Yes

by Joseph Whalen

Created on: April 04, 2008

Communication is paramount in a healthy marriage. A wife who is unwilling to speak of her past immediately draws suspicion from her husband. Husbands who have no interest in their wives past can never fully understand the person they married. Our past relationships are not things to be ashamed of or jealous of. A successful marriage stems from understanding your partner as well as you understand yourself, something that is impossible to do if their past is shrouded in mystery.

All through life the decisions we face shape the people we become later in life. Two people faced with identical situations can make entirely different decisions for reasons that even they may not fully understand at the time. Living with the consequences of those decisions is what helps us grow and mature. It is this more mature person that we eventually fall in love with and marry. Our chosen spouse is a person who is shaped and developed through their experiences all throughout their life, not someone who just came into existence the first day we met them. Ignorance of your partners past is a recipe for disaster. Even though you may not totally agree with the path your partner has taken through life, knowing the choices they had and the situations they faced help you to better understand the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with.

Men in general can be extremely over protective of their loved ones and this in turn can lead to feelings of jealousy when they feel their role in a relationship has been threatened, even if the threat is a perceived one from the past. As such many men may willingly choose to either ignore or simply disregard any experience their partner has had in the past that they find to be uncomfortable. While this may serve to cushion one's ego for the immediate situation, in the long run this is a caustic attitude that will eventually eat away at the relationship and cause a resentment that neither party could foresee at its onset.

The fundamental differences between men and woman are varied and complex. On one hand women tend to care very little about their partners romantic interests of the past and instead tend to focus more on the present and future. Ensuring fidelity, commitment and honesty in their current relationship often takes precedence over concerns about their partners past. To a large extent this is a healthy attitude to have. There is little purpose in agonizing over relationships your significant other engaged in prior to your unification with them, aside from the obvious and immediate health concerns and relationship stability assurances. However ignoring those experiences limits your understanding of your partner.

Conversely men tend to look at a woman's romantic past in a much different light. Women are all too often judged by the number of romantic liaisons they've shared with others in the past. This sets up a dangerous and unfair double standard that tends to label women who have been as amorously diverse as her male counterpart as being a less desirable long term partner. Such assumptions and reasoning are as equally ludicrous as they are unfair. However, the male ego is a fragile and difficult thing to reason with under such circumstances.

A healthy relationship more about understanding, acceptance and compromise than anything else. In the absence of these three traits there is little hope for a relationship to reach a meaningful enough of a state that it can sustain a long term happy marriage. Only through understanding your partner, their choices in life and their reasons for making those choices can you truly know the person you are entering into matrimony with. Once this level of mutual understanding is reached between couples there is nothing in one's past that can harm the relationship. Couples should concentrate more on celebrating the diversity that their two varying lives have brought together in a single union rather than looking for faults in each other's past. Both man and woman should be open and honest about their romantic relationships, and this openness should begin up front and continue through many years of marriage.

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