Marriage is very different from dating. Dating has some sort of excitement to it almost every day. It is sweet and makes life bearable. Especially for a girl who stole a man’s heart, it is a blast. She may sometimes feel that she is flying on the air. She easily embraces herself as the most beautiful and attractive person ever created on this planet earth.

When she ignores him, he texts her five hundred “I love you” and “I’m so sorry” messages and she continues ignoring him, just to receive more romantic messages.

And when she accepts his apology, she becomes queen of the land, at least for him. He treats her as if she is the last woman from the human race.

Well, I wish marriage was like that but it is not. And one of the reasons:

Men can’t work hard for – for something they already have on their hands.

I know some wives might get mad at this but, hey, this is the fact of life and understanding this fact frees us to enjoy our marriages more than we enjoy dating.

My Berhan is a very peaceful person. I have to work very hard to make him lose his temper. Me on the other hand, I love drama. I don’t like life when it is the same every day. I hate monotonous kind of life.

And before I tied the knot, I used to take every little conflict as a big deal. I knew it was not that a big deal but I used to get a kick out of all the process of “reconciliation”. I enjoyed everything he would do to bring me back to him. It was like a drug. Amazingly enough this is true for most women.

Well, is that how I live now? You think! No, I’m doing marriage now. There is no game like that. I learned that in the hard way.

So, the first time I realized that I was doing marriage, not dating, was after we had our very first conflict after marriage. I thought Berhan hated me.

I don’t remember what it was but I remember that I was upset.

I was ready to receive chocolate or flower at the end of that day. I thought he would beg me to talk to him. He went directly to bed and he dived into a deep sleep.

Listen, I thought that was the end of my life. I first thought he was joking but he was not. I stayed up for few hours, waiting for him to get up and kneel down or something. Precious, I think that day was the day he enjoyed the best sleep ever; at least for me it felt that way.

Why didn’t he beg me? Why didn’t he think that I could leave him? Did he take me for granted? Didn’t he care for me anymore?

No, that is not the case. Men process life problems differently.

They are naturally warriors to go after something they desire to have. They fight in any way, form or shape to be conquerors. They love winning. If they know that they can’t win, they don’t get involved in the game. If they see that there is a way for them to win, they stay with the game.

When they face a challenge, they don’t run away from it unless they are sure of losing. They will get engaged in the war until they declare their victory.

So, when a man pursues a woman to marry, he does everything he can to persuade her to marry him. Buying chocolate? Are you crazy? That is “a piece of cake”. He will lay down on the floor for her to walk all over him.

I remember one true story I heard.

So, this girl thought that she had to end her relationship with the man she was seeing at the time. And she asked him to have a walk with her so that she would tell him that she didn’t want to continue with him.

I always find this story to be very entertaining because I know both of these people, very well. They each told me their version of the story.

So, she met him closer to her parent’s house and she said she wanted to walk with him. So, while they were walking, she began narrating stories after stories from the beginning of their relationship to the day she wanted to call it quit. He tried to explain but with no luck. She overwhelmed him with one incidence after another. He was speechless because some of the things she was accusing him for, he was guilty, 100% (as he told me). So, he felt helpless.

Then, at the end of her story, she didn’t wait for him to speak; she said, “I called you today because I want to end our relationship here, now. Please, forget about marriage or anything. We will be good friends from now on.”

At this point she was very serious and he knew that very well. Then he started taking off his clothes and dropping them on the street (yeah, while they were walking).

Imagine, it was around 6pm and the weather was a little cold. And he took off everything from his waist up and when he started opening his belt, she started begging him to stop. Now one or two cars have passed them by, staring at them, trying to figure out who was the victim or the crazy person.

She said to him, “Please stop.”

“I will be crazy like this without you. Promise me to marry me; otherwise, I won’t stop. And I will be crazy from now on.”

She knew he was very serious and she said, “I won’t leave you, I will be with you, … ”.

At this point she started picking up his clothes. And she couldn’t control her tears. Before she finished picking up his clothes, he knelt down and said, “Will you marry me?”

Real man! They are now married with a beautiful daughter.

The war ended! The hero of the war has already been declared! No need now to try to claim the victory again and again. Everybody knows that the warrior deserves to receive “the Medallion”.

Men see marriage in a different way than women. A wife shouldn’t expect her husband to kneel down and beg her to forgive him for every minor conflict. She is his “Medallion” now and that is where it ends, for him.

And this is the biggie: Every potential man knows that this Medallion is already “out of the market”. So there is no competition.

So, a wife shouldn’t expect her husband to treat her as if she was his girlfriend. By the way, I’m not saying that a wife has to let her husband walk all over her. Oh, no, I’m not saying that.

All I’m saying is this: Be realistic what to expect from your husband. Don’t make him look like the most guilty person because he didn’t stay up the whole night, begging you to talk to him (I mean, like me. Learn from my mistake). Discuss with him like an adult. Discuss the issue and solve it. Don’t be foolish by saying, “I think, divorce is the only solution for us” just because he didn’t kneel down as he used to when he was dating you.

Yeah, we women are sometimes too much. We try to motivate our husbands by scaring them. Let me tell you something: They know us very well. And they are not scared of us. They usually are neither afraid of us nor getting a divorce.

But let me tell you one secret about them: They are inspired by a challenge. Instead of expecting them to treat us like we were their dates, let’s put a challenge before them, for them to become the man God calls them to be. How? By becoming the wives they want us to be. How? By becoming the wife God wants us to be. ///