Still struggling with structure!

So here I am after writing this blog for 6 and a half years, still trying to create a systematic structure for my posts!

Why I started this blog:  I’ve been thinking about marriage for a very long time; that is, what I could do to maximise my chances of of a successful marriage (by God’s grace).  I started this blog to express some of the ideas that occurred to me, to work through some of the questions.

Some of the biggest questions I had a few years ago (before seriously grappling through these issues on the blog) were these:

1. What makes me attracted to someone – really?  There are the official, acceptable “Christian” reasons – but what are the real reasons?!  The reason I so desperately wanted to know this is because I was thinking “What would happen if for any reason I stopped being attracted to my husband?  What would I need to work on to regain that attraction?”

2. How do I know that he is not going to change?  If I am immensely impressed by him now, how do I know that I will still be immensely impressed 10 or 20 years from now?  This is a bit like looking into a crystal ball – or whatever the Christian equivalent of that might be.

So those are the two big questions that occur to me now. There may have been perhaps two other big questions, but sincerely now I cannot remember what they were!  Perhaps they will come back to me.

I also spent lots of time thinking about the kind of marriage that I wanted.
Surprisingly, the huggie-wuggie thing, or discovering that I’m quite tactile, and very very partial to hugs specifically, is quite recent with me (in case anyone cares!)

So since I started blogging lots of different ideas have occurred to me, issues that people need to be aware of etc, issues that keep cropping up in relationships.  I have had great fun expressing these ideas.  However, I am extremely keen to implement a consistent structure so that this blog will be useful not just for expressing my ideas about different things, but also for real people at real life stages thinking how to go about their relationships.  I’ve tried to do this before, but I have not been consistent at keeping it up, because I did not really understand how to do it.

[A big issue though with all this is that many people will only start thinking of how to resolve problems after they have actually become problems. It just might not occur to many people to try to pre-empt marital problems by making deliberate choices in singleness; it might not occur to many people to ask themselves:  what could I be doing now to maximise my chances of an amazing marriage?]

As I think of it just now, there are two main ways of applying structure to this blog:
1. Looking into marriage, identifying potential problems or blessings, and working backwards to think what could be done to either eliminate potential problems or enhance potential blessings, also crucially working out when those solutions should/could be applied

2. Identifying different stages or subdivisions within different stages and thinking how someone in that position could act to get to their “optimum path”.

From henceforth, I think that my approach will be a bit of both! This kind of structure might seem quite obvious, but it has taken me so much thought to get here.  Really!

Please share!  Not just because it would be great to increase the readership on this blog!  But more please share it with single people who may not have thought that far ahead to marriage, to think that there are things that they could be doing at any life stage to enhance their own possibility of marital success. 

Here is the thing:  people do not have to agree with the actions that I recommend.  I have joked here before that even I do not always agree with myself, in that the viewpoints I freshly express will sometimes vary quite widely from previously expressed viewpoints, just because I am a human being, and I can be inconsistent like anyone else, and there are so many variables at work in my mind, and at different times I will inevitably give different weights to the same variables!  However I would love it if people would at least think through the ideas and think of some way that they could work regarding each issue!

Ever changing?
As ideas and facts and statistics become more available, there will be more and more ideas that someone could be thinking through. I hope to be able to represent  these ideas in diagrams to make them easier to follow! 

What this means for you as a reader!
From henceforth, I hope to be able to create posts for different stages, so that each reader would hopefully be able to visit this site regularly to find fresh information that is relevant to them or their relationship stage.