Musing...becoming a better me.: MARRIAGE IS LIKE A CELL PHONE GAME

26.04.2012

Playing games on cell phones can become quite addictive, and very quickly too. It can take your time and even become a distraction.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about it and I realized how like those cell phone games a marriage was.

There are different types of games, like LG’s zoozoo club, battle reverse, Nokia’s Bubblet, Beach Rally, etc. For different games, there are different techniques and different instructions.

This is the same for marriages too. Every marriage has its own unique set of instructions and techniques.

The background and orientation of each party is different and so are their personalities and values.

Therefore, one should not expect a strong willed man from an affluent background and a loving family to act in the same way as a strong willed man from a lower-income background and a broken home.

Each of us comes into marriage with our unique characteristics, likes and dislikes.

To excel in marriage, we would therefore, need to study and understand the unique characteristics of one another as partners.

When you want to play a cell phone game, the first thing you do is … read the instructions.

We may not understand it fully but at least, we get an idea of how to proceed. We may make mistakes along the way but we can always seek help and navigate back to the right lane.

This is the novice stage where mistakes abound and high scores could be rare.

In marriage, we also have this stage where we rub each other the wrong way more often.

Studying our uniqueness in marriage means that we not only can understand ourselves better, but that we can also deal with the challenges whenever we encounter them.

In my experience, you do not become an expert or start excelling in a game immediately you start playing it. As you continue playing regularly, you find yourself getting better and better. The more you play, the more you enjoy playing and the higher your scores.

If you give up, you will never improve your game or get good at it.

The more you play, the more you discover better ways of playing and improving your scores.

In marriage, the more willing you are to work at it, the faster you improve on your relationship building/problem solving techniques and the better your marriage relationship gets.

If you give up your game too early, you will never get the hang of it. And too early means different time spans for different people; it depends on the personalities and orientations/backgrounds of each individual.

In fact, giving up means you will never know how good you would have been in the game.

The longer you play, the better you play and the better you play, the better your results get.

To stay in the game for as long as it will take for you to do well in it takes determination and a form of willpower, but without it, there can be no success.

As in the game, the harder and more determined you are to work at your marriage with the attendant positive results, the more you will enjoy your marriage relationship.

Your victories may be little and not even often enough, but hang in there, whether in the game or in your marriage and soon enough, you will become an expert!

ex·pert

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