Last night my wife and I had dinner at a co-worker’s home. They are from India. They just moved in and invited everyone from the department over to dinner over the course of 2 nights since everyone couldn’t make it on one night. It was an interesting and fun evening.
The food from the appetizers to the dinner itself was home made by my friend’s wife. I couldn’t tell you what most of it is called but it was really good. We had coconut rice, lemon rice, garbanzo beans, and a couple of different kinds of chicken. She did the kind thing and lowered the heat level on the food to one that we could all handle. Everything that we had that was spicy was what I would call medium. I’m glad she dropped it down a notch for us or I’m not sure most people there could have handled it including me.
My friend also mentioned that he and his wife were an arranged marriage. He said that they married when they were very young and so kind of grew up together. He thinks that this is part of the reason that they have been able to have a successful marriage for 30 years now. It’s interesting to hear their perspective on this.
When you look at the divorce rate in America where you get to make your own choice about who you marry, you would think that making your own decision on this would help you to make a better one. That’s obviously not true in most cases. I’m not advocating arranged marriages or anything like that. I’m just saying that we too often look at the short term both when marrying someone and when divorcing someone. Marriage is a hard road at times. Perspective on life and happiness affect not only our short term vision of our lives but also our long term vision. Most of us can’t see past the current crisis. And it does take two people willing to tough it out and work on what’s wrong in the relationship. If either one isn’t willing to make at least some compromise, it will never work. I think that in this arena, too many people are under the false impression that there’s someone out there with whom they will always agree and have a happy, harmonious, disagreement free life. Grow up!
Back to my friend. He said something that will likely strike you as being as odd as it did me. He said that it doesn’t matter who the woman is you marry. Admittedly, he was drunk by this point, but still. In some ways it makes sense, but it’s not what we are used to thinking. If that woman – or man for that matter – is willing to marry and dedicate themselves to someone, it could be made to work. If you spend your time looking at what is positive and redeeming about them instead of looking for what’s wrong and finding fault, you could make it work with almost anyone. I know that it’s not the normal way that we look at marriage. But using logic and not emotion, it works.
As he said, you learn how to live together and compliment each others strengths and weaknesses. It’s an interesting perspective, for sure. I don’t know that a lot of people of my generation look at things this way. I think that probably earlier generations did look at it more in this way and that’s how they were able to have such a better marital success rate and lower divorce rate. It’s definitely something to think about in your current situations.