10 REAL Promises Every Guy Should Make To His Future Spouse

Sadly, marriage has lost much of its meaning in today’s society.

Growing up in a household where my parents have been together over 35 years and my grandparents over 60 years, I was always under the impression that marriage meant forever. It is a pledge, a promise, a commitment to another human being to be there for them (and with them) through thick and thin. To be their teammate and their partner in love and in life.

Unfortunately, these days, “Until death do us part” has become “until I get bored of you,” or “until times get rough.”

A big part of this problem is that people are not fully aware of what it really takes to commit to a marriage. They are rushing love getting engaged (or pregnant) before they really know someone, and before you know it, a few years have gone by and the divorce lawyers are collecting another pay day.

So, if and when we are going to make this important commitment to the person we love, what exactly is it that we need to be able to promise them for the future?

1. "I promise to stick by you through tough times"

I’m starting off with an important one. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: anyone can stand by your side during the sunny days. The real test of character is whether or not they will hold the umbrella over you during the stormy days.

When making a lifelong commitment to someone, you are committing to being there for them “in sickness and in health.” Sickness may not be a common cold. It may be a large, life-altering challenge. It may be the sickness of a family member. Maybe your own sickness. It may not necessarily be a literal health challenge, but perhaps a rough patch in life that tests your commitment and love. You are not pledging to be a fair weather spouse and only be there when times are good. You are pledging to be there always.

2. “I promise to always make us a priority.”

Yes, strive for success. Yes, go for that promotion at work. Yes, hustle to take your business to the next level. But be very careful not to destroy your relationship through neglect in the process. Before you were a CEO or a high-powered attorney or a doctor, you were a man or woman who fell in love. You are a human being who is intimately and emotionally connected to another human being.

Even the greatest accomplishments in life lose their meaning when we have lost the person we always wanted to share them with. The key is to find a balance. To build off of your relationship as a foundation. To appreciate your teammate as part of your success as he or she supports you along the way. Letting the scales tip too far in either direction will only lead to disaster.

3. “I promise will never let you forget how much i Love you”

As an extension of the previous point, sometimes life gets crazy and we lose sight of things by accident. One of these things can easily be letting our significant other know how much he or she means to us daily. One of the biggest problems in long-term relationships is lack of gratitude. When someone feels taken for granted it can easily breed resentment and a whole slew of other problems that will eat away at your foundation.

You’ll know you’ve found the right partner when they keep showing you how much you mean to them, long after they’ve already committed to you.

4. “I promise I will not lose my identity.”

In any happy, healthy relationship, it is important that the two individuals who are together still remain two individuals. Of course your lives are combined into one and you have become “us,” but if either partner begins to lose sight of their hopes, dreams, hobbies, or whatever makes them them, it can bring about a deep dissatisfaction that could be projected onto the relationship.

This is another reason why self-development is so important as well as personal growth. We need to be sure to not only grow as a couple, but also as individuals alongside each other.

5. “I promise to keep things exciting.”

A step beyond consistently reminding someone you love them is literally taking action to keep the spark alive. Spontaneous candle-lit dinners, a bath running when they get home from work, a weekend getaway for no reason.

When we start a fire, we cannot walk out of the room and expect it to keep burning forever. We need to continue to add logs to it and to stoke it. If we keep doing that, it will never go out. The problems arise when we stop giving it the attention it requires in order to continue burning.

Always keep stoking your fire.

6. “I promise I will do my best for our children.”

I don’t have kids, so I can’t speak to the obviously large challenges that come along with it. But what I can do is appreciate the importance of making them a priority in your life and doing everything you can to love, teach, and raise them into adults you can be proud of.

You can read all of the books you want, talk to all of the parents you meet, and be as prepared as anyone could be — but there will inevitably be endless unique challenges that every set of parents face. When you make the promise to your husband or wife that you will do the best you can and figure it out together along the way, that’s exactly what happens.

7. “I promise I will accept and love you fully.”

We all have flaws. We all have insecurities. We all have things we want to change about ourselves. We cannot expect to like every single little thing about our spouse but what we DO need to promise is that we accept all of their traits and love them to their very core, just the same.

