Did You Marry the Right Person?

Or maybe you’re still looking for the “right” person

Zig Ziglar was a popular motivational speaker who sadly is long gone. I listened to him a lot in the 70’s and 80s and I recently read a quote, attributed to him that I think is rather insightful:

“​I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person but I do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s possible that you did marry the wrong person.

However, if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all.
On the other hand, if you marry the right person and treat them wrong, you certainly ​will​ end up having married the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to​ be​ the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person.

In short, whether you married the right person or the wrong person is primarily up to you” - Zig Ziglar

Here’s the question: Is there really any such thing as the “right” person?

The older I get and the more couples “in distress” that I coach, the more I realize that whether you married the ‘right’ person or not, often has very little impact on how happy you are. Or even on how successful your marriage is.

As Zig Ziglar said, how you treat the one you ​already have​, right ​or ​wrong, is likely to have more impact on your marriage and your happiness. I’m convinced that the key is not finding the right person, it’s learning to love the person you found.

Assuming that​ most ​people feel that they’ve found the ‘right’ person when they do get married, and seeing as how the current divorce rate is around 50%, it seems that something might be wrong with the “Mr/Miss Right” strategy. Especially when we compare those statistics with the countries where arranged marriages are the norm. The divorce rate in those cultures is around 4%.

We could talk for a long time about falling in love and soulmates and that’s very romantic too but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to last the distance. There’s truth in the saying that most couples put more thought and planning into their wedding than they ever do into their marriage and it’s quite often all done in the heat of the moment. When the flames die down a little, it’s not surprising that some run out of enthusiasm. Being married is not easy and being married a long time is correspondingly more difficult. And it requires planning and acknowledging the other’s input and romancing and seduction and respecting and loving.

There’s no doubt in my mind that romance can be nurtured, relationships can be strengthened and love can last forever. It takes work and it takes commitment but it sure is worth it.