Transitions Before and After Marriage
“The first year of marriage is the hardest” I’m sure that most of you have heard this before. But the question I want to pose to you is, why? Why do people say the first year is the hardest? Sometimes life just happens, and you can’t control things, but can we predict how the marriage might be affected based on the decisions the couple makes before they get married? I believe that you can. Often in today’s society we are seeing how people like to skip steps in the process to marriage. How the process should look is something like this, 1. Datingà 2. Courtshipà 3. Engagementà 4. Marriage. More often than not, people do what we call “sliding” into marriage where you end up either cohabiting instead, or you jump over the whole engagement process. Now days it’s very common to see couples that are “engaged” and have a date set, reserved the venue, planned the food, but she doesn’t have the ring yet because he hasn’t officially purposed. Engagement = Commitment. When a man buys a ring and proposes he is investing himself and his money into the relationship, physically getting down on that knee is a symbol of him saying to her, “I’m fully committed to you, and I want you to be fully committed to me.” What a sweet and intimate moment for you as a couple. I’m not suggesting that if you do have an engagement where the actual proposal part doesn’t come until after the planning, or not really at all, that your marriage is doomed to fail. What I’m saying is have we become so “casual” in our engagement that we don’t take the time to talk and grow closer together before marriage. During the engagement period is a time when you can discuss important things like money, when you’ll start your family, education, your priorities, the way life will be after you get married, these things need to be out in the open before you’ve tied the knot otherwise there could be problems later.
Do we also stress ourselves out and spend too much money for a total of about 5 hours of our lives? Marriage is something to be celebrated and you want others to be there and share in the joy and excitement, but do we take it too far that it becomes more about the wedding than the actual marriage and union of two people who are promising to love each other forever. It’s so easy to get caught up in the glitz and the glamor of wedding, but once it’s all over in the grand scheme of things does it really matter? Will you look back at your $30,000 wedding and say, “that’s why we have a happy successful marriage” I don’t think you will. It’s all about perspective. I know I’m not perfect at it either, but I’m learning.
Identifying some of the points as to why couples struggle in marriage is a key factor in being able to fix or avoid those problems. Couples can struggle in the first year of marriage due to decisions made before the wedding but there are more decisions that come after the wedding that affect the relationship. Studies have shown that once the couple has their first child there will be a drop in their marital satisfaction and there will continue to be a drop after each child they have. This is because life changes a lot after this sweet little human enters your life, there’s less sleep, more responsibilities, changing dippers, feedings, and so much more. We get so wrapped up in our baby that we forget that there might be other people in our lives who also need a little attention and affection. Obviously, your baby depends on you for survival and should never be neglected but focus on how we interact with our spouse now that stress is high, and sleep is little. The effects are reversible, so our marital satisfaction will go up instead of down with each child, but you have to be willing to put a little extra time into your already hectic day. If we focus on not criticizing, not comparing hour work loads, finding time to really connect with our spouse, doing the little things each day to show that you still love each other, your marriage can not only survive but thrive.
This is Our Happy Place 