A Recipe to Keep Your Marriage Healthy

Back in February, I wrote a post highlighting the importance of accepting your partner for a successful marriage. (You can read it here.) In that post, I also briefly touched on what can be done to make a marriage succeed. I got requests from some readers to elaborate on this topic further, hence this post today.

I am not an expert marriage counselor, but I have personal experience of being happily married for last 33 years. I have also observed closely and learned from my family members. My parents have enjoyed 60+ years of marital bliss, My brothers have clocked 44 and 39 years of marriage respectively and my sister 36 years. Many of my friends have also celebrated their silver jubilee. I will attempt to capture the essence of all this learning and experience into a recipe for healthy marriage.

This recipe includes a set of do and don’ts and early warning signs of trouble that you should not ignore. It is in no way a comprehensive compilation of everything you want to know on this topic, but I will consider my effort fruitful if it acts as a good starting point for you.

The first and the foremost requirement is a change of mindset on a couple of fronts.

• Take active role in keeping your marriage healthy, and not just leave it to chances. It is your life, and you can shape it. Do not let life happen to you, but make it happen the way you want to.
• Take a proactive approach. Try to keep your marriage healthy by nurturing it regularly, and do not wait for trouble to erupt before you act.
• Stop seeing yourself as two individuals living together, and start thinking and behaving as an integrated unit. It is vital that we focus our energies on merger, and give preference to interdependence over independence. Don’t worry, there is plenty of space for individuality in a successful marriage.

The most essential ingredient for a happy marriage is a close bond between the two of you. The strength of this bond between you directly determines the health of your marriage. When you have a strong bond, you can even face major turbulences together and emerge stronger. On the contrary, even small challenges can take you to the brink of separation if you do not have this affinity.

How do I form a strong bond and what do I do to keep it healthy? Fortunately, it is not rocket science. Most of it is everyday common sense. If you just take one small step everyday to build a loving relationship, you would have moved 365 steps ahead in a year.

It is believed that there are four important parts of our being – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. A healthy person needs to keep all four parts in good health. By the same logic, we bond with our spouse in all these parts. My recipe involves being aware of these four parts, and make regular efforts to nurture and strengthen the bond with your spouse in all the four dimensions.

Physical

This is the most visible part of your marital relationship. You live together, share things, set up a home, and over time learn to take care of each other. Sexual relationship is an important part of it, though not everything. With a healthy physical bond, you feel comfortable with each other, feel naturally attracted to your partner, and feel like being one physically. To nurture this dimension, consciously find ways to spend time together – take time to watch a movie together, or go on a dinner date, exercise together if you like, or play a sport.. there are numerous such possible activities. If you keep doing it regularly, you can strengthen the physical bond with your spouse. I know you are thinking now, “This is all OK, but I am too busy to make a career for myself to take time for such recreational activities.” I understand the pressures of modern life. As a minimum, you should make a practice to have dinner together every day and sleep together every night. This is not too much to ask, and it can make a huge difference in your life. The physical dimension also involves taking care of your needs as a family unit; e.g. if the husband loses his job, the wife uses her salary to take care of family expenses.

But we do tend to ignore this basic principle from time to time and it causes deterioration in our physical bond. Look for these early warning signs and take quick action to contain the damage before it is too late:

• You are not living together for more than six months due to job or education related issues. Act before ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ principle kicks in. Make every possible attempt to find a job closer home so that you can live together. In the worst case, if that does not work out, take time to travel periodically to be with your spouse and refresh your relationship.
• You have not gone out together for past three months. Think carefully, any activity may qualify here – a dine out, a movie, shopping, attending a party, etc. If you have not done any outing in recent months, it is time to sit up and correct it. Why not go out to the neighborhood shopping mall this weekend and have some good time together? I know as a wife, you may enjoy shopping more with your female friends, and as a husband, you may be more excited to have a beer with your male friends, and this may be keeping you from being together, but if you see this warning, it is time to force yourself to act.
• You do not share your stuff, and maintain strict separation between ‘his’ things and ‘your’ things. Pay careful attention to your language for next few days. If you habitually use the word ‘our’ more often that ‘your’ or ‘mine’, you can relax. If you find yourself in other category, work gradually on increasing your sharing with your spouse. An extreme red flag may be if the two of you have separate beds or bedrooms. Never go for individual bedrooms irrespective of the size of your house.

Mental

At mental level, a healthy relationship implies that you have respect for each other, can relate to the other at mental level, and can strike a healthy adult–to–adult conversation. (For details, read ‘Games People Play’ by Eric Berne). In fact, when this relationship matures, you may start enjoying such discussions and may eagerly look forward to it. Life presents us with numerous problems and challenges, and we are equipped with mental abilities to deal with it. When we join our mental faculties to solve a problem together as a couple, it multiplies our abilities, and makes our mental bond stronger. Similarly, there are many decisions to be taken on a daily basis, and every time we work together to arrive at a decision, we come closer mentally.

