The hillside was covered with lush green grass. The white wildflowers among the grass resembled a bride’s veil. The scent of the flowers wafted through the air on the gentle breeze. On one hand, the chirping of birds, on the other, the breeze carrying the fragrant scents… The earth, the sky, the heart—everything seemed to be in bloom… The woman held the hem of her dress with one hand while carefully stepping on the grass with her fingertips to avoid crushing the flowers. With a smile on her face, she thought the visual feast on the hillside was very aesthetic.
She approached the foot of the mountain. She looked at the green hillside covered with wildflowers. She noticed that the hillside was very steep. Going around it could cause a lot of time loss. The blowing wind indicated that the pass at the top was also difficult. But the young man had to cross this hill… Because the water was on the other side of the hill, and his family needed that water. Without hesitation, he gathered his strength and walked toward the slope with confident steps. When the steep slope ended, the young man had reached the water.
Two people looking at the same slope… One a woman, the other a man… Both looking in the same direction, one marveling at the beauty of the slope, the other calculating how to cross it…
Why was the woman marveling at the beauty of the slope, while the man was thinking about how to cross it?
Could the man see the slope through the woman’s eyes? Or the woman! Could the woman see things from the man’s perspective? The woman was amazed by the view from the slope. The man, on the other hand, thought about how hard it would be to climb it. Which one was right? The beauty the woman saw? Or the difficulty the man saw? Actually, they were both parts of the same whole…
You know jigsaw puzzles! Some have 500 pieces, some 1,000 pieces, some 3,000 pieces… Each piece is meaningful when it is part of the whole. On its own, it means nothing. But when it is part of the whole, it has meaning. You spend days working on it, putting in effort, carefully finding and placing all the pieces. Some pieces represent the importance of strength and confidence in men. Some pieces represent the importance of aesthetics, cleanliness, and elegance in women… When you put some pieces together, you decipher the role of men in marriage. When you put some pieces together, you arrive at the formula, “the female bird builds the nest.” The pieces of the woman and the man in marriage are like those in a puzzle game. They are pieces that complement each other, support each other, and are consistent with each other. Because when it comes to a whole, the piece always seeks the whole. The woman and the man are both pieces of each other and each other’s completions.
The union that results from this completion is called marriage.
Marriage is two people from different cultures and family structures sharing their lives together. In other words, it means the union of two different lives. It means being able to look in the same direction and work as a team toward a common goal. Couples must first be aware of this. The common desire of everyone who embarks on this path is a happy and peaceful home. No one wants a marriage that will make them unhappy and cause them problems. When people reach a certain age, they get married and start a family because they believe it will make them happier.
So how does it happen that things go wrong? Why are there so many unhappy marriages today? Why don’t things go as planned in a story that began with the intention of being happy? Why are communication problems so common within families?
In the past, people married without knowing each other well and spent their silver and golden years together. Today, people date for a few years and have more opportunities to meet frequently. Despite this, the relationship can end in divorce shortly after marriage… Why is that?
How is it that people in the past were able to be happy with so few resources?
They had more difficult conditions, but they were able to support each other!
In the past, when people reached a certain age, they wanted to settle down and start a family. Their concern was not to get Hale or Jale, but to take on the responsibility of a woman, start a family, and become a family man. In their married life, people had common goals, common concerns, common joys, and common sorrows. In their relationships, they stood side by side looking in the same direction rather than facing each other. When one was happy, the other was happy too; when one had a problem, the other took it on as their own.
Let’s consider a shopkeeper who couldn’t make his payments that day. The man would lose sleep at midnight and wander around the house. His wife, noticing this, would also lose sleep and take on her husband’s worries as her own. She would gently offer her husband whatever gold or money she had in her possession, without hurting him, and admonish the children, saying, “Your father is troubled, so be quiet.” Or when they went to visit relatives with the children and it was late, the woman would not speak, but would simply look at her husband and smile, as if to say, “Come on, Mehmet, let’s go. The children are sleepy, and they have school tomorrow morning. If I say anything now, it would be rude to your parents.” With that smile, she would silently send a message to her husband. Her husband would receive the message in that silence and convey the same message to his parents in the same way, but aloud.
“It’s getting late, Mom, let’s go. The kids are sleepy, and they have school tomorrow morning…”
There was abstractness in relationships; the woman’s respect for her husband and the husband’s love for his wife were experienced in a completely different way.
Now, there are no more smiling eyes, no more kindness and delicacy… Today, the colors of being married look completely different. There are no more innocent glances, no more lively smiles… As abstractness in relationships decreases, concreteness increases. Abstract power and abstract beauty are giving way to concrete power and concrete beauty. Within families, marriages are experiencing decreasing sharing, decreasing awareness, and increasing unhappiness. Within that unhappiness, silent withdrawals begin, and eventually, separations occur. Now, there is pleasure taken from individual lives separate from togetherness. Relationships that are still called marriages but are only tenuously connected, with shared experiences diminishing over time, are being experienced.
So, what are the secrets to a happy marriage? Or, when we think of signs of an unhappy marriage, what else comes to mind?
Marriage is not about obtaining a certificate from the municipality. It is not just a contract signed by two people in front of the municipality. Marriage is a contract to form a family of two. It is about becoming a team where individuality becomes passive and togetherness becomes active. Being married brings with it the creation of a two-person family. It is also the design of a new story in which individuals can take on new responsibilities in their lives. Therefore, one of the cornerstones of marriage is that both spouses are aware of their respective roles. It is about them showing their existence as individuals who are responsible for life. It is about individuals being able to meet their needs, being confident, responsible, and having the strength to stand on their own two feet. At the same time, being loyal, trustworthy, respectful of family privacy, able to set boundaries, generous, and understanding are the basic criteria that will be evaluated in their ability to build a family.
Every person may have different desires and needs in life. It is also natural for people from different backgrounds to have different expectations. Because every person’s life experience and knowledge are different, what they learn, model, and experience may also be different.
Ultimately, people turn what they learn into behavior. Their attitudes, values, and judgments are shaped by the information they learn. All the behaviors we exhibit today are things we have learned somewhere. This is why we can react very differently when faced with a situation. This is what makes us different from one another. What is important is to be able to recognize that difference in harmony and to have the ability to accept it.
Accepting that one’s spouse is different from oneself makes things easier. Otherwise, we constantly complain with rising expectations, and after each complaint, we move further away from a solution. Our differences can suddenly become a source of conflict, and we begin to see the person we married as a source of unhappiness. Yet, at the beginning, we never imagined it would be like this.
Every person enters into marriage with different dreams. Even the most realistic person believes that everything will be as they imagined. However, reality can often be different from what one imagines. This is precisely the situation that people find difficult to accept. People do not want to admit that they are wrong because they cannot tolerate the truth that they are wrong. For this reason, they want to change the situation they do not accept. They try to make everything fit their dreams. They devote all their effort and struggle to this end. Their goal is to change the other person and mold them into the shape they desire. They want to make the other person happy according to their own standards, not the other person’s. Yet the hardest thing in life is to change a person. A person will never change unless they want to. They may appear to be compliant and not speak up, but they still do as they please. In reality, human beings are not opposed to change. They only strongly resist when forced to change by someone else. A person will only adapt to the other person when they are convinced that change is necessary.
What about you?