Times Magazine published an article about how to make your marriage work, entitled, “The Single Best Piece of Marriage Advice Ever Given“

It’s a common topic – you can find articles in magazines all over the place, almost every month out of the year.  But I thought it was a good article, so here’s a bit of a summary:

The highest praised piece of advice, according to the author, is to rise above the minutia of daily life and commit to bringing out the best in your partner.  

“In wise love, each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.”  ~William Butler Yeats 

You can’t do this without understanding what it is that your spouse truly wants. That may sound easy, but isn’t. In the short term, you might know she wants a promotion, or he wants to live in the country. But that is not the “high secret self” you need to know. The “high secret self” exists apart from daily desires and even apart from the twists of fate and fortune that get in the way.

And when your partner has given in to his or her least attractive tendencies, this is the moment when you must see through the annoying, demanding, complaining, failing, faltering wreck in front of you—and find the strong, kind, fascinating, functional person you know your spouse wants to be.

You have to learn to be critical without criticizing. The origin of the word critic is the Greek word kritikos, which does not mean “able to pick at flaws incessantly” but does mean “able to make judgments.” This is a crucial difference. The kind of criticism that helps marriage is the kind you learned in English class: studying something so well that you can find its hidden patterns and its deeper truths. If you apply this kind of criticism in marriage, it is actually possible to stop a spouse in mid-spiral (sometimes even in mid-sentence!) and say, “Excuse me, no offense, but you are not being the person you want to be.” The pronoun is vital. The difference between “who you want to be” and “who I want you to be” is the difference between encouragement and nagging: spark and ash.

Article Source : The Single Best Piece of Marriage Advice Ever Given