Remember that it is not necessary that the two of you have to think alike or agree on everything. If you find yourself disagreeing, it is good, since it means that you have different ways of looking at the situation. It is common management wisdom that when people with different mindset work together, they can be much more effective. You need to learn how to use synergy so that one plus one equals eleven.

But there are times this aspect of our relationship gets neglected. Look for the following early warnings signs that indicate that you are falling apart in the mental dimension and act immediately:

• One partner takes all decisions. In our male dominated society, it is common that the husband tends to believe himself to be mentally ‘superior’ and takes all the decisions. This is not a healthy practice, and a better way is to discuss and decide together.
• Each of you take own decisions. You may believe that this is better than the above situation, but it is not. It does not give rise to the feeling of being one unit. If you are doing this, try to force yourself to take at least one joint decision and see how it feels.
• You have not talked together on any topic for more than ten minutes for last one month. Take time to sit down and strike a conversation. It can be any topic, but it is important that the two of you talk regularly.

 
Emotional

This is a vital dimension, and most of us can easily relate to it when we think of love. A strong bond of love between the two partners can be the glue that can help keep them together and tide over any crisis in life. We human beings have an inherent need to connect emotionally with others, and a marital relationship provides an excellent way to address the need. We can take our emotional bond to a new high by regularly making small deposits in our ‘emotional bank account’.

If you see any of the following early warning signs in your marriage, it is time for some quick corrective action:

• You no longer feel love towards your spouse. If you face this, think carefully what you can do to come out of it. Remember that love is an action, not just a feeling that happens to you. So, love your spouse, reinforce the message, “I love you” with her every now and then, take every opportunity to express your feelings with little acts of love regularly, and you will find reciprocation, and a warm feeling of love growing inside you.
• You do not trust your spouse. This usually implies that the lack of trust is mutual, and the balance in emotional bank account is low. Work on building trust gradually by emotional deposits. Take time to understand your spouse. Take extra efforts to keep your promises. Be sincere and honest with your partner. Everyone makes mistakes, but be quick to admit your mistake and apologize.

Spiritual

The spiritual dimension relates to the bigger purpose and meaning of life. A good way to develop a stronger spiritual bond is to pray together. This gets you closer spiritually in the initial stages. But at the next level, you want to have a common mission statement for your family. Such a shared vision of future binds you so strongly that no force in the world can take you apart.

What is an early warning sign of a weak spiritual bonds? If the two of you have very different personal mission statements, and do not share a common vision of what you want to do as a family, treat it as the ultimate red flag for your marriage. It may eventually lead to a separation, even if you enjoy a strong bond at physical, mental, and emotional level. What can you do to correct it? Should you give up your dreams or get your spouse to give up her dreams? Such a thing will be unthinkable in modern times. Do pursue your individual dreams, but take time to weave it into a cohesive story of your family ‘dream’ that both of you can relate to. Let us take an example of a film actress marrying a cricket star. They both are ambitious, have their dreams of individual success, but it is important for them to have a shared vision of their family’s future. It is this vision that will keep them together despite all odds.

Look around and observe successful couples around you. You will notice that they all display a good balance in all four dimensions of relationship. They have learned by sheer experience and experiment to nurture a strong bond that keeps them together. They have invariably faced troubled times in one or more dimensions, but managed to tackle it based on the strength in other dimensions and emerged stronger from the encounter.

On the contrary, when a couple takes the unfortunate decision to separate, it is a result of gradual weakening of their bond over time in all four dimensions, till it snaps. If you ask them the reason for the split, very likely they would offer one of the following, can you connect these to the four dimensions we talked above?

• I do not like being with my spouse any more.
• We no longer sit and talk.
• There is no love left between us.
• We do not see any future for the two of us as a family.

We know now how to recognize the weakening of bond and act to reinforce it before it breaks.

Disclaimer: This post does not apply to the cases where domestic violence or dowry issues are the reasons of separation.   

