishments in other things in your life.
Is your life worth living when it comes to your relationships with others?
Compassion and Selfishness
In middle age, you might become more connected to future generations, as evidenced by being parents, mentors, and supervisors. However, you might also become too self-focusing, alienating yourself from the next generation, and thus creating the “generation gap.”
Do you spend much time focusing on your own needs, instead of those of others?
Ego and Despair
In old age, by letting go of the ego, you might accept both your successes and failures, and thus having healthy perspectives of your life in general. However, you might also look back at your own past experiences and the world in general with disdain and regret, and thus making you feel despa
Is your life worth living when it comes to your relationships with others?
Compassion and Selfishness
In middle age, you might become more connected to future generations, as evidenced by being parents, mentors, and supervisors. However, you might also become too self-focusing, alienating yourself from the next generation, and thus creating the “generation gap.”
Do you spend much time focusing on your own needs, instead of those of others?
Ego and Despair
In old age, by letting go of the ego, you might accept both your successes and failures, and thus having healthy perspectives of your life in general. However, you might also look back at your own past experiences and the world in general with disdain and regret, and thus making you feel despaired and unhappy.
Do you think you already have a fulfilled life?
Changing Personality Traits
If you don’t like some of your personality traits or those of your marriage partner, can you still change them?
Yes, you can, but it’s not that easy.
According to Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, some of the personality traits of an individual are already set in stone by the age of five of that individual.
So, how to change the personality traits of an individual?
·Show and express the desire and the determination to change the personality.
·Change the habits and behaviors related to that personality trait by doing the opposite. For example, if you’re shy and reclusive, then join a crowd and start talking profusely.
·Focus on the effort or the doing, rather than on the thought or the thinking. For example, say “I was successful because I worked hard on it” instead of “I was successful because I was smart and talented.”
·Set goals to change your self-beliefs through repeated self-affirmations.
The reality
Your happiness has much to do with your personality development throughout your life. In other words, your life experiences and your own perceptions of those experiences not only define but also shape your personalities, which are uniquely yours.
So, it’s impossible to say why some people are happy, and why others aren’t. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian author, said in the beginning of his novel “Anna Karenina”: “Happy families are alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.”
Emotions and Feelings Change
Emotions and feelings are two sides of the same coin. They’re closely related to each other, but they’re different in that emotions create biochemical reactions in the body, affecting the physical state, while feelings are more mental associations and reactions to emotions.
Harmony and Disharmony
According to the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), we all have qi (?), which is the internal life-giving energy circulating within each of us, giving us internal balance and harmony. Emotions are energy states, which may either contribute to or deplete our own internal life-giving energy, causing harmony or disharmony, and thus leading to positive or negative emotions and feelings.
Diseases and disorders
The truth of the matter is that any “excessive” emotion or feeling may become the underlying cause of many health issues.
Dr. Caroline B. Thomas, M.D., of John Hopkins School of Medicine, discovered that cancer patients often had a prior poor relationship with their parents, attesting to the pivotal role of emotions in the development of cancer.
In another study by Dr. Richard B. Shekelle of the University of Texas School of Medicine, it was found that depression patients were not only more cancer prone but also more likely to die of cancer than the other patients. If emotions play a pivotal role in cancer, by the same token, negative feelings may also adversely affect the symptoms or the prognosis of any human disease. Thoughts and feelings of anger, despair, discontent, frustration, guilt, or resentment are instrumental in depressing the physiological processes, including the human body’s immune response-a formula for promoting the development of an autoimmune disease.
So, an unhappy marriage may negatively affect your mental and physical health.
The seven emotions
According to the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there’re seven emotions which are the underlying causes of many internal diseases, and these emotions are: anger, anxiety, fear, fright, joy, sadness, and worry. Because Chinese medicine is all about internal balance and harmony, these seven emotions may even affect different human body organs. For example, excessive anger impairs the liver, causing headaches, while even excessive joy dysfunctions the heart, leading to mania and mental disorders.
Anger
Anger or rage is an ineffective and inefficient way to resolve any issue or to make any problem go away. Anger is a disruptive emotion that may often lead to depression, and worse, the breakup of a marriage or a love relationship, especially if the anger isn’t properly addressed and controlled.
So, how to change your disruptive emotion of anger or rage?
·Take a deep diaphragm breath, and just feel your anger as you breathe in.
·Look at your anger in your mind. Then review the situation, and ask yourself one simple question: Can your anger change the situation or anything?
·Accept that you’re now angry, and then breathe it out. If necessary, use your arm like a sword cutting through your feelings of rage, while saying: “I can see my anger: it is as it was!”
Don’t hold your anger in; instead, let it go, by breathing it out. Don’t let it go as pain; instead, let it go as your own acceptance. But your acceptance should be viewed not as a sign of your own weakness but as a statement of your own communication to yourself that getting angry will never solve the problem anyway or right away.
·Then, remind yourself that anger is always present to serve a purpose to release some deeper issues, problems, and internal conflicts that you may be carrying in your own bag and baggage all these years. It’s always better to release anger than to turn it around to destroy yourself.
But suppressing your anger is also self-destructive, as the negative energy redirects itself back into your own body. Anger is always a path of destruction. Resolve anger by developing habits that may release internal conflicts in a constructive manner before it can be released as rage.
Joy and sadness
Any positive emotion, such as joy, in excess may also become negative. It’s not uncommon that many people experience winter blues right after Christmas and the New Year celebration.
Worry
Of all the other negative human emotions, worry is the least useful, and serves no purpose at all. Worry is about the future and the unknown.
The reality
Your emotions and feelings are cherished and nourished by the traits of your personality. So, change your personality as much as possible, or at least adapt and adjust it to comply with that of your marriage partner. Marriage is about change, including that of personality.
Remember, the world always reflects your actions. If you change, the world around you will also change. In the same manner, if you lash out in rage, then the world lashes back at you with that same rage causing you internal pain or grief that still has to be addressed and resolved. That’s the reality of living a married life with anger and rage.
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
To get your Getting Married to Make You Happy?, click here to get your paperback copy, and here to get your digital copy.