A lot of surveys have shown that many couples do not exercise patience in their married life because they fail to understand that marriage is a life long event. Their impatience often times lead them to divorce which is a terrible thing to happen to a couple. Spouses should not live as though marriage is a job they would resign or retire from after a short while. The following are the basic requirements for a successful relationship between a husband and a wife.
1) LISTENING. Listening is the key to communication. Listening to your spouse makes him or her feel that he or she is cared for. It also makes the spouses to understand the unspoken messages. If a husband does not listen to his wife and his wife does not listen to him how can they listen to their children?
2) COMMUNICATION. This helps couples to promote close relationship between themselves. Daily communication is the honest sharing of innermost feelings with your spouse so that two of you will reach out to feel each others feelings and mutually experience each other as he or she is. Communication brings about the following: understanding, unity and closeness between couples. It helps in making a husband known to his wife and vice versa by words, gestures or bodily expressions such as embrace, look, tone etc.
3) LOVE. Different people have different views about love. We have eros love which is concerned about animals. It is the one animals have about themselves. We have philia love which is required in the family between parents and children and relatives. We have agape which is the christian love the emphasized by Jesus Christ. It IS LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I LOVE YOU. The type of love that should exist between husband and wife should be unconditional one.
4) OPENNESS AND SINCERITY. This makes a couple always ready to explain their ideas, their real feelings and plans about each other. It helps them to show themselves the way they are.
5) FORGIVENESS. Couples should always acknowledge their guilt and therefore try to forgive each other because forgiveness is very important for a very happy and stable marriage. When couples fails to forgive each other, their love starts waning together with the happiness existing between them. They should always learn to say I AM SORRY WHENEVER THEY WRONG EACH OTHER. There is nothing as soothing as I am sorry.
6) SOLID PREPARATION BEFORE MARRIAGE. Human beings have developmental tasks from childhood to adulthood. For this reason, they need to have those basic things that will make the marriage stand such as education, reliable jobs, accommodation etc.
Though no marriage is perfect, with those basic things stated and discussed above applied marriages will be enjoyed by couples not endured as it happens to so many families in Africa where polygamy is practiced especially.
