IF YOU are considering marriage as a way of fixing some problem which you are having, you are looking at life the wrong way, says counselling psychologist, Mrs. Yvonne Foster who recently made the presentation on 'Can Marriage Fix Anything?' at the Victoria Mutual Building Society 19th Marriage and The Family Seminar series in Kingston.
The first problem, she states, that some wanna-be-marrieds come across, is the matter of who they are.
"You might be looking for Mr. Right or Mrs. Right, but are you right?" this counsellor asks.
Rightly, the search for rightness ought to begin with you. Rightness, says Yvonne Foster, involves knowing yourself and developing yourself. Mr. or Mrs. Right will have identified and accepted in-born talents. "Everybody does get a talent. Some of us get more than one," she comments.
Weaknesses
The ready-to-be-married should also ask themselves: "Have we loved our neighbours as ourselves? Have we lived honest and decent lives? Have we recognised our weaknesses? And all of us have those too. And have we try to correct those weaknesses. Because unless we do, we are not the right person to be looking for the right person," says the counselling psychologist.
Otherwise, "the right person will get a wrong person. And that's not fair."
Another mistake that wanna-be-marrieds make is that marriage will fix them if they are not fulfilled as a single person.
Many single person, says Foster, go around thinking "You know, I am really not a complete person, but I want somebody to complete me."
Help mate
"If you want somebody to complete you, that's not going to happen. It means you will end up being not a help mate, to your partner, but you'll be a heavy weight to your partner. So it means, instead of being a help mate, you become a mill stone around the other person's neck, and not an equal partner in the union. So he or she will get tired or you, drop you like a hot potato and you'll return to being incomplete and unhappy," warns the psychologist.
Marriage, additionally, is not a means of compensating for the things you lacked as a child. "If you have not been taught in your family life to be responsible for yourself and you have lived a life of dependency, then marriage can't fix that," says Foster.
"Marriage is for adults. So if you always need somebody to take care of you, somebody to look after you, you are going to be disappointed. How are you going to take care of your family if you are still a child? So you have to be an independent person, and if your family life brought you up to be dependent and not responsible, then you have to work on that in order to be an equal partner in the marriage."
- Counselling psychologist Yvonne Foster is attached to the Family Life Ministries in Kingston.
