Newly married

Newly married couples have a great adventure in front of them. All of life is laid out in front of them, with all its possibilities, opportunities, trials and tribulations. It's exciting, and a bit frightening, too. Before you get into the thick of things, it's important to have an idea about how you'll deal with the joys and the difficulties that you face together. It's vital to speak to each other and to trusted others about how to face the many things that you haven't even yet imagined will come up in your life.

No one wants to think that they will ever have disagreements with their spouse, but that's just not realistic. The difference between a healthy relationship and a rocky one isn't a question of having or not having fights about anything. The real difference is in knowing how to deal with those differences of opinion, figuring out between you, consciously, how you will make your way to consensus and move forward.

And here's another secret: There is no one size fits all answer. No guru, no psychologist, and no grandmother on the planet can give you the keys to make your marriage a long and happy one. You two have to work that out together, and that's what people mean when they say that a good marriage takes work. It takes communication, negotiation, give and take, huge amounts of trust, and lots of patience, too.

All relationships have a way of solving problems, the question is, is the path in your marriage going to be a conscious path or an unconscious one? A healthy marriage and a healthy family comes from a conscious decision making process.

What are conscious decisions? They are decisions that are made with careful thought, not based on knee jerk reactions, with solid reasoning behind them. But they are more than that, too. They are decisions that are solid, and yet are not so rigid that they can't be reworked based on new information. They come from a holistic approach to life. Conscious decisions are made with the heart and the intellect together, and in a relationship they are made based on agreed upon patterns within that relationship.

An unconscious decision is one that is made based on ingrained patterns that you never question. An unconscious decision may come from only emotion or only dry logic. It is based on an unconscious process that you have built up through training and experience, without any internal analysis.

Newly married couples need to spend some time together thinking through the way that they will make their choices together.