The following are eight very common but wrong reasons people get married or want to get married. Marriages built on these reasons run into problems sooner or later. 1.LONELINESS: Many people see marriage as the answer to loneliness. It is one of the common reasons girls especially want to get married. They believe that when they marry they will have someone to talk with anytime they want; someone to eat with; someone to go everywhere with; someone who will be there for them 24/7- no more loneliness. This is an illusion. At best, marriage will provide involved in your community-develop networks with school mates, church brethren, office colleagues and people in your neighbourhood. If you don't do any of these, you will be lonely even in marriage and you will put too much pressure on your spouse. 2. HAPPINESS: The search for happiness is as universal as it is illusive. And when you search for happiness in your marriage, you are likely to be disappointed. This is because nobody has the power to make another person happy. Happiness is a personal choice. You choose to be happy. You can find someone living in a mansion who is miserable. At the same time, you will find another person living in a kiosk who is happy. You can find someone at a feast who is unhappy; at the same time, you can find someone happily enjoying the most modest meal. Happiness has nothing to do with anything happening outside yourself- it is a choice. You can have the world and be unhappy; you can lose everything and be happy. It is a choice. So you can be happy in marriage not because you are married but because you have chosen to be happy. 3. ECONOMIC : We don't like to admit it but many people, both men and women, marry for economic reasons (women are guiltier of this than men in Ghana because of our social structure). Many girls aspire to be married to someone who has the means to take care of them and their parents or siblings, so some girls turn down certain people. Marrying solely for economic reasons is dangerous, the rich man today may be a "broke man" tomorrow. What happens then if you married him for his money? The poor person today can come into riches tomorrow. What then if you turned him down simply because he did not have money? 4. CHILDREN: It is not unreasonable to expect marriage to bring you children. Indeed, in Genesis, this is one of the charges God gave to Adam and Eve when he brought them together. Consequently, for many people, the absence of children in a marriage is sufficient grounds for its annulment. But we need to understand that marriage is complete with or without children. So it is unfortunate when marriages are dissolved for lack of children. 5. SEX: For many young people, marriage is a licence to have sex and their eagerness to get married is driven by their impatience to get that licence. They see marriage as an opportunity to have sex on demand. Indeed, marriage is the proper context for sexual activity so it is not unreasonable to look forward to great sex in marriage. But if sex is the main reason for marriage, then cheating is inevitable. This is because your spouse may not always be available, (travelled or ill) and so on. If sex was the main driving force for your marriage then the relationship will come under severe pressure when your spouse, for any reason, is not available. One has to learn to control his/her sexual appetite before marriage or he/she is likely to disgrace himself/herself in marriage. 6. SOCIAL REASONS: There are many social reasons why people get married. For instance, in our context, many young ladies marry because of social pressure for them to do so after a certain age. The pressure can be so intense that many young ladies settle for less. Some others marry because of their position in society. Some positions in society implicitly expect the occupant to be married. For instance, many churches will not ordain you as a pastor unless you are married or you can assure them that you will get married within one or two years of ordination. Then again, when you reach a certain point on the social ladder, you tend to get a lot of invitations to social events and you don't earn full acceptance unless you come with a spouse. If an older girl's younger siblings get married before her, the intense pressure on her to get married leads her to accept the next man who comes promising marriage. 7. PEER PRESSURE: Peer pressure can be overt or covert. If all your friends and classmates are married, trust me, you will feel the pressure to get married too. If you don't get married, you will find that you have lost all your friends and if you are a woman, you will find that whenever you get close to the husbands of any of your friends, they view you with suspicion. The problem with yielding to peer pressure to get married is that you are very likely to marry someone you know you don't love. 8. HOUSE HELP: Many men, especially widowers and divorcees with children, get remarried just to get a woman to keep the home for them and mother their children. So, in most cases, they are not looking for a wife but for a glorified house-help. But it is not only widowers and divorcees who look for a house-girl in their wives; for many men, a wife must first and foremost be a house-girl, you know, someone to wash, clean and cook in addition to warming the bed for them. Marriages based on the search for a house-girl can be terrible and lack respect for the woman.