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15 Things to start today to make your marriage work




Here is a list of 15 things which, if you give up on them, will make your married life a lot easier and a lot happier. We hold on to so many things that cause a great deal of stress and frustration in our relationships – and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing our relationships to flourish and blossom – we cling on to them. Not anymore. Starting today you will give up on all those things that no longer serve you, and you will embrace change. Starting today you will make your marriage work. 

Ready? Here we go:

1. Give up your unrealistic expectations
Give up all your unrealistic expectation about marriage being this beautiful box full of all the things you have always longed for and see marriage for what it truly is – an empty box where you and your partner MUST put all the things you want to take out. Accept that if you want to have love in your marriage, you have to put it there. If you want to have happiness, passion, intimacy, companionship, trust in your marriage, you have to put it there. Relationships take work, a lot of work and if you want to live a happy, beautiful and loving life next to your partner, you will both commit to making your marriage work. Always remember, relationships don’t work unless you do.

2. Give up control
People are made to be loved, not controlled. The more you try to control your partner, the more you will push him or her away from you and the less love there will be left between you two. Give up control and allow the ONE you love to just be. Allow the person you love to be who they are and not who you want them to be.  

3. Give up possessiveness
No matter how long you two have been together and no matter if you are married and have 10 children together or not, you do not possess your partner. He/she is not your propriety. You both are two separate entities and just as you are separate from him, so is she separate from you. Give up possessiveness and allow your partner to breathe. Give him/ her space and freedom they truly deserve and watch how much more beautiful your relationship becomes.

4. Give up criticism
Give up the need to criticize every little thing your partner does or doesn’t do and instead start appreciating those many things that made you fall in love with this person in the first place. Seek to praise not to criticize. Keep in mind that you attract more bees with honey than you do with vinegar.

“Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection.” ~ Billy Corgan

5. Give up the need to fix your partner
Relationships aren’t about fixing one another, relationships are about loving, caring and supporting one another. You might think it’s your responsibility to “save” and “fix” your partner but trust me, that’s not really the case. Give up the need to fix your partner and work on growing, improving and evolving together instead.

“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.” ~ Albert Einstein

6. Give up your jealous behavior
”A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The root cause of jealousy is insecurity. Work on letting go of your insecurities and you will immediately understand the futility of a jealous behavior. You will immediately give jealousy up. 

7. Give up on your fears
Give up the fear of cheating on one another, the fear of falling out of love, the fear of having your present relationship become as toxic as the previous ones and so on. Get out of your fearful head and into your loving heart. Give up on all your fears and love with all your heart. 

“Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love.” ~ A Course In Miracles



8. Give up the chase for perfection
What screws us up the most is this idea we have in our heads about how relationships should be like and how our partners should behave. Instead of savoring, loving and praising one another, nurturing the relationships we have, we waste our precious time and energy seeking perfection, in ourselves, in our partner There’s no such thing as perfect relationships simply because there’s no such thing as perfect people. Your marriage is and always will be a reflection of who and your partner are – two perfectly imperfect people.

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.” ~ Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

9. Give up on blame
Believe it or not, it’s not the other person’s job to make you feel all the things that you yourself can’t feel on your own. It’s not the other person’s job to make you feel loved, happy and whole when you yourself feel unworthy, unhappy and incomplete. That’s not their job, that’s your job. Give up the need to blame your partner for everything that goes wrong in your world, for why you aren’t feeling as loved and as happy as you would like to feel and start taking ownership of your own thoughts and feelings.

“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.” ~ Esther Hicks

10. Give up the need to always be right
Remember when you and your partner first started dating? Remember how beautiful and how lovingly you spoke to one another? Back then you didn’t care whether you were right all the time or not. All that you cared about was to make the other person feel loved, appreciated and happy. So why change now? Give up the need to always be right and choose to be kind, loving and supportive instead. 

“Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don’t want to hurt one another’s feelings, and they don’t try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another.” ~ Frank Pittman

11. Give up living your life according to the other person’s expectations
It’s true that relationships require compromise but when you compromise too often, living your life according to the other person’s expectations, you risk losing yourself and that’s how you start feeling bitter, depleted, frustrated and very unhappy. Don’t lose the “I” in playing the “We” game. Compromise when needed but not so much that you lose your sense of self. Balance is key.

“The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.” ~ Mignon McLauglin

12. Give up your clingy behavior
There’s nothing less attractive than a person who clings onto his/her partner expecting the other person to provide all their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs. Take the “pressure” off of your partner’s shoulders and put it on your shoulders instead. Seek to become the provider of your own their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs. Be the source of your own happiness.

“You have so little faith in yourself because you are unwilling to accept the fact that perfect love is in you, and so you seek without for what you cannot find within.” ~ A Course In Miracles

13. Give up asking for more than you give
“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something. They’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.” ~ Anthony Robbins
If you enter a relationship expecting to get a lot more than you give, chances are that you will have many marriage regrets. The only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. Give more, ask less.

