Okay, God initiated the first marriage and sanctified it! The Holy Bible stated that so: “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
In these days of crass materialism, some people marry for prestige or wealth. But, generally, a lot of people tie the nuptial knot because of love. “The need to love and be loved is the simplest of all human wants,” says Charles Galloway. “Man needs love like he needs the sun and the rain. He perishes without it. His basic longing is to be the object of love and to be able to give love. No other need is quite so significant to his nature.”
Love is blind, William Shakespeare said so. “But marriage restores its sight,” Samuel Lichtenberg added. To Beverly Nichols, marriage “is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”
Is this the reason why Filipinos are marrying less and less? The website of the National Statistics Officer reported that in 2003, some 593,553 got married. Three years, the registered marriages went down to 492,666.
Whatever happened? “Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open,” George Bernard Shaw said. Rita Rudner agreed: “I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
During courtship, the lovers are at their best. But once they get married, it’s another story. It means trouble. “Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them,” Ogden Nash said.
Experience is the best teacher, so they say. “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married,” Max Kauffman revealed. “And by then it was too late.” He probably didn’t heed the words of Hollywood actress Zsa Zsa Gabor: “A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.”
A man won’t have so much fun anymore. “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness?” Henny Youngman asked. “It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.”
Women have different views about men. Humorist Helen Rowland thinks: “Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.”
Katharine Hepburn thundered: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married!” To which Barbra Streisand wondered, “Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?” (Trivia: The two Hollywood actresses tied winning the Best Actress Oscar in 1968 when Hepburn was handpicked for her tour de force performance in The Lion In Winter and Streisand for her film debut in Funny Girl.)
Ideas of husbands and wives differ when it comes to their spouse. “Women hope men will change after marriage but they don’t; men hope women won’t change but they do.” That was what Bettina Arndt wrote in 1986’s Private Lives.
Fortunately, there are marriages made in heaven. “Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.” So said Barnett R. Brickner.
“I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy,” American president Lyndon B. Johnson disclosed. “First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.”
Marriage counselor James C. Dobson offers this advice: “Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without.” In 19966’s The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, Mignon McLaughlin wrote: “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
More advices. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility,” George Levinger pointed out. Jerry McCant believes “you can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. Successful marriage demands a certain death to self.”
Remember the movie War of the Roses? Marriage should not be that way. Listen to the advice of Ogden Nash: “To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the loving cup: Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.”
“Chains do not hold a marriage together,” French actress Simone Signoret bared. “It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” Doug Larson is even more direct: “More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.”
In United States and other industrialized countries, divorce is defined as the past tense of marriage. “In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce,” Robert Anderson wrote in Solitaire and Double Solitaire. “The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.”
Finding happiness in marriage? Go ahead! “All marriages are happy,” Raymond Hull declared. “It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.” Nathaniel Hawthorne has this idea: “What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.”
Despite all the differences, the troubles, and the pain of marriage, people still get married. George MacDonald one simple reason: “One of the good things that come of a true marriage is that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.”
For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
In these days of crass materialism, some people marry for prestige or wealth. But, generally, a lot of people tie the nuptial knot because of love. “The need to love and be loved is the simplest of all human wants,” says Charles Galloway. “Man needs love like he needs the sun and the rain. He perishes without it. His basic longing is to be the object of love and to be able to give love. No other need is quite so significant to his nature.”
Love is blind, William Shakespeare said so. “But marriage restores its sight,” Samuel Lichtenberg added. To Beverly Nichols, marriage “is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”
Is this the reason why Filipinos are marrying less and less? The website of the National Statistics Officer reported that in 2003, some 593,553 got married. Three years, the registered marriages went down to 492,666.
Whatever happened? “Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open,” George Bernard Shaw said. Rita Rudner agreed: “I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
During courtship, the lovers are at their best. But once they get married, it’s another story. It means trouble. “Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them,” Ogden Nash said.
Experience is the best teacher, so they say. “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married,” Max Kauffman revealed. “And by then it was too late.” He probably didn’t heed the words of Hollywood actress Zsa Zsa Gabor: “A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.”
A man won’t have so much fun anymore. “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness?” Henny Youngman asked. “It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.”
Women have different views about men. Humorist Helen Rowland thinks: “Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.”
Katharine Hepburn thundered: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married!” To which Barbra Streisand wondered, “Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?” (Trivia: The two Hollywood actresses tied winning the Best Actress Oscar in 1968 when Hepburn was handpicked for her tour de force performance in The Lion In Winter and Streisand for her film debut in Funny Girl.)
Ideas of husbands and wives differ when it comes to their spouse. “Women hope men will change after marriage but they don’t; men hope women won’t change but they do.” That was what Bettina Arndt wrote in 1986’s Private Lives.
Fortunately, there are marriages made in heaven. “Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.” So said Barnett R. Brickner.
“I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy,” American president Lyndon B. Johnson disclosed. “First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.”
Marriage counselor James C. Dobson offers this advice: “Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without.” In 19966’s The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, Mignon McLaughlin wrote: “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
More advices. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility,” George Levinger pointed out. Jerry McCant believes “you can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. Successful marriage demands a certain death to self.”
Remember the movie War of the Roses? Marriage should not be that way. Listen to the advice of Ogden Nash: “To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the loving cup: Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.”
“Chains do not hold a marriage together,” French actress Simone Signoret bared. “It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” Doug Larson is even more direct: “More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.”
In United States and other industrialized countries, divorce is defined as the past tense of marriage. “In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce,” Robert Anderson wrote in Solitaire and Double Solitaire. “The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.”
Finding happiness in marriage? Go ahead! “All marriages are happy,” Raymond Hull declared. “It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.” Nathaniel Hawthorne has this idea: “What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.”
Despite all the differences, the troubles, and the pain of marriage, people still get married. George MacDonald one simple reason: “One of the good things that come of a true marriage is that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.”
For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
