Everybody's dream is to have a good marriage. However, not everybody gets to live that dream. Every year marriages end in divorce because people just do not have a good marriage. One of the things that you can do before or after you get married is to evaluate your relationship expectations. Evaluating what you expect from your relationship can be very beneficial for your relationship because it gives you a clear idea of what the two of you expect from your marriage, which can show you if you people are both on the same page.

The best way to evaluate what you expect from your marriage is to sit down and answer a variety of questions about your marriage. When answering the questions you are not going to want to guess on how it should be, what you want to do is write down how you expect things to be. This expectation does not have to be realistic because how you expect things to be is going to affect your relationship regardless. When you are writing down the answers, you also want to think about your parent's marriage. The reason for this is that your parent's relationship is going to affect how you view your marriage and what expectations you have for your marriage.

Here is a look at some of the things you want to think about when evaluating your marriage. You should also include any other significant expectations that you have for your marriage because in order to evaluate your marriage thoroughly you need to address all of the potential issues.

• Do you expect your spouse to be loyal? What will happen if your spouse is not as loyal as your expect?
  
• How do you feel about the longevity of the relationship? Do you expect to be together forever, is divorce an option if things do not work out or do you consider marriage to be forever?
  
• Do you have any concerns about the current way things are going in your relationship?
  
• What kind of expectations do you have about fidelity in your relationship? For example, do you expect your spouse to have friends that are of the same sex only or can they have friends that are of the opposite sex?
  
• What do the terms loving and caring mean to you? Do you feel that you should always have loving feelings towards your spouse? Alternatively, can the feelings change over time or with certain moods?
  
• What about your sexual relationship? Do you expect to have sex a certain number of times in a week? Are there any sexual practices that you consider forbidden? Do you think that your spouse should initiate lovemaking or can either one of you initiate it?
  
• What kind of expectations do you have for the romance in your marriage? What do you expect your spouse to do or not do that show you in the little ways that they love you? For example, do you expect little gifts as a sign or do you prefer hearing the words or is it a combination of things?
  
• Do you want to have children? Do you want to have more children? What kind of discipline do you believe in for children, such as time outs or spanking? Who should do the disciplining of the children?
  
•  If you have kids from a previous marriage, where do you want them to live? Do you expect to share the discipline? If sharing the discipline how do you expect to share it?
  
• Talk about your careers and the provision of income. Are both of you going to work in the future? Is somebody's career or job more important than the others are? If there are children or you plan on having children in the future is somebody going to stop working to stay home and care for the children. Do you plan to save money for retirement? Will a spouse return to work after the children have left home or are old enough to care for themselves?
  
• What kind of emotional support are you going to need from your spouse? Do you want to feel taken care of? If so in what ways do, you want to feel like you are taken care of. Do you plan to rely on your spouse during tough times? If so, how much do you plan to rely on your spouse during hard times? Can you depend on either family or friends for emotional support? Are there certain areas that are going to require more emotional support than others do?
•  What is your basic approach to marriage? Do you think a marriage is two people working together or two people working separately?
•  How do you plan on dealing with problems? How will you approach working them out? For example, do you plan to talk through problems? Do you plan to handle your expression of anger in a specific way?
•  Do you expect one person to have more power in decisions, if so what type of decisions will they have more power over? How about control? For example, is somebody going to control the money? Who will make the final decision when you disagree about key things? Who has more power and control in your relationship now? Is that something you are comfortable with?
• Look at the various household chores that need to be done. Who is going to do what? Do you expect your spouse to do half of the chores or is it going to be more one sided? How does the current division of chores match up with what you expect?
• What do you expect when spending time together? Do you have any concerns about spending time together? Do you want certain things done when spending time together, such as going out for dinner or watching movies? How much time do you want to spend alone together when compared to spending time at work, with friends, or with family?
  

• Do you expect you and your spouse to share all of your thoughts and feelings with one another? Alternatively, do you think that there are certain feelings and thoughts that should not be shared?
• Do you think that you and your spouse should be best friends? What do you consider a friend? How do you envision your friendship with your spouse? Is it okay for you to have another best friend that is not your spouse?
• What do you expect when you need to have forgiveness in your marriage? Are there some things that should not be forgiven? Is forgiveness important to you or would you rather just move on in the relationship?
• Think about the little things in life that can come up and create problems. Do you have any pet peeves that your spouse would not consider important? What do you expect from your spouse and yourself in these little areas? For example, should the toilet seat be left up or down? Who should send out greeting cards?

After you have written down what you expect from each area of your marriage, you are going to want to go back and rate each area for how reasonable it is. You can use a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is considered completely reasonable and 1 is considered completely unreasonable. You are also going to want to place a check mark next to the areas that you have not previously discussed with your spouse in depth. For example, before you got married you talked about how you are going to spend holidays, but you neglected to discuss how you wanted to raise your kids or you talked about it briefly but want to discuss it more.

After going through your list a second time, you are going to want to sit down with each other to go over both of your lists. When sitting down and discussing your list you are going to want to talk about the things that are the most important to you first and then work down the list. Be prepared for the fact that this is going to take more than one discussion. Each discussion should only cover one or two expectations. In your discussion, you want to cover each topic in detail, including how it has affected your relationship in the past, if the expectation is reasonable or unreasonable, and what you plan on doing with each expectation.

Once you have thoroughly evaluated your marriage you will be able to figure out what to do next. In some cases after you have evaluated your marriage you are going to find out that there, is nothing left to save so you are better off getting a divorce? However, in other cases you will find out that you still have something left underneath all of the stress, so it is best to seek some type of counseling to try to save your marriage.