8. “I promise I do not love you for your beauty.”

Yes, of course you should love someone’s beauty. Yes, of course you should be physically attracted to the person you are with. Yes, of course you should love making love to them. But all of these things are very different than loving someone for their beauty.

My mother and grandmother always said to never fall in love with someone for their hair, teeth, looks, or money because they can lose all of it. When marriage and true love is part of the conversation, all of these things take a back seat to who this person is at their very core. Who they would be if everything that made them beautiful got taken away. If it did, would you still love the person underneath it all?

9. “I promise I will not let myself go.”

Is this a contradiction to the previous point? I think not. There is an important distinction to be made between someone who reaches old age and someone who figures, “Hey, I’m married now, I can stop trying.” Of course bodies and appearance change as we age, but the point here is to not become a giant lump on the couch just because you’ve gotten yourself a husband or wife.

It is important we continue to live a healthy lifestyle. To eat right. To take care of the only body we have in this life. To show the man or woman you love that you will still put in effort for them and not become too comfortable. Just because you’re in a long-term committed relationship does not mean that your partner deserves a lesser version of you.

10. “I promise I am in this until the end.”

Scary, isn’t it? The rest of your life. Death. Possible illness. Forever. Hell yes, it’s scary. It scares the living daylights out of me, to be honest. I don’t want to get old — ever. I’m watching my grandparents age and it kills me to think that we’re all looking out into the same future. It’s not romantic or glamorous or beautiful. And for them, they still have each other.

But it is reality. It is love. It is commitment. And it is marriage.

When you pledge the rest of your life to someone that is exactly what you’re doing. I think this is so far outside of our realities that it’s almost not an actual promise we feel like we are making. 50, 60, 70 years down the road? Who knows what the future will bring, anyway? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

When you marry someone, though, you are making the promise that you will be crossing any bridges you reach together. You will do it whether you are walking side by side holding hands, or whether one of you is pushing the other in a wheelchair. You will cross each bridge you find along your journey with the quiet confidence that your partner is going to be stepping onto the other side with you.

How can you be sure they will be there?

Because they promised you.
#JamesMichaelSama. goodmenproject.

The Divine Order to Marriage

"Don't get it twisted, Marriage is ordained."
God’s design for marriage

In Genesis we read:

And the Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." . . . So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, He took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib (side) he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. (Gen 2:18, 21 22)
Why did God do it that way? 

Happy couples

Why create one being and then take a part of that being and create a second, differentiated yet complementary being who is "bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh," a being who is sexually, emotionally and in other ways different, yet of his own substance? Upon seeing her, Adam could have observed, "It's me . . . but not me." Well, if you think about it, it does sound like the kind of thing you might expect a Trinity to do.

The Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is a family, and thus man in God's image must be made a family as well. 
Therefore, a man cannot completely realize the essence of his existence until he learns to exist with someone and for someone. Both relationship and communion are crucial to this process.

And so we see from Genesis 1 and 2 that God created woman from the side of man so that the man would not be alone. From the teaching of the New Testament, saints have since discovered that He also created the Church from the side of the second Adam—Christ—for the same reason—for intimate fellowship.

Back in the Genesis account, we note that the newly created Eve was Adam — his very flesh and bone, and for that reason, the Bible says, Adam called her woman, and, for that reason a man is to leave mother and father and be united to his wife to become one flesh (v24).

For what reason is man to marry a wife? Because woman was originally a constituent part of man, she must return to become one with him again, so that the full expression and design of God's image in human beings can be revealed.

Here we have another parallel between the Old Testament type and the New Testament fulfilment. Eve was to reunite with her source and become one with him—just as we are with Christ, as He prayed in John 17. Sexuality, therefore, is a prefigurement of the intimate relationship that God desires to have with man. In fact, the marital union and covenant, in all its dimensions, is meant to gloriously reveal the very image of God in ways that we can only begin to understand.

Ah, but there's more to this mystery than can be seen on the surface. The union of a man and a woman in Holy Matrimony is not literally the permanent recombining of two bodies into one. This is mystery that reaches depths of meaning beyond what our present intellectual capacity can grasp.