14. Give up your emotional baggage
Make peace with your past. Make peace with your “stuff”. Don’t carry the heavy weights of your past with you into the present. If you want to build a happy, loving and healthy relationship, you have to start fresh, you have to leave your emotional baggage behind.
“The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. What is grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.” ~ Lao Tzu

15. Give up attachment
There is a huge difference between love and attachment and what most people call “love” is nothing more than attachment. Attachment comes from a place of fear, while love is pure, kind, and selfless. Love is ready to detach and let go if the relationship between two people becomes toxic and detrimental to the healthy growth and evolution of both parties. Attachment, on the other hand, loves to hold onto toxicity, feeding itself with the pain and suffering of people.

Deepak Chopra says it best with these words: “Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you. Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires. Love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand – “Make me feel whole.” Love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people.”

And these are the 15 things you should give up to make not only marriage work but also any romantic relationship.

P.S. It’s very important to understand that some people, no matter how much they love one another and no matter how much they want to make their marriage work, might not be able to do so simply because they both learned the lessons they had to learn and now life calls them in different directions. To paraphrase Elizabeth Gilbert, soul mates, they might come into your life to reveal another layer of yourself to you, to help you see a part of you that you did not know was there, but when the work is done, they will leave, making room for something new, for something better to come your way.

This is why it’s so important to listen to your heart and intuition and make sure that you don’t stay in a relationship that makes you feel dead on the inside simply because that’s what society and everyone around you expect you to do. Your peace of mind, health, happiness, and well-being are more important than anything else. So stay happy!

“The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make – not just on your wedding day, but over and over again – and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife.” ~ Barbara De Angelis













10 ways you can save over $30,000 on your wedding




How to cut 27K from your wedding expenses and still make it the party of the year
Weddings are infamous for the price tag that is attached to them. A lot of the cost is dependent on what the wedding industry sprinkles into your mind with magazines and advertising to make you think you need all of these things to have the perfect day. But if you take a step back and break down what you really want, you can easily find ways to plan the party of a lifetime without spending thousands of dollars that you, or your family, don’t really have.

1. Abbreviate your cocktail hour
Instead of splurging on passed apps, cut cocktail hour down from an hour to 30 minutes and only offer one or two things for guests to munch on. You can even cut down on the alcohol options here so that you’re not paying for an extra hour of open bar.

Approximate savings: $2,500

2. Skip the pre-wedding parties
It may not seem like an obvious, but paying for an engagement party and even sometimes your own bridal shower is something you’ll need to add to your wedding budget. These parties alone can be a few thousand bucks, so skip them and pour that extra cash into your big night.

Approximate savings: $3,200

3. Don’t use wedding vendors
Vendors always seem to charge more when they know they are providing a service for a wedding. So instead of searching for wedding DJ’s or photographers, just look up vendors in generals who work all different kinds of parties.

Approximate savings: $1,500

4. Browse the clearance racks
It may seem like a dream to spot your wedding dress on the rack of some tiny designer boutique store in a fancy city like Paris or New York. But you can save a ton of cash if you buy your dress from a wedding dress sample sale or even buy it used. You’ll be wearing the thing for only eight hours, so it’s OK to get something that’s second-hand.

Approximate savings: $2,500


5. Go digital
Paper will cost you a lot of paper! So shake your head at doing traditional wedding save-the-dates and invitations that you stick in the mail and instead go digital. Create your invites online and send them via email. You’ll save your guests paper cuts and you’ll save your money so you can use it on more important things, like a week-long honeymoon to Thailand.

Approximate savings: $2,000

6. Never say "yes" right away
Even if you find yourself sitting in front of a vendor who promises you they’ll help make your wedding one for the record books, never sign on the dotted line until you negotiate. Look over the contract and make sure everything you want is included in the price and then bargain with them to get them to shave off a couple of hundred or even a thousand bucks if you can.

Approximate savings: $1,500

7. Skip the frills
Trust me, nobody remembers what you had custom-printed on your napkins or whether or how many different kinds of flowers you used for your centerpieces. So skip the expensive frills and small details and splurge on what matters the most — good food and music.

Approximate savings: $450

8. Swap the flowers for something else
Flowers are a waste, and an expensive one at that. Instead of using them for bouquets and centerpieces, go with something more creative or homemade that you can pull off with a trip or two to the craft store — and of course, a step-by-step manual from Pinterest.

Approximate savings: $4,200

9. Close your open bar
Not for the whole night. No way! Keep it open for most of the night. But don’t pay for an open bar for the last few hours of your reception. By then, most people will have had enough to drink and if they want more, they can shell out their own cash to pay for it. Limit the number of hours the bar is open, and you’ll save big.

Approximate savings: $1,150

10. Pick an off-season date
Get married on a Friday or Sunday or during an off-season month at your venue or in your city. Picking a popular date to get married will up your costs for not only your venue, but also every single vendor you try to book.

Approximate savings: $8,000


Numbers are based on average costs in wedding contracts I've seen and dealt with.