Whatever You Marry, Marry Your Mindset

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Booth Tarkington

 

Ordinary people marry based on a façade- towering height, beautiful smile, hour glass figure, handsome face etc.

Others marry for status, money and maybe love.

Smart people however, marry a mindset.

It is easier to set out with the aim of marrying a mindset and end up with the mindset wrapped in an attractive façade than the other way round.

A mindset is a person’s outlook and opinions on issues. Very key issues.

Of course this may include a person’s religion and academic qualifications but it goes beyond these superficial criteria most times.

Any true pastor for instance will advise you to marry a fellow Christian but marrying just anybody solely because you share the same faith is like hiring an employee just because he/ she has a degree.

No, there has to be a short listing and compatibility-testing process!

Unfortunately, relationship counselors and even spiritual leaders deemphasize this and it goes ahead to boomerang.

The 3 leading causes of divorce are infidelity, irresponsibility and incompatibility.

Of the 3, incompatibility is the most avoidable.

This is the reason why many marriages end in divorce after few months of marriage- the couple have superficial things in common but do not share a mindset.

 

This is not to mean that couples must see things from the same angle all the time to be called compatible, it simply means that few things, if anything at all, can compel one to see that a vehicle is a comfort if he sees it is a burden.

Therefore, the best choice is to let such marry his/her match- everybody’s got one.

A difference in mindset is evident when people differ on very basic issues; the difference increases until it is weighty enough to cause pressure on the relationship.

A choice in marriage is not distinctly separated between rich and poor or Christian and non-Christian; a similar mindset must be found and this is where it gets trickier.

 

“I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.” 
― Mary Ann Shaffer

This is why a prince can marry a pauper and have a blissful union while another can marry a royal princess and have a troubled home- it is not just about the easily identifiable similarities but the mindset, which is harder to define.

The pauper obviously has the mindset of a princess, even though she was not one.

I know of a situation where the husband doesn’t have a degree or an irrelevant one at best while the wife has her Masters.

The day I found out, I did a slow blink because it was simply unbelievable- they were in the same mental orbit and had incredible coordination.

Their mindset was the mutual attraction obviously.

Don’t be deceived, marrying a mindset may mean marrying what others consider ‘abnormal’- too ugly, too young, too old, physically challenged, too white, too black blah blah blah…

Beauty lies in the ‘mind’ of the beholder- there’s always a beauty and the jerk.

 

Identifying a mindset is like tracking a device or gadget- you hover around an indeterminate area (a school, a church, a social club) until it is traced.

A key factor in possessing similar mindset I have observed is a person’s background.

I have a happily married aunt who once told me that “70% of a successful marriage is a similar background”.

I couldn’t agree more.

One reason is that chances of disagreements over financial expenditure for instance, are minimized.

This is not to say there aren’t exceptions- I sometimes disagree with my sisters’ financial choices as they do with mine but there are standards where we are unmistakably on par.

Like they say, water will always find its level.

There’s this place where the intellects and emotions are amazingly in sync.

It’s like the sound the hammer makes when it hits the gold after digging through uncertainty-clink!

Eureka!