Marriage is a lifelong commitment that requires emotional maturity, personal and spiritual growth, self-awareness and accountability. It takes teamwork and individual work. Therefore, marriage has a prerequisite: a commitment to the self.

Do You Take Yourself To Be Your Spouse?

Before you decide whether you’re willing to commit to someone else for life, you have to make a decision to commit to you. You must first learn to love and accept yourself as is – something far too many people find difficult to do. Yet, not nearly that many hesitate to hop down the aisle.

For the record, abandoning the relationship with the self and moving on to a marriage with another always ends badly. Even if divorce never takes place, dysfunction and despair always do.

So, before even thinking about taking vows to love someone else through the good, bad and ugly, you must first do so with yourself. After all, you cannot love anyone until you love you.

Keep in mind that the love you show to yourself and the work you do to improve on an individual level will help you become someone you’d want to spend the rest of your life with. That’s important, too; be someone you’d want to marry.

Do You Promise To Trust, Honor, Cherish And Obey Yourself?

To be someone you’d want to marry is to become the kind of person who exhibits characteristics and qualities you admire. This includes the ability to trust, honor, cherish and obey another. For that reason, you must first come to trust, honor, cherish and obey yourself.

Falling in love with you means you honor your needs, thoughts, feelings, experience and sacred space. You cherish yourself and all that you are while listening to your intuition, obeying what your inner voice tells you to do or not do and trusting yourself over anyone else.

If you want to marry someone who has fallen completely in love with you, be the person who is head over heels in love with yourself by trusting, honoring, cherishing and obeying you.

In Sickness And In Health, For Better Or Worse?

The vows of “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health” aren’t always considered to the full extent of their meaning when individuals decide to commit to another. Typically, they’re not thought over with regard to self-commitment. In fact, we seem to be a lot less compassionate toward and forgiving of ourselves than others.

It’s important to remember that committing to yourself involves learning to love yourself unconditionally. It’s necessary to give yourself the same compassion you’d give others and provide yourself a safe place to just be. The latter is the greatest gift you can give anyone, including you.

It’s always been said that marriage isn’t easy. Though that is certainly true of anything worth doing, marriage can certainly be a lot more rewarding and less challenging when it is preceded by a commitment to the self. In fact, fulfilling that prerequisite puts a great deal of the hardest work – the work on yourself – behind you, and creates a sense of identity and independence that is needed to maintain a healthy relationship with someone else. After all, the personal and spiritual growth and emotional development that results from that pre-marriage self-commitment is what makes a person truly ready and capable to commit to another.

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