Monica : We have a big problem in Norway. Many people get divorced, like 50% every year, and I don’t know why that happens all the time because you can just change your man like you change your car or clothes, and so we are trying to find out how do they do it in other religions and other cultures. Hopefully we can take some of this information back home and inspire Norwegians. How is it possible to maintain a long loving marriage?
Luang Por : Those who decide to get married need to know three important questions. Why do you want to get married? How do you find a suitable spouse? What will create a good married life? For the first question, the objectives of marriage are not only for a sexual relationship or the continuity of family lines, but also to live side by side and encourage each other to achieve the goal of being born human, like doing good deeds, avoiding bad deeds, terminating the cycle of birth or at least being reborn into a celestial realm. Moreover, it is not enough to get married just because two people love each other. Apart from love, one needs to consider other factors as well. As mentioned above, the couple should be equal to each other in four aspects: faith, precepts, attitude and belief. Buddhist couples usually take some time to learn and know each other before getting married. This means it may take months or even years. In a way, waiting is seen as a test for true love. In order to have a happy marriage, husband and wife must learn to live together and treat each other with equal consideration. What a husband and wife should do in order to make a good relationship is to “love simultaneously, be angry at different times”. Also, they should always smile at each other, learn to be calm and reasonable, respect each others needs and opinions, provide each other with some degree of freedom, and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the family. In order to prolong the relationship, they should learn to create some space between each other. For example, a relationship is compared with a bird in our hands. If we grasp it too tight, the bird will die and we will lose it forever. To keep it with us, we must learn to hold it gently and with great care. Moreover, husbands and wives should learn to please each other with sharing, sweet words and help. They should also act properly so as to learn what a wife should do for a husband and what a husband should do for a wife. There are a lot more tactics which can not all be explained here. Although the advice here may be quite a good guideline for leading a married life, sometimes it does not work for some people. If it does not, the cause of the break up may be explained by the law of karma. In the Buddhist worldview, separation is a sign that the couple , s time to reap the fruit of their good deeds, which they had done together in the previous lifetime, is at an end. Thus, each of them is forced to separately walk their own path according to their karma. For women whose married life suffers from violence, hard burdens or infidelity, according to Buddhist explanation, it is the effect of their own misbehavior in the past life. The women probably used to be men in their previous lifetime but they are re-born as women and suffer all these situations because they had committed adultery, had abandoned or abused their wives and children. One of the reasons why family members are drawn to share the same fate or belong to the same family is that they had committed similar actions in the past.