Recharge Your Batteries Daily

We know how important it is to charge our smartphone battery everyday. We depend so heavily on the phone that we dread the situation when the battery runs out and the phone goes dead. Everywhere you can see a familiar sight of people next to a power socket charging their phones. Why don't we watch our own batteries with equal eagerness and recharge them regularly? When it comes to our own well-being, we tend to neglect it to a point that the batteries are about to run out. The most common excuse for this is, "I am too busy right now, will do it next week / month."
It reminds me of the woodcutter, who was working to saw down a tree. He was exhausted from working for hours. Someone noticed that his saw has gone blunt and suggested that he take a break to sharpen the saw. The woodcutter replied, "I don't have time to sharpen the saw, I'm busy sawing!" Are we not a victim of the same syndrome? Why can't we take enough time for improving ourselves on a regular basis so that we are better equipped to tackle the challenges of life? We are sum total of four distinct parts – Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit and we need to continuously charge our batteries in these four areas. You can call them four dimensions of well-being that need to be nurtured to achieve the right balance. If we ignore any one of these aspects, it will affect our happiness adversely.   Let us find out more about what these parts are and how can we take care of them.
Physical well-being relates to our body and health. We need regular exercise, adequate rest, and healthy diet to stay physically fit. If we ignore our health for a prolonged period, it may cause an illness, reducing our capacity to work.
Mental well-being is about knowledge, thinking, and intellect. We need to recharge our mental ability by reading and learning new things. This helps us do the same job with a deeper understanding, and equips us to take on more challenging tasks.
Another important dimension is Emotional well-being, which includes relationships and trust. The work alone cannot give us a happy and satisfied life. We need to invest in close relationships within our family and friend circle for emotional well-being.
The fourth dimension is spiritual well-being, which is about the meaning in life, purpose, values and religion. When we take time to think and discover our mission in life, it can have a truly energizing effect on all areas of our life.

So, every evening when you plug your phone into the charger, remind yourself that you need to charge your own batteries as well. As you go through your day, find opportunities to recharge yourself in any of the four dimensions. This will pave the way to long lasting happiness.

The Four Dimensions of Well Being

Most of my blog posts center around positive thinking or self-improvement. For a change, I wrote a post with tips on managing money. I was amazed to see the overwhelming response on this post. In just a few months, it became the popular post on the blog. My blog aims to provide material to help “charge your batteries”, so this post was somewhat out of place. I am no financial expert either, so I wasn’t sure what was going on here. I thought some more about it, I came up with the following possible answer:

As this picture shows, we are sum total of four distinct parts – Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit and we need to continuously charge our batteries in these four areas. You can call them four dimensions of well-being.

• Physical well-being relates to our body, health, material comforts, and money.
• Mental well-being is about knowledge, thinking, and intellect.
• Social / Emotional well-being includes love, relationships, trust, family, and friends
• Spiritual well-being is about the meaning in life, purpose, values and religion

All the above are vital dimensions and we need to nurture each of them to achieve the right balance. If we ignore any one of these aspects, it will affect our happiness adversely. So far, the physical part was neglected in this blog, as it focused around mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The post on money management addressed this neglected area, and that may be the reason why people liked it so much.

So, I decided that there needs to be a better balance in my blog, hence in future you will see more posts on money and health matters. As a validation of this hypothesis, I came out with a follow up post on how to make money in stock markets, and as expected, it rose to top three posts in just one month. :)

Take Charge of Your Health - Now !

I did not study medical science myself, but I have a deep respect for the discipline. As an engineer, I really marvel at the wonderful advances in this field over the years. What used to be killer diseases of past have been reduced to a curable illness with a simple pill. Vaccines have been developed to prevent many deadly diseases early on. Advance diagnostics methods not only detect the cause of the disease with certainty, but also flag the conditions that may lead to diseases in future with accuracy. Imaging techniques like X-rays, ultrasound, CT-scans, and Angiograpgy enable doctors to see clearly what is going on in our body.

Silent ailments like Diabetes, and Cardiac diseases are easily managed with early detection and care with the help of pathology tests. Development of Genetic science has reached a point that it is about to become the ultimate tool to read your DNA like a book and answer the crucial question – are you susceptible to a certain disease or not?

There have been such unbelievable advances in Medicine, Diagnostics, and Surgery that it sounds like a miracle to a layman. Open heart surgery on a beating heart is similar to replacing a tyre in a running car. My engineering mind can never understand how you can replace parts in a system without shutting it down. But the human body can be shut down only once in its lifetime – and medical science has learned to work with this constraint :)

There is no doubt that this tremendous progress in the medical field has given us the gift of longer life spans. Infant mortality has come down significantly and average life expectancy has gone up. It has become super easy to cure most diseases. Does this mean we are moving towards a disease-free healthy world? The reality seems to be far from it. The more cures we find, the higher incidence of diseases we find around us. Today, our hospitals and clinics are filled with more patients than ever. There is such a shortfall of doctors everywhere that all doctors are super busy treating the patients – living a crazy break-neck schedule every day. New killer diseases show up with alarming regularity – Cancer, Dengue, AIDS, Swine Flu, Ebola, to name a few.

