You can find proof of this by looking into the traditions of other cultures.
In the western tradition we love and decide to marry.
In the eastern tradition they marry and decide to love.
Oh, but you say, "we have fallen in love and decided to marry".
It is a common default in the way we understand love.
It implies that we really have no control and besieged by the compounding physical effects and modern confusion.
We have decided to legally join ourselves together and hope that nothing changes.
Something changes.
In this country more then fifty percent of the time something changes.
Because we made the second decision, to marry, assuming that a mystery made the first decision, to love, for us.
Now, we have a mess, often an extended, expensive mess that can be bitter and unhappy and affect the lives of children for generations.
Love and marriage are both decisions.
It does not make much difference in which order the decisions to love and marry are made.
It depends more on where your traditions come from, eastern or western.
But, you can not successfully build a healthy relationship unless you consciously make both these decisions.
The only way to make good decisions is to have a good understanding of the nature of the issue.
Marriage is pretty easy.
It is a contract.
Love is much more difficult.
It is an abstraction.
When you promise to marry, you step up to the judge or preacher and pay a few dollars for a license.
When you promise to love, you step up to yourself and pay whatever it costs for a heart.
There are a number of other things a novice at love should know about how love works.
They can be stated as a set of rules or helpful guidelines for those who dare to accept the challenge of learning about love.
Behind each rule exists several thousand years of human experience with love captured in music, art, literature and sometimes modeled in noble men and women.
Because love is the most profound and desirable of human experiences it would serve each of us to search out the rules and then study the experience and wisdom behind them.
It is a fundamental of love that we can only be better for having dared to explore and understand the power of love.