Eugenia, twenty-three years old, is a pretty and self-confident lady from a well-off and secure family. Her family adored her since she was an only child, and she grew up with the idea that the world was her oyster. She then met Laud, twenty-six years old and a recent Business Administration graduate, on a beach in Accra, Ghana. Eugenia had just graduated from college and her parents gave her the trip as a graduation present; Laud had just passed her exams and used a part of her savings to give himself a “congratulations” gift. With a look, Eugenia and Laud fell in love. The chemistry was great. They both felt on top of the world now that they had finished school, and the nice afternoon breeze didn’t hurt either. Only a few days after their romance, Eugenia decided that Laud was the one. He was handsome, hard-working, and had all the necessary credentials. He was snapped out of her girl-of-the-match image. Obviously, Laud was also in love with Eugenia, when they found out that they both had plans to move to Miami and the idea hit them both simultaneously: they were so in love, why not live together?

That is exactly what they did. Only Eugenia had a not-so-hidden agenda. From the first week of cohabitation she began to pressure her, her parents did not like that she lived with a man and harassed her to get married. Laud was starting a small business and it wouldn’t help her career to have a wife. What Eugenia managed to do was maneuver Laud into getting married, not that he hadn’t come to love him on her own, but Eugenia, Laud realized later, was pushing. Laud, who has visited the consultant, began to realize what was happening, now he can see more clearly Eugenia’s motivations: “Once we got married,” he said, “Eugenia started the same pressure techniques to move from Miami … I tried to explain to her that I still wasn’t making enough money to buy a house, that I had just started my small business, but it was like she didn’t listen to me and listened to me about anything.. All of that was a pleasure because she was fulfilling her own agendas and fantasies about what she wanted from marriage. She had married marriage, she hadn’t married me.”

Eugenia was trying to force Laud into his own dream without consulting him. Eugenia and Laud face difficult days: she has to realize that marriage means a commitment to a real person, not an idea, and he has to face the possibility that, once she finally sees him, they both might Have second thoughts about your relationship. There is also no guarantee that Eugenia will wake up to the reality of Laud; if she doesn’t, Laud will have to decide if he wants to continue in the marriage.

The problem illustrated by Laud and Eugenia is very common. A very common and painful trap that many men and women fall into when they marry is that they marry with the idea of ​​marriage; they don’t actually marry a human being. Or they may marry the lifestyle that certain marriages make possible, without really thinking about the person attached to it. Some couples are really attracted to lifestyles, not other people. Wealth, prestige, connections, someone’s family – there are a number of lures we can fall in love with other than the real man or woman. Married people with this kind of fantasy are not really married at all; they have simply bought into an idea of ​​marriage with no sense that there is a fallible human being attached. Waking up and realizing you’re in a myth, not a marriage, can be painful: it means giving up some simplistic ideas about what you thought marriage meant, and it can mean having to meet the man you’ve married and vice versa. the first time, maybe years after you said “I do.”

The value of seeing love in marriage is not about material possession; It’s about sharing good and bad times. Proverbs 31:10 says, “Who can find a wife of noble character? She is worth more than precious stones.” Both spouses in a serious relationship (marriage) seek to marry human beings and not ideas in marriage. Not only can you get happiness from ideas in marriage, but happiness comes from marrying the human being. Many people complain about not finding happiness in their relationship. Have you wondered the root of all this white? It may be that you demand too much from your partner or do not support them spiritually, physically, morally and emotionally.

The marriage was a sure success so the partners knew they had enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and financial support to raise the children. But beyond that, marriage played a significant psychological role for the couples: It defined the couples’ sense of self in a way that might make them notice something else. This is because marriage meant a “full” life; the very act of being married provided a genuinely satisfying, validating, and psychologically rewarding experience for most couples.

The value of looking at Eugenia’s situation is not in judging her inability to see and accept her husband and her life for what they really are. It’s in allowing her story to prompt us to recognize ways we may be similarly trapping ourselves in sham marriages. You can’t get out of a trap until you see how it works. That’s the point, so choose a good partner who marries a human being and not with the idea of ​​getting married.