Who Comes First – Spouse or Kids?

Sastang dandavat at your lotus feet oh Swamiji. Thanks a lot for helping me out again in the Neutron Experiment Lab. You correctly emphasized that even if you might not be able to remove obstacles from anyone’s path, you would definitely handhold the person to wade through the troubled water. I felt the essence very much in last few days when I have been overworked and gasping for your hand. Koti koti laurels of Gratitude at your feet.

Coming to today’s blog, it’s all about marriage and the type of relationship we maintain / sustain with our better half. Yes, it is our 14th marriage anniversary on 28th Jan. (Actually, I double checked the date to avoid being scolded by you know.. 😉 . We, men, are generally weak in remembering dates. Please raise your hands who agree with me. I think the ‘ayes’ have it and motion is passed😁.

Jokes apart, marriage is such a strange relation. We share the blood, genes of our biological father and mother. We pass on our genes and traits to our offspring. But, we marry to a person who neither does have the same genetic construction nor the same familiar background (exceptions are excluded!). We stay with our parents for a particular time frame and then set on our own journey. We get a life partner and start our coupled life. We have offspring and as History repeats, they also fly away after learning how to do so, emptying the nest one day.

The point is marriage is such a bond which ties two unknown persons with different backgrounds to spend life together! Really strange, isn’t it? That’s the beauty of the relationship and the one which needs to be nurtured and taken care of. Else, it may lead to disastrous consequences. It destroys the lives of many stakeholders. Personally, it gives me immense pain to go through the heart wrenching agony, pain and suffocation of numerous members of os.me through their blogs. The blogs are from married persons in abusive relationships, the divorced ones, the kids who have suffered from such toxic relationships. I reduce to tears at times while going through some blogs. My heart goes for all of you there going through the turmoil. I wonder, can’t we make things better! That is my attempt in this blog.

Fun Fact: Did you know, working on maintaining our marriage happy and healthy is one of the best things we can do for our children?

We made our marriage vows to our spouse, not to our children. Please remember, putting children first, diminishes the level of commitment vowed. I am not saying that neglect your children. But neglecting your spouse may have a snowballing effect and can instill psychologically unfavourable beliefs in your child towards his / her future spouse. Putting each other first, creates the kind of confidence to make the children feel safe and secure. Remember the golden words of value investing, (not by Benjamin Graham, but by us 😛 : “Loving your spouse is an investment in your children.”

The basic relationship on which a family takes support is ‘marriage’. It is the foundation of the building called family. And children do replicate, inculcate, imbibe what they observe repeatedly. (Actually this is the fundamental way all AIs are being developed and reinforced, and we have now ChatGPT at our disposal about which Swamiji mentioned in his last blog. Swamiji, you really are the tech savvy giant keeping tab of all the latest tech-developments. How do you get all those time to do the amount of work you do! 🙏

Please remember that marriage is a life long investment. Some men and women find out that they are strangers when the children grow up and move on in their lives. That time the couple realizes that, they have not dedicated any time to know each other or how each other evolved with time after the honeymoon phase of their marriage has been over in raising and taking care of the children. (For the emotional feeling of the same please watch the movie ‘Maja Ma’ in which the male protagonist expresses his emotional feelings to the female protagonist: bachhon ko bade karte karte mein to tumhara chehra hi bhool gaya ki maine isi aurat se shhadi kiya tha!) Now don’t even think of taking opportunity of the statement to forget your wife’s face and knock at another door 😜.

Remember, we as a couple are going to live together a lot longer than our kids. Who we are and what we mean to each other as a couple, while raising our offspring is life shaping and life changing for both the couple and the offspring. Having a strong marriage and a magical bond, is the best thing for our kids to see and observe. When they see us working as a team making choices, spending time together and being respectful to each other they realize that they are in a safe and secured environment which motivates them to explore the positivity of life and have a positive outlook towards the world. It is one of the most powerful ways that we show our kids that they are loved as well. Eventually, we are training / programming our kids about what kind of mate to seek later in life. And a successful training data / model will go a long way in helping them to find out mates who are not just temporary gap fillers as we are seeing very often now-a-days. Please do share your thoughts about this.

What we give our attention to and invest upon with discipline, grows and compounds over time (not only mutual funds 😊). If we expect and desire to have a lasting marriage, we have to show the genuine intent about making the same happen. ‘Tourist investing’ now and then is not going to work for sure! And if marriage goes on ‘auto-pilot’ mode without the couple taking charge of the same, it often leads to fatal crash as ‘takeoffs’, ‘landings’ and ‘critical maneuvers’ in the flight called ‘marriage’ cannot be left solely on ‘Auto-pilot’ mode. Makes sense? Definitely, you can co-relate.

Keeping our spouse as priority when the kids are still young, makes parenting easier. You and your partner can work as a team rather than feeling like two separate people trying to raise the same set of children (what if different set of children are there with secrete families, Just kidding 😛). In the former case, you always have someone there to support you. You can always fall back upon a reliable shoulder apart from that of Swamiji’s feet!

Putting your marriage first, does not mean neglecting your kids as mentioned before. In our case, we both are extremely involved parents. We both feel that both of our kids are the loves of our lives. They are the greatest assets we have on earth. We can’t even imagine our lives without them. They are very close to our hearts. We love them infinity plus.

But we have a mechanism of putting our marriage first. That is why our elder son Sahil knows that there is nothing that he can inform one and hide from the other parent. If papa knows something then, mummy also does and the vice versa! Our partner comes before anyone in our lives, including our kids. Putting our marriage first means that, we are protecting the relationship that is central to our kids’ happy and memorable childhood. We make sure that we co-exist happily despite the changes that we experienced in our relationship after the birth of our second son Samil i.e. lack of sleep, extra work, health issues of us and kids etc. We are in perfect harmony with all these changes.

Now the research part: Researches strongly suggest that kids whose parents love each other are much happier and more secure than those raised in a loveless toxic environment. The latter category tend to adopt a rebellious and criminal mindset while the former become resolve, creative and contribute to the society and mankind in general. They have a model of not just what a relationship looks like but also how people should treat each other as human beings.

In the concluding remark, it is really hard to figure out who comes first: your spouse or your children. While the thought of putting your children after your spouse can be scary. But the benefits of growing up with loving parents in a happily married relationship cannot be emphasized enough in today’s world. It will not only have the tremendous positive impact on their childhood, it will but also sink into their subconscious mind for the rest of their life.

Thank you all for going through such a long blog with patience. Wish you all a happy Republic Day. Jai Shri Hari…

Credits: As I was compressed for time due to official workload, my ChatGPT🤗🤩, Sanghamitra , jotted down the important points and I paraphrased the blog with my normal sense of making the point with added humour!