My husband and I have been married for a little over four years. And although we’re still considered babies in this game, I assure you we’ve both come to the conclusion thus far that marriage isn’t for the faint of heart. I guess you could say we started off with very little idea of what we were getting into. It’s possibly because we had our baby shortly after saying our vows, which made it even more of a challenge.
Yes! We’re that couple that got married shortly after getting pregnant with my son. And even though we were engaged and planning to have a wedding prior to my pregnancy, fate had another plan in mind.
Here’s Why I Didn’t Have a Wedding
Instead, we forewent the wedding and chose to tie the knot with less than ten family members and friends to witness. We were excited to be one happy family, but we quickly learned it took more than being in love and our intimate wedding to keep things afloat.
The first two years of our marriage was rocky. I’m not going to paint this picture of happy bliss. I wish I could say it was all bubbles and roses, and we were the happiest we could ever be with our new baby boy, but that would be a lie.
It was constant arguing, disagreeing, lack of communication, misunderstandings, and a ton of resentment. It felt as though we were constantly on two separate pages, and couldn’t meet in the middle. I’ve lost count of how many times we went to bed angry over an argument we just simply could not resolve in one night. We even contemplated being separated. The adjustment was severely difficult for us.
And although we’re in a much better place now after committing to marriage counseling and personal therapy, we’ve finally come to learn the one thing you don’t hear too often when receiving marriage advice.
The hardest thing I learned about marriage…is that you don’t know anything about marriage at all.
Leading up to the day we got married we were given the old sage advice of love one another unconditionally, don’t yell at each other, blah blah blah.
But, we weren’t prepared for what do you do when you can’t agree on something? What do you do when you’re so angry with one another you can’t even look at them?
Sure communication, trust, honesty, and time to cool off were some of the responses I could find through Google when I really needed advice about what to do. But even still, there wasn’t a one answer fits all.
The hard forward truth was that we had no idea how to be a husband and wife for each other.
We both grew up differently. Therefore, our ideas of what constituted a healthy marriage were on separate ends of the fence. He witnessed one thing between his mother and father, while I witnessed another. We came into our marriage attempting to emulate what we knew a marriage looked like based upon our upbringing and immediately learned what worked for our parents was absolutely NOT going to work for us.
Instead, trying to practice the same ideas our parents had was working against us. We ultimately had to unlearn what we thought consisted of a healthy marriage and create what we agreed would work for us. We created our own blueprint and built our own foundation from scratch.
Every couples’ union is different. Whether they like to sleep in separate rooms, or one spouse has their own apartment, or maybe they’re into the polyamorous thing. Hey, whatever floats your boat. Regardless, it all boils down to that couple creating a system that caters specifically to them through trial and error.
I’ll admit. There were things I thought I wanted in my husband upon getting married. As my husband would deliver those wants it dawned on me that what I wanted from him as my husband wasn’t what I needed. It wasn’t working for us and vice versa.
Every once in a while my husband and I have to refer to our blueprint to remind ourselves of what we started upon. And, sometimes we even have to knock down a few walls and rebuild some new ones as we become a bit more tenured in this union.
We’ve had the time to learn one another’s quirks, needs, mood swings, and preferences. We’ve had time to understand when one of us is downright in a crappy mood and doesn’t want to be bothered. We’ve learned to pick up on what makes each other uncomfortable, what makes us feel secure, or what we need to feel loved.
We still have a lot of learning to do, but we now know there is no rule book for marriage. There isn’t a set guideline or standard that tells you how you should handle disagreements, finances, parenting, and career.
Everyone is just winging this. There is no perfect couple. There is no perfect equation. There is no perfect spreadsheet that details exactly what should happen.
I use to think if an older couple survived marriage for several decades, they found the perfect equation. They had the recipe. When, in reality, they went through their ups and downs as well until they finally got it right.
And that’s not advice I can give to the next couple. The advice I could give to any couple preparing for marriage is to erase everything you think you already know about marriage and keep an open mind.
We definitely still don’t see eye to eye all the time. But this time, we can work based on what we learned.
This time, we have our own blueprint.
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Previously published on “Hello, Love”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash