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How to preserve and protect your marriage

(Feedback of readers are at the end of this essay.)

By: Nirmal

Written: March 2003

You have many possessions, like your bank balance, your home, your stocks and bonds. You have to account for these possession on your annual tax return. But you have other possessions also, like your marriage, your friends and your relatives. You also have possessions like your knowledge which may or may not be backed up by degrees and diplomas. And then you have your wisdom which is supposed to increase with your age but is not guaranteed to do so.

In this essay I want to focus on the topic of how to preserve and protect your marriage. If you do not take care to protect your marriage and end up ruining it, it is quite likely that you will enter your old age alone and without any spouse or children to take care of you.

A person who has no spouse or children to take care of him or her in old age is indeed unfortunate. Such a person can find support in God if he or she has faith. But if he has been reading works of atheists all his life, and has little faith in God, then his situation is indeed precarious and old age becomes a heavy burden for him.

Many people are happily married in their early years. Then they make the mistake of starting affairs which in many cases ends up breaking their marriages. In many cases this person with a broken marriage is not fortunate to start a new happy marital life and ends up as a single, divorced parent.

If you are happily married the first thing you ought to do is to realize - and thank God for it- that you are indeed blessed. It does not matter whether your wife is not as beautiful as many women at work or the women you see in the malls. (Remember, beauty is the in the eyes of the beholder.) It does not matter that you husband is not as rich or handsome or successful as many men you work with or you meet at parties. The most important thing for you is that you have a spouse who loves you, and who cares about you and you love him or her.

Now that you are in such a fortunate and blessed situation, you should make sure that you do not fall into the trap of affairs. The simple rule to follow is as follows. Stop socializing with a person of opposite sex especially if that person creates sexual excitement in your heart.

In the modern society, you have no choice but to work with a person of opposite sex, sometimes quite closely and this may often lead to friendships. But friendship with a coworker of opposite sex can only develop if you allow it to develop. If you are conscious of its dangers, you may stop it. The best way is to limit the relationship with a person of opposite sex to work relationship and not allow it to develop into close friendship.

You have a need to have friends. Try to make friends with coworkers of the same sex. This is the best and safest way to have friends.

Now that I have given you my ideas let us see what famous persons have to say on this topic. This is what Swami Vivekananda says:

"A good, chaste wife, who thinks of every other man except her own husband as her child and has the attitude of a mother towards all men, will grow so great in power of her purity that there cannot be a single man, however brutal, who will not breath an atmosphere of holiness in her presence.

Similarly, every husband must look upon all women, except his wife, in the light of his own mother, or daughter or sister. That man again, who wants to be a teacher of religion must look upon every woman as mother, and always behave towards her as such."

(From What is Duty? By Swami Vivekananda, published on www.hindutemplehouston.net, at URL:

http://webtechstore.hypermart.net/nirmal/hws/vedanta/vivekinfo.html)

And Buddha, founder of Buddhism, taught that a man or woman must avoid intimate relationships with a person of opposite sex, who is not spouse.

Read the following quotation from "Buddha, the Word"

"What, now, is Right Action? It is abstaining from killing; abstaining from stealing; abstaining from unlawful sexual intercourse.

There, someone avoids the killing of living beings, and abstains from it. Without stick or sword, conscientious, full of sympathy, he is anxious for the welfare of all living beings. He avoids stealing, and abstains from it; what another person possesses of goods and chattels in the village or in the wood, that he does not take away with thievish intent.

He avoids unlawful sexual intercourse, and abstains from it. He has no intercourse with such persons as are still under the protection of father, mother, brother, sister or relatives, nor with married women, nor female convicts, nor, lastly, with betrothed girls. This is called Right Action."

(Published on CD-ROM, "World Literary Heritage")

The same kind of teaching is contained in the holy books of Christianity and Islam. This is why I have said that there is a common thread linking all the great religions of the world. However, it takes meditation to realize the existence of this common thread. It is easy to fall into the trap of hating other religions and glorifying one’s own.

*** The End ****

Please send your feedback about this essay to the author at nirmalb@hotmail.com.

"Thanks, Nirmal ji; you have been doing great service to the society. GOD bless you to continue and create some impact on innocent /ignorant people. with best wishes, Davendra.

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