Clearly however, what woman is as a part of man is not tied to individuated pieces of flesh and bone, but is far broader and more profound than that. She is the necessary compliment to him that together reveals the glory of the image of God in humanity. Her parts and his parts each have their own order and function. Together and rightly ordered, their united differences ignite the power and glory of creation itself, which is the consummate activity of God from the beginning.

So God does a two stage creation of man. First he makes the full orbed being (Adam, which in the Hebrew means, mankind). Then in phase two, God removes woman from Adam's side and makes Eve a separate being, though of Adam's substance, designed to ultimately reunite to her source through the mystery of Holy Matrimony.

And the spark, the power of that union is meant to gloriously reveal the very image of God to angels and archangels and all the company of heaven and earth. That is why Satan fights tooth and nail to pervert and distort rightly ordered human sexuality, holy matrimony, the family, and fatherhood in particular.

In fact, the amount of time and effort that Satan expends to destroy the image of God reflected in marriage, fatherhood and human sexuality is a barometer of just how incredibly important it is to God's plan and the expression of His glory.

Beloved, there is a profound and awesome reason for the way God ordered the creation of man—one that is commented on throughout Scripture, and one that we must observe if we are to find the fulfillment of our very being as humans. It is ordered as the union of a man and a woman in marriage—heterosexual and monogamous—an order that Jesus unambiguously reaffirmed in Matthew.
By Focus on The Family.

5 practices you need to learn before you say 'I do'

Happy marriages don't happen by accident; they take work. Practice these healthy habits now to make your future marriage strong.

Before you get married you may say or think, "when I get married I will (such and such)," or "I'll never do (such and such) when I'm married!" But are you doing or not doing those things now?

They way you act, treat your significant other and how you spend your time is a pretty good representation of what you will be like after you are married ... unless you make some positive changes now.

Lasting, healthy and happy marriages require work, with both spouses working together. "[S]tarting healthy habits before marriage can mean the difference between a marriage that thrives and lasts and a marriage that crumbles and ends in divorce. Cultivating healthy habits builds a strong foundation so that when issues come up, both individuals are more skilled at resolving them in a respectful and considerate manner.

Work on these practices now, regardless of your relationship status:

• Communicate

Whether you are hurt and angry, happy and excited or frustrated and annoyed, it's necessary to establish healthy lines of communication. You need to be able to discuss important topics with your partner. If you can't communicate with respect, love and with intent to understand, you will carry the same struggle into your marriage. Communication clears up misunderstandings and miscommunications, which can lead to marital problems. Establish healthy communication practices now.

• Put your significant other first

In a marriage, nothing should be more important than your spouse. Practicing this before you get married will make it easier to do after you are married. Your marriage and your companion should be your first priority before friends, work or other aspects of life.

• Take some time to do what you enjoy

In healthy relationships, you need to have some time to yourself. Hang out with friends, play sports or do other things you enjoy. Don't be excessive with your free time to the point that your girlfriend or boyfriend is not a priority, but find a healthy balance. You bring your individual experiences into your relationship, which helps to enrich it.

• Forgive and apologize

If you are not willing to learn how to forgive and say sorry when you have hurt or wronged someone, your relationships will suffer. Everyone has regrets about something they have said or done, which often hurts another person. We must be willing to let go of pride and genuinely apologize. Even if you don't think you did something wrong, you may have inadvertently hurt your spouse. You also must be willing to forgive in your relationships and be willing to let go of negative feelings, rather than harboring resentment. Strong marriages rely on forgiving and apologizing often.

• Even when life is busy, make time for each other

This kind of goes back to making your partner a priority. Even if you have busy weeks or months, you should make it a point to ask how your significant other is doing. Make a quick call or send a text message. Schedule regular date nights. These are equally, if not more so, important after you get married. If you can't make the time before you get married to connect, you sure won't be able to keep it up after — when the demands of work, children, house care and other things demand your time.

Starting healthy relationship practices now will make it easier after you're married to the love of your life. Working on it now will help you form habits you can bring to your marriage — even if you end up marrying someone different from who you are dating right now. Strong and happy marriages are built on good communication, putting your spouse first in life, forgiveness and apologies and making time for one another.