Women – you can’t live with them; you can’t live without them. Although a catchy aphorism, it’s rather useless.
If you can’t live with a woman or without her, then you’re basically screwed. Fortunately, it is most definitely possible to form a bond with a lover strong enough to last a lifetime.
The real trick is understanding whether or not the woman is – for lack of a better phrase – a keeper.
While each man will be attracted to a different sort of woman, there are a couple of signs that you should pay especially close attention to.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe a man should only get married once. Here are a couple of ways of knowing that the woman you’ve found may very well be the last woman you’ll ever need:
You trust her.
Although a given, trust is a crucial aspect of any relationship. What’s most important to keep in mind is how fragile the trust between two individuals is – especially between two individuals who are intimately involved with each other.
When one person breaks the other’s trust, it causes pain. The more someone trusts the person – the more he or she cares – and the more it will hurt once that trust is broken.
Such pain leaves gaping scars that can take eternity to heal. If you found a woman whom you trust entirely and, more importantly, a woman with whom you can’t imagine breaking that trust, then you may have found the one.
She’s a positive force in your life rather than a negative influence.
This is something that I am nearly embarrassed to say took me a long time to comprehend. Truth be told, I only came to understand it recently. When you’re in love, it can be difficult to understand exactly how an individual impacts your life.
Because love is as blinding and distracting as it is, realizing the negative impact a person has on you can be almost impossible.
There are people in your life who will support you, criticize you constructively, and help you learn. Then there are those who will point out flaws with such a negative tone that it’s perfectly evident that their only wish is to hurt you.
If your woman is the latter, then break away as soon as you can; the relationship will only bring you pain and misery.
She believes in you, motivating you to believe in yourself.
Let’s say that we are lucky enough to live to 80. That’s roughly 29,000 days… 29,000 days that you should get up and push ahead in life with full force. Finding a way to motivate yourself day in and day out can be a daunting task – if not impossible altogether.
However, finding the right woman to help motivate you can make the difference between the realization of your dreams and continuous failure. The ideal woman is a woman who motivates you both actively and passively to be, and to do, better.
One of the greatest gifts a woman can bestow upon a man is a reason to be a better man.
Your life is much better with her than it is without her.
Emotions aside, the woman you ought to marry is the woman who adds to your life and doesn’t simply take away from it. Again, this can be a difficult differentiation to make, but it is one of dire importance.
Your emotions can lead you to believe that you need a woman that, in reality, you would be better without. You need to take a step back and decide whether your life is better or worse with her as a part of it.
She never makes excuses when you need her.
Dependability, although often incorporated with trust, is a beast of its own.
Is your woman the kind of woman whom you can depend on? Will she be there for you not only when you are at your best, but likewise when you’re at your worst?
Will she stay by your side or will her love waver the minute the waters turn rough? Some women are more interested in what you can do for them than what you mean to them.
The sex is really, really good.
There is a certain level of physical chemistry that I believe necessary for a marriage to work. This is one reason I could never understand remaining celibate until after the wedding day – if the sex is really bad then you’re going to have a difficult time being happy within the partnership.
Some people say that they don’t care much for sex… I’d say that this is because they’ve never had mind-blowing sex before. Although you may be able to get away with ignorance as bliss, why settle for less?
You both want the same things in life.
This is yet another crucial aspect of relationships that many overlook until it’s too late. It’s easy to love a woman when you don’t fully understand her – and to understand her, you have to understand exactly what it is that she wants out of life.
What does she want to do? Experience? Accomplish? What are her goals? Her dreams? Her wants? Her passions?
Too often we don’t realize that, although theoretically we may be compatible as individuals, our ideal lifestyles aren’t compatible. It’s difficult to spend your life with someone when the paths you need to take separate.
You love each other deeply.
Before you go ahead and say, “Yes, of course we do!,” make sure that you understand what loving deeply means. To love deeply is to love twofold – it’s to love romantically and to love in the form of agape.
To truly love each other is to love not only who the person is as an individual, but also to love what that person means to you. You have to love the person for who that person is as well as what that person does for you.
The common definition of love, to love unconditionally, is wrong. We all love conditionally whether we like to admit it or not.
The deepest love is a love that can combine both unconditional and conditional love to form a bond that cannot be broken by outside force – a mutual love that can last the test of time.
