Recently, as I was researching information about bridal packages, pre-wedding photography, solemnizing/banquet venues, I was also linked to many other related articles such as "Keeping Your Love Alive In A Lasting Marriage" and I just wanted to share my findings.


Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is much harder.  
What does it take to have a long-term relationship that continues to be successful?  
Marriage has traditionally been the indicator that we love someone enough to commit our entire life to them; to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things and endure all things within that relationship for the love of our ‘better’ half.  
Although marriages change, the keys to sustaining a healthy, lasting marriage are companionship, communication and commitment. 
Here are 10 tips for staying married. 
1. Marry someone with similar core values as you. Don’t go into your marriage thinking your will change your lover into who you think they should be. 
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years. -- Simone Signoret 
A soul mate marriage does not at all mean that you have found someone you match up with on all the cards – on all the issues, on everything. That would be the most deadly dull thing to even imagine. Instead, it means you've found someone and they don't ever want to blow out that little light inside you. And you feel the same way about them. -Diane Sollee 
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. - Antoine De Saint-Exupert 
When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens [during] the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home. There's a knowledge, knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, 'Get your hands off me.' -Danny Perosa, NPR "Story Corps" Morning Edition 
2. Marry your friend. Friendship is more important that lust or physical attraction, because that friendship is what keeps the marriage together. Heart-thumping passion will change throughout your relationship, but friendships most often deepen over the years. 
Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends. -Harville Hendrix 
Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing. -Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics 
Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman. -Joseph Joubert 
Be on the lookout for strain in each other, and with compassion and understanding, lend a helping hand and a mature heart. Helping each other manage emotional strain can yield creative alternatives and build a new foundation for heart-based communication and hope. -Doc Children 
Why would a couple that lives and sleeps together every night need dates and rituals? Precisely because they live and sleep together. -Bill Doherty, Take Back Your Marriage 
3. Mutual respect and affirmations on a regular basis are important to keep your friendship alive and growing.  
Let’s face it, if your partner only has negative things to say to you and about you, life gets pretty grim. On the other hand, if you can only think of negative qualities and actions of your spouse, how is that coming across? And how is that reciprocated? Two negatives in a long-term relationship do not add up to a positive. 
Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up. -Joseph Barth 
Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner, it feels limitless, not limited. -Gloria Steinem, 2000 (upon marrying for the first time at age 66) 
Be presidents of each other's fan clubs. -Tony Heath 
A good marriage is a contest of generosity. -Diane Sawyer 
Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. -Margaret Mead 
4. Genuine affection for each other becomes more important as you age and doesn’t replace sexual activity, but becomes more important.  
So, in addition to loving your spouse, you should look for someone you like a lot and in whom that ‘liking’ continues to grow. Sexual affection is more important in the early years of your life, even though many older adults continue to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, too. However physical affection and kindness continue to be more important to keep your marriage going than intercourse. 
In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic, a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts, an enabler rather than a reformer. -- H. Norman Wright and Gary J. Oliver 
Empathy means resonating with the “not self”. In empathy you know everything is connected, so whatever you do to something else or someone else is done to you. -Harville Hendrix 
Real giving is when we give to our spouses what's important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not. -Michele Weiner-Davis 
One of the great illusions of our time is that love is self-sustaining. It is not. Love must be fed and nurtured, constantly renewed. That demands ingenuity and consideration, but first and foremost, it demands time. -- David Mace 
5. Continue to build intimacy. This means that in addition to being friends,(or because you are friends) you and your partner share emotionally.  
You tell each other your most intimate feelings; your worst fears and worries, your hopes and dreams, and all the minutia of daily living. Building intimacy still involves passion and keeping the romance alive as you know more about each other’s body than anyone else: you know the smell of their sweat, the curve of their hip and the feel of that hollow at the front of their throat. And more, much more than these. 
