Nope. No one gets married for the ‘wrong reasons’! Even so-called ‘gold diggers’ marry for the right reasons: the ones that suit them, not anyone else.

As humans we evolve from one age to the next, constantly growing, developing and changing our preferences. It stands to reason that as we age, learn and grow, we will want different things at different stages of our life. So a person of 40 years old, for example, will seek something entirely different to their 20 year old self because they have matured in the intervening 20 years, and their experience and knowledge have taught them a lot that their younger self was not aware of. We can only go according to the knowledge and experience we have at any one point.Thus everything we do is always for the right reasons AT THE TIME it is done, to match our stage of knowledge and maturity. That is all we can use to make our decisions: what we KNOW and how we FEEL.

Later on in life, when our experience and new information tell us otherwise, we can look back in time and use hindsight to beat ourselves up about how ‘wrong’ we were to do what we did. But every action in life fulfils a physical or emotional need/desire that we have at that precise moment in time.

For example, looking at my boyfriend’s youthful pictures, he was a hippie type, long hair, beard etc. At that time, we were almost total opposites of each other in approach and ideology. I would not have found him attractive, and I doubt if he would have felt the same about me either. Fast forward 25 years, and he is a different person in looks and intellect, because of his developing knowledge and diverse experiences. We have also moved closer together in all sorts of ways to the extent that we now find each other very attractive.

So, one thing to remember about relationships and people is that we always do things for the right reasons FOR US when we make those decisions, because we are not robots who are static in time. As we mature, get educated, or change our aspirations, we begin to see ourselves in a different light and desire something else. If our partners have not developed with us in the same direction, discomfort and conflict ensues, and that’s a relationship heading for the rocks.

At those stressful times, it is tempting to look back and bemoan why we went into that partnership in the first place, especially using the useless tool of hindsight to chastise our actions. But no one forced us to act in that way at that time. Most important, if we could have done something else then, or acted differently, we would have certainly done so. We clearly had needs that the person fulfilled when we got married, needs they are no longer fulfilling, which gradually makes them less attractive in our eyes, and almost alien in some respects.

That’s the simple, and hard-to-accept, fact of every relationship that doesn’t last as expected – our natural evolution from one point to another impacting our partnerships!

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