Excerpts from Gettin’ Married

Getting married can be the most exciting time in your life. Every since you were a little girl, you played house imagining the kind of man you would marry; how many children you were going to have; and what kind of home you were going to make. I know you remember playing house—going through all the motions of a day in your happily-ever-after-life. Remember how good you felt dressing your baby dolls, cleaning your home, and kissing your pretend—well-paid, handsome husband. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is a whole lot more to consider in creating this happy home. So, brace yourself. What I am going to share with you will better prepare you to create the home life of your dreams.
Now, I know you’re saying, “that’s old school dreaming, Dr. Nixon.” Okay, let’s make your plan a bit more contemporary. Instead, you a professional woman—attorney, doctor, or business owner. Your professional—make-believe—husband is a strong, well groomed, very handsome, physically fit, child-free, disease-free and equal partner. How’s that? And even if neither of these scenarios fit your dream, you have one. And more than likely that dream is equally as euphoric as the ones that I painted. You know why? Because in the paradigm of marriage, it’s always a very beautiful dream. And honesty, we women are the ones dreaming the dream. Men tend to be very well grounded about what the commitment of marriage is really about. But somehow we women don’t seem to get the reality of marriage. Now understand me, this is not an accident: TV, magazines, movies, romance books, mass media, institutionalized religion all have done an outstanding job of selling us the dream. And because it feels good to our left brains, we buy into it without reading the very, very fine print. So we don’t get the message about what we have to sacrifice to be in that glorious number of the married ones. The most realistic education are the usual disclaimers: “no relationship’s perfect,” or “everybody has problems.” Well, allow me to break both of those ideas down just a bit more. Both statements are true, but if we do just a little more homework, we’ll discover that there is possibly a winning scenario in it for us. But it comes with a price; we may have to walk away from a relationship, or we’ll have to ask some very hard questions of what seemed like a good prospect, who may decide to walk away from us.

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