Transitions

 

Last week in class we talked about dating and how we can do that better. Now we’ve moved on to marriage.

So we’ve done the dating, we picked a person to “court” or to be exclusive with, gotten engaged, and now married. Are all life’s problems solved now? Definitely not. One of my older sisters said that she and her husband didn’t fight UNTIL they were married. I know that after I got married, my husband and I definitely had more arguments than ever before. Marriage is not an easy thing. There’s an adjustment period when you first start living together. There are arguments about money, chores, time spent with each other, intimacy, and anything else that two people aren’t used to doing with each other. This is especially true of marriages in quarantine. I spent almost 24/7 with my husband for the first 6 months of our marriage. We love each other so much, but sometimes little breaks from each other are good!

Specifically, in class, we talked about marriage transitions. The wedding is a transition, after the wedding is a transition, and having kids is a HUGE transition for couples. One thing we talked about in class that I had no idea was even an issue for some people is planning and paying for the wedding. We talked about how when parents offer to pay a large amount of money for your wedding, there are obligations that either the parents expect or the child feels to be involved in his or her life. This can cause the parents to break or weaken the boundaries that their child has with their spouse. The parents may feel like it is okay to tell them they have to do specific things because they paid so much money for their wedding. I am grateful to say I never experienced that! Also, getting married at the beginning of quarantine definitely helped lower the costs of my wedding. My parents paid for my dress which was around $90 and dinner and dessert for our family. They probably only spent about $200 on my wedding. (We did get pictures taken about 6 months after we got married, but my parents and my husband’s parents split that.) I think everyone should get married the way my husband and I got married. It was amazing and felt so personal. We got married in my parent's living room with his family on Zoom. (I do wish they could have been there, though. That’s the only thing I wish could’ve been different. But covid.) We didn’t have to talk to a bunch of people we don’t even really know just because they came to our wedding. I’m pretty introverted anyway, so that was a plus!

Moving on to other transitions! The next transition a married couple will face is when they have their first child. Now I can’t really speak on this because my husband and I don’t have kids yet and aren’t planning on having any for a few years. We did learn in class though, that this is a difficult transition sometimes. The couple will experience a decline in their marital happiness. This happens every time they have a new child. The happiness starts to increase again as the kids move out. At least hopefully it goes that way. But how can we prevent the decline in happiness in the first place? Wives can involve their husbands as much as they can in their pregnancy. Ask the husbands to come to doctor’s appointments when they can. Let the husband feel the baby kick. The husband should involve himself in helping take care of the baby once the baby is born. Do things in the middle of the night that the wife doesn’t need to do. So changing diapers or rocking the baby back to sleep or feed the baby if the baby is on bottles. There are so many ways for the wife to make sure her husband feels included and for the husband to take care of some of the responsibilities.

This week definitely has helped me gain knowledge that I can use in the future when my husband and I have kids to make sure that we stay strong and happy.