People think they have to find their soul mate to have a good marriage. You're not going to "find" your soul mate. Anyone you meet already has soul mates. Their mother. Their father. Their lifelong friends. You get married, and after 20 years of loving, bearing, and raising children, meeting challenges - then you'll have "created" your soul mate. -- Diane Sollee 
Marriage is like a gas stove. Even if the burners aren't on all the time, you've always got to keep the pilot light lit. --Brian, a husband giving advice on Oprah.com 
The goal of sex is the big O…(and it ain’t orgasm).It’s Oneness. Loving the whole person, not just the body parts. Connecting at a deeper level. --Tim Gardner, Sacred Sex 
6. Humor is a key source of fun and will lighten even the most intense debates. A relationship with humor as one of the main characteristics stands a better chance of lasting.  
Every relationship needs to have lighthearted laughter and fun, but remember to also have time for down-to-earth, serious talk that is not made fun of. Humor should not be malicious; but should be balanced. Too many practical jokes, gag gifts, witty remarks, funny stories, off-color jokes can become as counter-productive as a relationship with no laughter. 
As for his secret to staying married: "My wife tells me that if I ever decide to leave, she is coming with me." -- Jon BonJovi 
I told him after we had made up once again, “I love you honey, but you are gonna’ have to stop pissing me off.” -A. Gagliardi 
Lust fades, so you'd better be with someone who can stand you. -The Story of Us 
The RealAge web site recommends finding a "reminder buddy" to improve your health, one with whom to exercise, eat right, etc. "Reminder Buddy" - such a nice term for the role of a spouse, sounds so much better than "nagging". -Diane Sollee, 
7. Don’t keep score. No relationship gives equal amounts of love, attention, resources, etc. to both parties. It just is not the case with any union.  
Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring and integrity, they think of you. --H. Jackson Brown, Jr 
To get the full value of joy You must have someone to divide it with. -Mark Twain 
8. Communication. Partners who are in marriage for the long term talk to one another about (almost) everything. 
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory. -- Friedrich Nietzsche 
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.-- Oscar Wilde 
No man is truly married until he understands every word his wife is NOT saying. --Unknown 
One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with each other, it keeps you together until maybe you fall in love again. --Judith Viorst 
The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that they can't possibly doubt that you love them. -- Diane Sollee 
The goal is to have a conversation in a way so that you can have another conversation tomorrow. --Unknown 
9. Commit to the institution of marriage. For those couples who feel divorce is not an option, or at least the very last resort, find themselves working harder to keep their relationship strong.  
Seeing the marriage as bigger than their own immediate need to be first, to be right, to get their needs met, helps people work together for a solution, and to work longer at a solution. 
I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them - it was that promise. --Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth 
People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked. --Paul Newman 
Marriage is the hardest thing you will ever do. The secret is removing divorce as an option. Anybody who gives themselves that option will get a divorce. --Will Smith (11 years into his second marriage) 
10. Choice. Marriage is choice: choice of partner; choice of self; choice of growth, even choice of passion & adventure. Marriage is the continuing choice to stay together even when your spouse has just pissed you off for the last time, or gotten on your last nerve for the umpteenth time.  
Aside from the commitment to the institution of marriage, the fact that each day in many ways you choose to keep working on the relationship, you choose to think the best of your spouse, you choose to be loving instead of hateful and you choose to grow in your relationship instead of throw in the towel. The many times daily that you choose to honor your relationship and keep working on your marriage helps keep it intact. 
“Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out.” --Jim Harrison 
One of the nicest things you can say to your partner, "If I had it to do over again, I'd choose you. Again." -Unknown 
I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough time for a man and a woman to understand each other and . . . to understand - is to love. -- William Butler Yeats 
Choose your love; then love your choice. --Unknown 
Being in a long marriage is a little bit like that nice cup of coffee every morning - I might have it every day, but I still enjoy it. --Stephen Gaines, documentary filmmaker

Yup! I'd chosen to become Mrs Z so I will just continue to become better and build a better relationship with Mr Z :P