With the increased life span, falling health in old age is a cause of concern for many as the healthcare expenses in the old age are going up. Post retirement finances were already a big worry for the aged, and it has become even bigger now. While it was enough to plan for ten years after retirement in the past, one has to worry about twenty or thirty years now.  The health problems are not limited to the aged population only. We are seeing a trend of early onset (in 40’s) of chronic ailments like Diabetes, Heart diseases, Back and joint pain, etc. To complicate the situation further, the unholy nexus between corrupt doctors, drug companies, and diagnostic labs is driving the cost of treatment further to prohibitive zone for the common man.

The situation is far from healthy and it does not feel that we will be in a disease-free world any time soon. In fact it makes me wonder – “Are we designed by nature to be sick? What is the purpose of widespread diseases? Who is responsible for this sorry state?”

After pondering on this topic for a while, I have a possible answer. It is we who are responsible for our current situation. The root cause of the problem may lie in our attitude and approach towards health. We have left it completely to the doctor to take care of our health. We just want her to give us medicine or do a surgery but do we follow the lifestyle advice given by her? Do we bother to moderate our diet? Do we find time for physical exercises?  On the contrary, we get into junk food, smoking, drinking, and drugs. We constantly live with all kind of stress in our mind. When we fall ill, we expect the doctor to ‘fix’ our health problem quickly with strong medicines and injections. If it turns into a serious illness, we get scared with the thought, "What if I am not cured?" In short, with such powerful medical facilities at our disposal, it is natural that we refuse to accept death as a possible outcome. What is happening here? Are we not trying to live forever?

Clearly, the solution has to be found within ourselves. What can we do about it? Let us pause and think again, "What is more important, More days in life or more life in days?" Let us try to live more, not longer.  Our natural tendency is to stay healthy, and if we remove the obstacles that come in the way of this natural state, we will regain our health and will not have to go to the doctor so often.

By this, I do not mean that we stop going to the doctor when we are sick. We need to learn to take responsibility for our well-being and take positive action to live a happy and healthy life. How can we go about doing it? I have compiled a list of suggestions below that I have found to be very helpful in my own experience.

• Live happy and stress free life. Stress causes or aggravates the majority of diseases in modern times. Learn yoga, meditation, learn to accept things as they come. Stop being in the rat race.
• Cultivate a positive mindset. Look at the bright side of things.
• Find a purpose in life and absorb yourself into it. When you are busy doing something you feel passionate about, it causes a flow of health enhancing juices in our body.
• Exercise regularly. This is the single most important factor for staying healthy.
• Eat healthy food in moderate quantity. Avoid junk food and drinks.
• Have a preventive health check every year; it is just like taking your car for service; if you do not do it, it will break down some day on the road.
• When you fall sick, take advice from the doctor, and co-operate fully with her. Take rest as advised, follow the diet restrictions, and take all medicines as prescribed. Remember, the medicine itself is not the cure; it is just helping your body to fight the disease. You need to provide your body all the support you can in this fight.

You may be asking, “The above suggestions are all fine, but they are just about changing my approach. How can it help me live longer?”  Ironically, when you shift your focus from longevity to living a happy fulfilled life, it automatically improves your general well-being and makes you live longer.

If You want to Stay Healthy..

A positive attitude is necessary in life to keep ourselves happy; but does it play a role in staying healthy as well? We all have seen instances around us of positive people being healthy, but is it just a coincidence? What role can our thoughts have in us getting a viral infection?

According to Rev K Vasudevan, our health largely depends on our emotions. When we respond negatively to people and situations, we set in motion a negative trend in our entire body system.

All our emotions are connected to the endocrine, nervous and immune systems through our thoughts and feelings. If the systems are negatively charged, they set in motion a chain of negative reactions. Hence we need to respond carefully to situations in life.

American journalist Norman Cousins used this to recover from fatal sickness. He was so ill that his doctors gave up on him. To cheer himself up, he rented really humorous movies and began watching them regularly. He noticed that he was able to sleep better, felt less pain, and gradually recovered. He wrote of his experience in the British Medical Journal.

Art Mathias was allergic to hundreds of food items including fiber. The prognosis being bad, and doctors reluctantly gave up on him. One day, he listened to a teaching on forgiveness and simply decided to forgive those who hurt him. He suddenly realized from that day he could eat many foods, to which he was allergic. Even his skin allergies stopped. Behind this phenomenal healing was the major shift he made in his thinking from harboring bitterness to forgive.

For both Norman and Art, the turning point was their attitude towards health and hurts.

We don't always know everything about illness but a recent study says 82 per cent of all physical sickness is caused by emotions. It is extremely wise to respond positively to every crisis and disappointment in life.