Working independently in his own practice, Leonardo Talpo has several years experience as an educator and counsellor in the field of Human Relationships.
I have been observing married people for the last 40 years. I have analyzed my own marriage over and over again, many times. I have been asking myself - what could be the secret for living happily ever-after? - as candidly stated in all major fairy-tales books.
I haven’t found the formula that matches the naïve expectations we have when we are young and madly ‘in love’ with our prince or princess, but I believe education and to seek the help of a professional marriage counselor will help committed couples to redesign and live a far better and exciting married life. And when I say couples - I don’t mean only couples that have been struggling for years in their relationship, but any couple, especially young couples who have just started out on their journey together.
Marriage is a serious business, and like any other business, in order to be successful, it requires total conviction, dedication, passion, creativity, total commitment, loyalty and love.
As in any other situation, if we simply work for convenience or fear that we don’t deserve any better, and not with the joy in our heart, with the confidence and conviction that we will do whatever it takes to overcome the odds - whenever is necessary, and enjoy the fruit of our work, then it will not be sustainable, it will die.
Normally marriages deteriorate close to a point of no return before partners decide that something must be done, and eventually no one has an answer. Eventually couples try to fix something that hasn’t been working for many years, and it ends in frustration and discouragement because, very often, the marriage at that stage is already in jeopardy. If I stereotype, we men are normally the most resistant party since we carry the ‘hero syndrome’: “Why do you propose for us to go to see a stranger, how would he know about our life, about us? I know us all too well and if I can’t fix it, nobody else can.”
I encourage men to have a look at the results they have in front of their eyes when they make this kind of statements, because it is true, only they can fix it, with their decision and hard work in co-operation with their partners. I invite men to ask themselves: “Am I fixing it?” and if not, then they need help. Very often couple counseling doesn’t work because the heart of one or both partners is already too dry, too much resentment, anger, and sometime another alternative, a new partner in the horizon, sounds a better deal. Trust is gone as well as the willingness to fight for it, to endure, to find a way out; their lives are unhappy and meaningless, multitudes of negative emotions take over, they feel trapped and in constant pain.
We need to acquire skills in the business of marriage because we have never been to college to learn how to be married. The real work needs to be done before getting in trouble, not after. We need to learn to disassociate from the Prince and Princess’s story where the Prince has to slay the dragon in order to conquer the princess, because in the business of marriage there is nothing to conquer but everything to build, together.
Conquering means to get something that already exists, while building means to give life towards something that doesn’t exist yet, that needs to be totally created. Love has to be the result of hard work, a choice. Like any other business, in order to be successful, a relationship or marriage needs to be built with consistency and attention, in a healthy progressive way. It needs to be profitable with a constant healthy ‘cash-flow’ in order to be sustainable.
You must know what you have in your hands, what kind of resources, before venturing in to such a high-risk business such as marriage. You must do your due-diligence; you must know how to run your own personal business with hard work, faith and dedication. You must have rules; boundaries and regulation in place and the partners must be responsible and accountable for anything they commit to. You must be prepared for challenging days to come. In a nutshell, you must know what you have to do before committing yourself to a marriage and then during the marriage life.
‘OMG, it sounds so mechanical, so cold, without romance! How can I possibly start something like that? I am already doing that every day in my job, and then go home and continue to work? This sounds so unappealing!’ Well, trust me, the only thing very unappealing is living a miserable marriage life; what about learning a better way?
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