I’m directing this article to mainly women because they seem to be a tad more at fault in this area. But since it does apply to both genders, both men and women – listen up.

Okay. You’re a woman or a man in a relationship. There are red flags cautioning you to beware. There are irritating personality traits in the person you’re with and you’re not even married yet. Sometimes the red flags are so numerous it looks like a hemorrhage. But still you marry. Why?

The reasons are numerous, but here are some of the ones I hear most often; your family expects you to marry him, you’ve been together so long that starting to date again is repugnant, you think your love will grow stronger after marriage, all of your friends are married, you think you’ll change those irritating habits once married, and/or your biological clock is ticking. These rationalizations are insidious. Here’s how it works. You weren’t totally happy during the courtship, but you feared that making too many demands would drive him away. Now, armed with a wedding band glinting up at you and waving a little piece of paper in your sweaty hand, you think you can safely proceed in trying to fix that faulty man of yours. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact he’s established a style of living during the courtship that he thinks is perfectly fine, and you haven’t contradicted that notion. Based on that, he figures you accept him as he is. He isn’t usually about to change.

Fact and fantasy intermingle into a muddied pool of misconceptions when one looks to marriage as a cure to problems in the relationship. That sort of thinking will drop you into a quagmire of quicksand, something detrimental in the long-term. Somehow, we think that there is something magical in becoming “legal” in the eyes of the law and we will be protected from all that is harmful in life. All that was wrong will turn right. Ha!

Once you declare, “I do,” many develop new expectations in addition to attempting to alter your mate. Maybe in the back of your mind you have some romanticized ideal of what your spouse should be – kind of like kissing a frog and turning him into a prince. You may expect your guy to morph into this idealized notion of what a husband should be. And your husband may also have a new set of expectations for his blushing bride. In the real world these expectations can’t be met.

Attention! Neither one of you isn’t about to change.

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