Women and Good Marriages - Watering Reed Talks About Gender

Author: Shuilin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Many people say that the way of living before and after marriage is different. Even celebrities report in the news: "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, but half-closed after marriage." However, this saying isn't entirely correct. A wife said that after marriage, she often half-closed her eyes, but her husband still had an affair. Another single woman who has passed her marriage age said that she always kept her eyes wide open when choosing a partner but never found a good one. Why is that? Because those two phrases really have issues and need correction. Before marriage, you should keep your eyes open normally, not necessarily wide open. Single people before marriage should date, and young people are prone to making mistakes. How can they keep their eyes open as wide as possible? Try it—open your eyes as wide as two bronze bells, and you'll get dizzy and see things even less clearly! Excessively wide eyes mean being too picky. Since there's little understanding before marriage, and dating makes it even harder to see the other person completely, if you overthink and try to see everything clearly, it becomes "picking flaws in an egg," which might lead you to never find a partner. No one is perfect, let alone the fact that people change. After marriage, you shouldn't half-close your eyes and pretend to be ignorant either. A wife should pay more attention to her partner—how can she half-close her eyes? If you always tolerate things, problems will gradually surface. Ignoring the flaws between spouses might seem useful in the short term, but in the long run, it leads to issues. The world says "It's better to be ignorant," but only in rare cases is ignorance acceptable. Even in marriage, being ignorant is the start of all new problems. Ignorance is also subconscious endurance, even if it's tolerance. If you tolerate too much after marriage, suppressing things for too long will eventually cause problems, because many tolerances are done out of ignorance.
I once said that tolerance is better than communication, and communication is better than understanding. Here, communication can help with understanding, but it's better to understand first and then communicate, as it's more constructive. After marriage, you should help your partner improve and not be ignorant. Half-closing your eyes is indulgence. If you don't believe it, observe—most wives who half-close their eyes have already had affairs (though outsiders might not know). Because they used to pretend to be ignorant, they didn't realize their husband was about to have an affair!