With all the excitement of the Royal Wedding at the end of this month, people are focused on marriage.  The average bride is now 30, and the typical groom is just past his 32^nd birthday.  The modern couple is older and wiser; they know who they are, they know what they want and they know each other as well as they can.  That’s the idea anyway.  Yet, 54 years ago my own parents married at the ages of 34 and 30 so is it modern or were they before their time?

Many people believe that this age is the “right” way and they use divorce stats to verify their argument.

 

Yet I married at 21 and believe that if you marry young, you marry baggage-free, full of hope and blissfully ignorant.  It’s all very well spending years weighing up each other’s potential, but the long relationship test-drive is the opposite of romance and trust.

We live in a culture that encourages young people to fear all the big stuff – what if it goes wrong?  How will you afford it?  Burden of responsibility…. And as a result nobody wants to do anything, let alone marry. 

Marriage might be the most important decision of your life, nonetheless you can if you’re not careful take it far too seriously.  Some choices have to be instinctive.  You don’t have to be in your thirties to cope with the big life challenges.

I say get married when you are your most resilient and optimistic.  There’s no guarantee it’ll work, but at least you’ll have an amazing experience of being on a huge learning curve.

When there are problems within a marriage and it nearly falls apart, this is when people open their eyes to their self-defeating behaviours and gives them an opportunity to resolve those problems

But unless they understand the unconscious desires that motivated their dysfunctional behaviour in the first place and they choose to divorce, they will only repeat them again with their next partner.

I have come to believe that couples should make every effort to honour their wedding vows, not just for moral reasons, but for psychological ones; fidelity and commitment appear to be conditions dictated by the unconscious mind.