Improve Your Marital Experience – By Victor Akunna

At the start of my school days, my parents suffered a huge financial setback that made them change my school. In fact, I was relocated from one part of the country to another, where I lived with relatives I barely knew at the time. At the age of 4, many things did not make sense, many questions were unanswered, and as an introvert, I kept my frustrations to myself, rather than verbalise them.
Eventually, when things got better, I was relocated again, but this time, I had to learn in a new language and culture to integrate into that part of the country. This meant that I was an easy target for bullies, taunts and jokes because I was different, I was an outsider. This negatively impacted my esteem, which also reflected on my grades as red pens conspicuously ‘decorated’ my report card, highlighting areas for improvement.

Through those years, I came to accept the label, AVERAGE student, until something changed; I became curious and started to ask questions and like the Chinese proverbs states, “when the student is ready the teacher will appear”. I started questioning why some students did better, why a particular grade seemed to be permanently allocated to me each term. In the bid to uncover these answers, I made friends with the top students at the time to find out how they studied, how they reasoned, how they prepared for tests. This decision changed my life forever as I learnt an important law called the law of association. This was succinctly captured by a gentleman, Charles Jones, who stated that “you will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

At the time, I did not fully grasp why things changed for me, but now I know better. When we interact with people, we soak up their emotions, thoughts, paradigms and beliefs, providing new ways of seeing the same issues. As a matter of fact, our brain s completely change because new neurological pathways are created. This principle applies to any area of life, but to look at it within the context of marriage, couples who are struggling in marriage must take a critical look at the marriages of the people in their inner circle. Doing this may shockingly reveal that those marriages are not that different from theirs. In other words, bad/great marriages are ‘contagious’.

Action Point: If you want to improve your marital experience in 2017, good intentions are not enough, you must change who you listen to, what you read and what you say. Your association determines your destination.

Victor Akunna
Romance & Intimacy Catalyst
www.foundationforfamilyaffairs.org