How could everything change so dramatically?

"The difficultly with marriage is that we fall in
love with a personality, but we must live with a
character."
- Peter Devries

We can only appreciate the profundity of this
statement if we understand what is meant by
CHARACTER.

"Personality" is easy to understand. Your
"personality" is how people experience you. It's
your public persona.

But what is "character?" And why is "character"
so crucial in your marriage?

Character is who you are when no one is watching.

Let me say that again so you can read it slowly
and really digest it this time.

Character is who you are when no one is watching.

You see, when you and your spouse met, you met
each other's PERSONALITIES. You showed your
spouse and you were shown by your spouse your
public personas. I'm not saying you tricked each
other. It's just your personality; how you
display yourself to others.

But marriage lasts too long in too close quarters
for anyone to sustain a public persona.
Personalities eventually give way to an INNER
SELF that gets revealed for the first time. And
there you each stand, naked as if no one is
watching. But someone is watching. And that's
when you meet for the first time...again!

You and your spouse don't meet the person who
charmed each other's friends, bought gifts for
each other's parents, and always smiled from ear
to ear. No, this time it's a meeting of your
CHARACTERS.

In many cases, it's not only that you're meeting
each other for the first time, but it's that
you're meeting YOURSELVES for the first time.

Most people wouldn't be caught dead treating
anyone the way they treat their spouse. Most
people don't recognize their own behavior. "I'm
just not myself with him/her." Well then who is
that person? Next, that's YOU...it's
your character. (And your spouse meets their
character.)

The reason so many people fail at marriage and an
attempt at marriage renewal is NOT that they
don't like their spouse. It's that they don't
like THEMSELVES. And while everyone else in their
life is like a mirror reflecting their
personality; their spouse is a mirror reflecting
their character. And most people don't like what
they see.

Many people would rather choose to be with
someone else than remain with their spouse and
have to continue to be with themselves. (Did you
get that?)

Balthasar Gracian wrote in his 17th century
manual on success, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, as
follows: "You are as much a real person as you
are deep. As with the depths of a diamond, the
interior is twice as important as the surface.
There are people who are all facade, like a house
left unfinished when the funds run out. They have
the entrance of a palace but the inner rooms of a
cottage."

Explicit sex education images criticised by Christian group

Children as young as five are being shown "explicit" images to teach them about sex, an evangelical Christian pressure group has claimed.

The Christian Institute has complained that at least 10 books or teaching packs used in English primary schools for lessons on sex and relationships, contain images or descriptions that are "obviously unsuitable".

Its report, Too Much, Too Young, criticises, among others, a BBC teaching pack for its images of a nude man and woman and the children's book Mummy Laid an Egg, by Babette Cole, for its child-like drawings of a man and woman having sex on a skateboard and wearing red noses. The book won British Illustrated Children's Book of the Year.

A number of councils have recommended the books and lesson plans to schools in their area. The institute said many parents would be "deeply upset" to find these images were being shown to their children.

Other teaching packs criticised in the report contain short explanations of bisexuality, anal intercourse and oral sex.

The report suggests parents stand as governors at their local primary school so they have influence over which images pupils are shown. It recommends they ask teachers to show them the materials being used and, if they refuse, advises them to demand it through freedom of information legislation.

"The current approach to sex education, which demands ever more explicit sex education at ever younger ages, has wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money and comprehensively failed to reduce teenage pregnancy and abortion rates," said Mike Judge, head of communications at the institute.

The Department for Education is conducting an internal review of personal, social, health and economic education, which covers sex and relationships. This will be published later this year.

Currently, all primary schools are required to give lessons on human biology as part of the science curriculum. While lessons about sex are not compulsory, many schools choose to include them in the curriculum. Governors decide what is taught beyond the compulsory curriculum and parents are allowed to withdraw their children from any sex education lesson that is outside the science curriculum.

The Sex Education Forum, which campaigns for all pupils to have high quality lessons about sex and relationships, said primary schools tended to teach children basic facts about the difference between boys and girls' bodies, and which parts of the body were private and should not be touched by others. "This is not about teaching primary school children to have sex. One of the purposes of sex and relationship education is to try to protect children from abuse," said Lucy Emmerson, principal officer at the Sex Education Forum.

Teaching about sex and relationships was "patchy" in many schools and often "too little, too late", she added. "It is not acceptable for a child to finish primary school and not know what periods are or what they should do if they are abused."

She said the images contained in books and teaching packs had to be seen in the context of a lesson rather than on their own. "We strongly advise parents to become involved in a school's decision on which teaching resources to use when teaching about sex," she said.