You Don’t Need to Fail in Order to Have Success

Many people think that having a few failed relationships helps prepare them for marriage. Some even see the first marriage itself as a ‘training ground’ for the grand love that is expected to follow.

They reason: now I know what NOT to do in a relationship.

Experience often produces wisdom, and wisdom is surely helpful in any relationship.

However, for many, experience breeds not wisdom but cynicism and bitterness.

Too many people learn the wrong things from their negative experiences; they learn not to trust, not to have high expectations about a lasting relationship, and not to invest too much of themselves.

Marriage Means Business

These are excellent self-protective strategies if your goal is to avoid the pain of rejection and failure, but they are exactly the wrong behaviours for building a vibrant marriage.

No marriage can flourish without trust, hope and total commitment.

But there is something else that is faulty with this thinking. There is an underlying assumption that the only way to learn about relationships is through mistakes, that we have to experience failure and disaster in order to learn and mature.

In truth, we learn from both failing and succeeding. In business, no one would consider successive failures to provide any confidence of success the next time round.

Just like in business, being in a successful relationship is the best learning opportunity.

All relationships have difficulties. The challenge for us all is to learn wisdom rather than cynicism so that we overcome the difficulties rather than walk away from them.

Like anything in life, success breeds success… especially in marriage.

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Republished with thanks to SmartLoving. Image via Adobe.