Week 7: Transitioning to Marriage & Having Children

The way you start your marriage is important. It's like a cannon. How you start will propel you and continue into your marriage years later. Although you can change the course of your marriage later, it will be really difficult.

For women, when marriage problems happen, and they will, women tend to look back to how the marriage started. As my teacher put it, "If the wife can look back and have a lovely story to tell herself, then she can make it." 

The way your relationship develops really does matter. Your relationship should be like a staircase, meaning that you take the proper steps to build a healthy relationship. These steps are dating, courtship, engagement, and then marriage. 

Nowadays, couple go on one date and then it's like they skip right to courtship after that. They begin steady dating and are committed without even really knowing each other. It's important to go on plenty of dates with each other and get to know as much as you can before you decide to get serious. 

When a couple gets engaged, there are all sorts of decisions that they have to make together. Where will you live? How much? Where? What are your priorities? How will you budget? Where will you go to school and for how long? This can be a stressful time, but if you practiced making decisions together while you were dating (like where should we eat? etc. etc. etc.), it will make these decisions easier. 

I was SHOCKED to found out that the average U.S. wedding is $38,700 according to Wedding Wire's 2019 newlywed report. This includes the price for rings, a honeymoon, ceremony, and reception. WOW. That's a lot of money for one day!

We live in a culture where we plan for weddings and not for our marriages. If we planned for our marriages as well as we planned for our weddings, our society would have many more successful marriages. After all, a wedding is just one day. A marriage is a lifetime, an eternity. 

Honestly, my reception was a blur! I barely even remember what it looked like or who I talked to. It was just one day, but it was the start of my marriage, and that's what means the most to me. 

Adjusting to being married can be more challenging than we tend to think. You are all of a sudden living with someone who does things differently than you do. You have different opinions on the way the toilet paper is put on the roll, how you wash the dishes, or how certain things are cooked. 

Honestly, my favorite part of being married to Conner is learning to fully incorporate each other into our lives. Instead of me, it's become we. Some people really struggle with that transition, but I have loved it. 

One transition that I have yet to experience is the transition of having children. This is one that all couples struggle with. Marital satisfaction ratings tend to go down around this time. The parents are tired, they have less time together, they have more to do (especially the mom), husbands tend to have the perception they are less loved because he receives less attention, sex happens less often, the wife may bring up things that may seem negative that the husband does, etc.

My teacher shared with us a few ways he and his wife worked to stay closer together as they transitioned to becoming parents. He shared that his wife would try to keep him involved by having him feel when the baby kicked and she would have him come with her to doctor's appointments. The husband can be more involved too by changing diaper, helping feed the baby, etc. Not only does this help the dad to be close to his son or daughter, but it also helps bring him closer to his wife. That's because they are having shared experiences. 

It was fun to learn a little about these transitions! I'm experiencing one of them and will experience another in the near future. It's been so helpful to learn things that can help strengthen my marriage and my future family. 💓