What You Need To Ask Yourself Before Getting Married


Getting married is one of the biggest life decisions you’ll ever make – especially if you’re determined to stick it out through thick and thin. According to relationship psychologist and author Eli Finkel, it’s important to assess long-term compatibility before tying the knot. These are the questions you should be asking.

Eli Finkel is the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage and a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in the US. As he explains in the video above, just because someone makes you happy now doesn’t mean they are a suitable life partner. If you date for two years and then get engaged – how representative of your overall life are those two years of dating going to be?

“The degree to which you’re compatible right now isn’t any sort of guarantee whatsoever that you’ll be compatible even in three years or five years,” Finkel explains.

“If you have goals that misalign, if you view your ideal version of yourself, for example, is not the person that your spouse actually wants you to become then you have some amount of incompatibility.”

Serious long-term compatibility issues can still be overcome, but it all comes down to motivation and ability. If you decide the relationship is important enough, you will need to realign your goals to match your partners and be able to pull off the required changes.

“There is a risk that you will marry somebody who will change in ways that become incompatible with you or that you yourself will change in ways that become incompatible with your spouse,” says Finkel. “And we know that risk, or at least we should when we decide to tie the knot.”

You can check out Finkel’s entire spiel in the video above.

[Via Business Insider]


This story has been updated since its original publication.


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