The 15 Steps to Get Married
- Dec 2, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 5, 2025
Written by Jonathan Dubrulle, Healer-Influencer
Jonathan Dubrulle is a Healer-Influencer in Madrid who likes to help people create 'paso a paso' a better life.
The key to being ready for a real marriage is emotional maturity. It takes a list of joyful and harsh experiences to be emotionally strong enough to thrive and make a marriage last. Let’s explore them together.
1. Being a baby
We all start very sensitive. We feel everything but have limited strength. Everything feels like a life-threatening attack. Relationships are too hard, and we have a 0 percent chance of the real deal unless we learn or get taught the steps to emotional strength needed to be marriage-ready. It takes 14 more steps. Consequently, bear with me if you ever want to get married.
2. Learning to say no
Babies don’t have the strength to say no. Toddlers do. To become an emotional adult ready for marriage, you need to practice setting boundaries and saying no.
3. Feeling emotions
To mature further, emotional expression needs to be practiced and felt. Feeling anger, sadness, boredom, and fear is key. Next comes a way to express them healthily, process them, and grow. How do you bounce back? How long do you take? How do you feel afterward? How do feelings make you grow?
4. Being betrayed
Marriage includes betrayal. To be ready, you need to have had the experience of family or friends betraying you. Did someone close talk badly behind your back? Have your friends stolen money from you? Has someone turned their back on you for a reason you did not understand?
5. Forgiveness
Moving on from betrayal to forgiving them. In middle school, my best friend bullied me during a summer camp with some accomplices. I cried to my sister once I was back from the camp, holding strong for the week. I forgave him a couple of months later. Now I realize he couldn’t deal with my popularity and told people I slept sometimes in my mom’s bed, which did happen until I was 12, as I was a scared kid and even afraid of sleeping in the dark.
6. Feeling sexual desire naturally
For some people, it is hard to let it flow, the energy that is meant to be at the moment. Do you prefer oral, vaginal, or anal sex? Are there kinks or is it vanilla plain? Do you want to receive or give? It takes emotional strength to let that truth flow, no matter how pure or nasty it is.
7. Making friends
Friends love you for who you are. They know you and like you, help you, and care for you. That sets the stage for knowing you have worth and are appreciated.
8. Making a friend group
In a group you get familiar with group dynamics and dealing with many people. Like in a family or extended family, it teaches you how to survive when two families and in-laws come together.
9. Losing friends
People come and go. Some die physically, some relationships die, and others you realize were never meant to be. Losing friends makes you experience nostalgia or melancholia and gives the profoundness needed for a real marriage.
10. Knowing you are attractive
As a former model, and based on interactions, I know I am attractive now. It was a hard one for me. Parents don’t easily tell their boys that they are beautiful. It caused a lot of issues, especially if you are unique in your own way. Knowing you are attractive sets the stage for comfortable sex, where it doesn’t get odd, so everyone can enjoy it.
11. Knowing you can fall in love
When people don’t know if they have ever fallen in love, they never have. It is such an insanely profound feeling that it drives people to the edge. That is why many people don’t go there. They don’t feel safe enough to fall in love. Knowing you are safe enough to do so subconsciously is usually enough.
12. Falling in love
It is so beautiful. With all the pain you will feel, it is a marvelous growth opportunity. It is the step that will propel you to being ready for marriage. However, it is a test. Will you survive managing the emotions and behave to acceptable standards?
13. Focusing on the career
The emotions are normally too overwhelming the first time, and the best strategy is to focus on your career for a while. That will give you meaning and distraction while you mature emotionally.
14. Knowing a career is not possible
For a real marriage, your partner will always have to be the priority. A real career in my past experience, with high salaries and prestige, is not sustainable in that way. It will always call you to put it first above a partner, and that will never work out.
15. Ready for marriage
Once you have experienced all the 14 steps before, you are emotionally an adult and ready for marriage. A real marriage changes everything. You are always alright, even in eternity. A bond that lasts eons, with or without children. The world needs more real marriages, with people who are emotionally strong enough to make them last. Sometimes one can guide the way for the other, but one or both parties need an exceptional level of resilience to make it last. In a superficial culture it gets harder, where most people seem to be babies in adult bodies.
Are you brave enough to go through the process to become fully ready for marriage? I hope you are. For eternity.
Read more from Jonathan Dubrulle
Jonathan Dubrulle, Healer-Influencer
I’m Jonathan (38y) and a Spinal Flow Practitioner in Madrid. I started as a high-potential at Thomson Reuters when I was 21. After Brussels and Geneva, I started the healing journey in Singapore and fell in love with my Chiropractor. I discovered I was gay in a country where it was still illegal at the time. With a broken heart, I moved to New York City, where I worked in Corporate Strategy. At 24, a revolt of the soul would happen at the Times Square Headquarters, and I was admitted to Bellevue Hospital. Now I have a practice in the center of Madrid. I help clients heal and grow, develop good microhabits, and create strategies to impact the world. Beauty can rise out of ashes.
