Three Keys to a Successful Marriage and Family

I found this article online and want to share it with you. A part of it reads:

To raise great kids, focus on your marriage. There are three keys to a successful marriage and family:

1) Recognize that we've already chosen the perfect spouse. No, we would NOT choose better next time;
2) Recognize how often our fight-or-flight instinct overrides our passion in marriage. To create a happy marriage, we need to go from the fantasy, "It's his/her fault that I'm unhappy" to the truth, "I wouldn't do any better in my next marriage, so I might as well give 100 percent to this one;" and
3) Recognize that if we build a great marriage, we create a great role model for our kids, and they learn self-reliance and cooperation in the process.

As long as you believe your life is your spouse's fault, a new partner will always seem attractive. But once you begin to see your role in the ongoing, lifelong problems of your marriage, you'll recognize that if you started over with a new partner tomorrow, you'd still be carrying all your personal baggage into that relationship.
And that's where accepting our spouse creates a positive chain reaction. Commitment forces us to be more forgiving because we have given ourselves no choice but to work things out. It also forces us to be more outspoken and negotiate a relationship we can live with.

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