Why your partner's health is vital when choosing a spouse

Oct 31, 2020

In this topic, it is crucial that a couple takes time to honestly share any known physical health challenges that are hereditary, or unique to the individual and likely to be of a persistent nature.

RELATIONSHIP | MARRIAGE | HEALTH 

Being physically and emotionally healthy is presumed as an important subcomponent of one's decision to get married to another person.

Our cultures have been traditionally very careful to ensure that physical wellness is a strong dominant principle in making a decision about marriage.

At the same time, this should not be seen as discriminating against those who may not be physically healthy but strongly have grounded in the power of faith and love to each other, even as they get into a committed relationship.

It is further expected that the existing structures helping young couples do include appropriate premarital screening against communicable diseases, especially sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), as an essential component to ensure the physical-health integrity of the couple.

Making these decisions and executing them with caution is another indicator of a couple's capacity to work together and have difficult conversations with respect to each other and with anticipated appropriate resolutions.

In this topic, it is crucial that a couple takes time to honestly share any known physical health challenges that are hereditary, or unique to the individual and likely to be of a persistent nature. 

This knowledge adds to the capacity to make full consent in decisions. Finally, an issue that ought to be seriously considered is the psychological health of the individual and of the couple.

Emotional wellness and stability is probably the most unappreciated and underrated component in a couple's decision to marry.

Yet, as we know very well, emotional health or what is known as Emotional Quotient, (EQ) is higher than Intellectual Quotient, (IQ)  in our daily needs. 

This predicts the individual's capacity to manage themselves in day-to-day challenges, as they negotiate the stressors of living and the capacity to be present to the other, in a meaningful and safe manner.

Additionally, psychological health eventually affects the emotional temperature of the couple in their home, and subsequently on the wellbeing of their children.

Risk factors towards psychological instability include worries about psychological abuse, remarkable for physical, intellectual, and emotional aggression towards the other, and the incapacity to assume and have empathy for the other person.

This could also contribute to domestic violence which is a phenomenon that is yet to be seriously addressed, and should by all measures, be of public health importance.

Furthermore, the psychological well-being of the couple creates an entity of its own as they mature and get to know each other because their emotional wellness becomes the vehicle through which they express themselves to each other with and outside their own household and eventually into their family units.

Here, one is inclined to also pose the question as a wedding looms, and as the couple settles in to commit to each other, that what if psychological challenges begin to emerge?

These may include challenges with excessive anxiety, depression, panic attacks, addiction to drugs, and/or alcohol as well as other addictions.

These factors should be seen as important decision-making elements, just like physical wellbeing or the capacity to sustain and support each other financially or other factors that influence how we are attracted and drawn to each other.

Ssempijja is a consulting psychologist and CEO/Clinical Director of Sebastian Family Psychology Practice.

He is also an appointed Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, by the Medical College of Wisconsin, USA.

 

 

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