I remember, “The principal is your PAL.”
Life is complicated, and there are a lot of unexpected things that could come down the road. There’s no way to talk them all out in advance.
I had a simple list of necessary conditions, IOW if these weren’t satisfied, in the end no amount of trying to make it work would suffice.
The list: mutual trust and respect; shared or compatible goals, values, worldview. Ten words. I don’t know if they’re sufficient conditions, but I’d think the odds are good that if you’ve got all these going in, the marriage will work if you do the work.
My wife and I talked about a lot of things as we were becoming a couple. Our Christian faith was central to both of us, even though we were comfortable with different styles of worship: she grew up Southern Baptist, and I’m a born-again Christian who is most comfortable at the liturgical end of mainstream Protestantism (Episcopal, Lutheran). We both wanted children. We were both aiming for a future in academia. We both valued people more than things. Fidelity was essential to both of us. Each of us trusted the other, and saw the other as their equal.
I’m not sure if we ever talked about it in these terms, but I saw marriage as a calling, and felt that we were called to marriage with each other. It would be hard to imagine what it would take to have been a deal-breaker: one of us, I think, would have had to become an extremely different person from what we were when we got married.
I mean, any 25-year-old who has ever actually looked at any statistics about what happens in marriages over the long term? Cheating, dry spells and terminal illnesses happen a LOT in marriages. Even if a bridal couple doesn’t set up specific contract clauses about them, it seems only sensible to be consciously aware of the reality in these matters.
I’m certainly not saying that every marriage is going to get hit with those issues, and I’m not in favor of mandating premarital counseling, but it does occur to me that maybe a couple who blithely assume ”these super common marital challenges will never happen to US, because us!!” might be too young to get married.
I’m not saying they blithely assume those things won’t happen to then, except for the cheating. What I’m saying is that most young people don’t consider dry spells or terminal illnesses at all. And most don’t read statisitcs about those sort of things at all. If you asked them whether they might encounter a dry spell, they might say it’s possible. Same for a terminal illness. But that doesn’t mean they ever would have considered it on their own , and knowing that terminal illnesses exist doesn’t mean you’ve thought about whether you’d want euthanasia. And the magazines I was reading in my young, single days didn’t say a word about the possibilities of dry spells or thinking about what you might want in case of a terminal illness in those articles about fashion, makeup and “how to drive him wild” , much less give statistics.