The Successful Marriage Handbook

PREFACE

From the beginning of time man and women have been different.

It was Eve who was curious, imaginative, exciting and daring while Adam remained loyal, steadfast and some would say dull. The roles that developed, because of their environment, as aggressive defenders of their family, hunter gatherers, providers and the bearing and nurturers of children only brought about additional traits to their personalities and built up and reinforced these differences.

Some men, who look only upon the physical, say, “long live the difference.” Most men try to understand these diversities in their beautiful companion but are confused by their thought processes, their expectations of their mate as a mind reader, the confusing manner in which they act towards them, and certain aspects of their environment. Because of this and because most men need to pigeon hole everyone and everything so they can identify everything quickly and clearly, they react and treat them either as fools or some mysterious, weird and sometimes inferior, species they need to tread carefully around.

This has developed a complex in many women to the extent they consider, with some justification, that some men look upon and treat them as second class persons or as sex objects.

Generally speaking, throughout all history it has been the nature of most humans, if they were comfortable with it, to act out or live the roles they have been assigned by their peers or family. In the past, where sensitivity has been, mostly because of circumstance, non-existent or denied so as to make life as secure as possible, mothers accepted and taught this way of life to their children.

As civilization progressed and as many women gained confidence and freedoms, they have asserted themselves to the extent that many pushed the envelope to the other extreme. They wish to be recognised and treated like men.

They have tried to become and act so much like man, to the degree that many men do not know what role they are supposed to act out. Even some women are confused and they shift from one role to the other, as they consider the situation warrants, only adding to the confusion of the steadfast man.

Hey! I’m not saying it is the woman’s fault entirely! Men must share the blame, if any is to be given. Just as many men court Rachel but wake up married to Lea, many women believe they were courted by David and ended up married to that selfish and egotistical Samson. No one is perfect.

I personally, do not think any blame can be given. I believe this is just the cut and thrust of our changing civilization, attempting to establish harmony, as it moves further and further away from what it was originally planned to become.

Marriage, in the past, had always appeared to be the safe harbour in which to raise children and fulfil every basic need for the development of every member of that family. At the time of writing, the basic unit of all civilization and even many of the larger animals, is still the family of a mother and father and children. Today, with disrespect towards this basic unit shown by many governments through supporting and sustaining homosexual and defacto relationships, child care centres, paid maternity leave and not making a firm stand on many other community moral issues of abortion, children’s rights etc., marriage as an institution of importance, between a man and a woman, is only being given token service. Acts, laws and bills are passed most of which have taken away from the parents their authority and tend to fragment the family unit to the extent that it has not been able to live up to its real purpose and its accomplishments of the past. It has been said that governments are a reflection of the community attitudes. I believe the jury is still out on that statement.

There seems to have developed an ethos among governments and the powers that be, that all the proven institutions that have been shown to be the backbone of our civilization thus far have to be ‘improved’ by change. Marriage, Religion, morality, financial management and many other standards of the past have to be changed to suit, so called modern times. ‘Everyone’ seems to be saying families are not as strong or as united today; I wonder why?

We today, and other past societies, never seem to learn from the experiences recorded in history.

If we study every past civilization, most of which have disappeared, where records have been uncovered, it is easy to discover that the fall of that society was because unrighteous leaders or the powers that be, had influence in controlling or governing sections of that society. They allowed the moral standards of all the basic institutions that cemented that civilization into a strong force, to be lowered or become non-existent and finally those civilisations collapsed.