Reason Number Four – Lack of Common Purpose

The fourth reason why people marry the wrong person is that you don’t share a common life purpose, or common priorities and commitments. Let’s focus on the importance of a common life purpose. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

There are three ways that people can connect. Three ways that people tend to connect when they feel that they want to be with each other. The first is they feel chemistry and they feel compatible with each other. They just feel a connection. That’s the first way. The second way is they share common interests. Now I think generally speaking this tends to be a large part of the basis for how people feel connected or bonded with each other. Through chemistry, compatibility, having shared interests. Let me throw in a third one which is that they might share a common life purpose. So I want you to think for a moment about the qualitative difference between the third way of bonding, which is to share a common life purpose with someone. Do you feel the qualitative difference between that and the first two? In other words, chemistry will create a bond and shared interests will create a bond, but sharing a common life purpose, to me, seems like a much deeper way to create a bond with another person.

It’s often true that two things can happen in marriage. You can grow together or you can grow apart. Two people that share a common life purpose have a much greater chance of growing together. I know personally… I grew up in a very secular, very Reform Jewish home. Judaism was actually quite unimportant to me. I was sort of a typical middle class Jewish guy. And I didn’t discover Judaism until I’d finished a graduate program, and then went to Israel, and found Aish HaTorah, and suddenly my eyes were opened to the depths of Judaism. But most importantly what happened for me was that I realized that up until that point, and I guess I was about 24 at the time, I realized just how confused I was about life. How confused I was about what I thought my purpose was in life. I thought I was pretty smart and I thought I had it pretty much together, but once I got the perspective of studying Judaism and becoming more observant, I realized just how confused I was. I also realized what a liability I would have been if I would have married somebody. Two people who don’t know what they’re living for, two people who don’t know what their purpose in life is, who knows where they’re going to end up down the road. And that’s why I say in marriage people can grow together or they can grow apart. And if you don’t share a common life purpose, your chances of growing apart are much greater.