Living together.

How to build the foundations of your wedding

Happily married life! We all dream of it.
And there's no shortage of modern clichés of the ideal couple to fuel our aspirations. We all long for true love. After all, how can we imagine a love that doesn't make us happy? Yet other images, very real ones, haunt our minds... Fear of commitment, monotony, routine, disappointments, marital conflicts, divorces, seem to have become the facets of today's loves.

Building a couple, a family, is a bit like choosing stones from two family homes to build your own home. Stones are necessary, but a pile of stones never made a house. It needs a plan, a construction, a new order.

That's what this book is all about. It's based on a conviction: it's possible to be a successful couple and live happily together, but it's always a challenge. To be a successful couple, you need to take up seven major challenges: love and tenderness, the evolution of love towards maturity, difference, dialogue, the couple's project, sexuality and faith.

When a home is built, what is it built on - sand or solid ground? The couple is invited to build on solid ground and establish pillars that are all too often absent in many couples. Seven major pillars will enable each spouse to become a diligent architect of their relationship:

• Cultivating love and tenderness as a couple.
• Understanding the evolution of love relationships.
• Enjoy being different.
• Dialogue skills.
• Building a couple's project.
• Building a sensitive and satisfying sexuality.
• Living the Muslim faith as a couple.

I invite you to follow me, as I go through these pages, to better understand your partner and build your happiness as a couple in the light of the Muslim faith.

Author: Habib Affes holds a doctorate in Education and a diploma in Arab and Islamic Studies and Training Engineering. He has reflected extensively on the encounter between Islam and the Western world. He participates as an expert in various commissions attached to ISESCO (Islamic Organization for Education, Science and Culture). He is the author of numerous publications.