Cultivating delight

I was recently thinking that the question of marital success is completely subjective and dependent on what the marriage partners feel. If they both feel like it’s working, then it’s working! Conversely if either party, or both, feel like it is not working, then it is not working. If it is subjective, then you could do everything, and the other person could still say “I don’t feel like it is working.” Realising that made me ponder for a moment, and then this occurred to me: [that] what most people want to feel in their marriages is delight. Most marriages will have their challenges, everyone knows that and often these will be life challenges rather than truly marriage challenges, but they will often still be big enough to influence your marriage.. However, if your marriage averages out to delight for each partner, then on the whole that is a successful marriage and crucially both partners would agree. I believe that if the marriage substantially deviates from a baseline of delight, then the survival of the marriage will depend on the tenacity of the partners. Some people would go through literally anything to preserve their marriage. However, while I truly care about my marriage, I am not one of those people. This is why I am sitting here and analysing what I will need to insist on from my husband for ongoing joy and delight.

For me, a huge thief of joy which I am always complaining about is having to deal with people’s poor character. (Pooe(y)?! – typo!)
I am going to leave this post just now. However, my main point is that in marriage there will be so many challenges and frustrations. However a mutual goal should be to try to outweight and drown out all the frustrations with so much delight so that on balance even taking into account all the frustrations your marriage is a place of phenomenal delight for you both. Any deviation from delight would count as marital dissatisfaction.