Come on doper couples lets hear it…Tell us about that first year of marriage, were you in joyful bliss indulging in that youthful inexperience and imprudence? Or were you at each others throats over picking up that dirty underwear in the bathroom and arguing over why he bought a canoe instead of paying the gas bill? Or were you in the middle…you argued yet never went to be unhappy, you had the best sex of your life and may have even purchased a toy
Background: I am writing an article for our college magazine on The Salad Days - that illustrious fisrt year of marrige. One thing college students get enough of during their tenure at school is the serious side to dating…they are budding adults in most situations and are learning the ins and outs of the opposite sex (or same sex as it may be). Remaining coy in most situations College students of 2004 need to learn as much about living with a partner as they do about calculus, psychology, engineering or dance. The article is about the finer and darker points of living with your partner…learning about your own personality and theirs and how to positively marry the two.
Anecdotally, I got married after having known my wife a year and a half. We were both in Graduate school and living quite meagerly. In the beginning we were lost in our schooling, living in a small one bedroom appartment in an elderly housing complex…(I knew the landlord - and rent was cheap) We didn’t care who had the nicer comforter, or that we were driving an 85’ Jetta. Then came dissertations and nights till 4am for a few months…Then came first job and a profound thrust into the concrete jungle. MARRIAGE - We wed 6 months after I proposed, in a wonderful venue on the coast of Connecticut. Very nice. But then came that fateful first year of marriage…both in big jobs, grappling with credit issues, buying a first new car, managing our finances, fighting etc…etc…I do believe that first year was a tough year…and had we not learned how to manage money and manage our own married personalities - we’d probably not be together today some 8 years later. We are as strong as ever because we respect each other.
What say the doper populace at large? How was your first year?
Ours was pretty much the same as yours Philsophr, except for the whole graduate school part. We haven’t had those kinds of fights in many, many years, but we never considered divorce an option even then either. I definitely consider it our roughest year.
Pretty much just like the four years we had spent previously living together.
No, seriously… I really recommend living together first (except for religious and/or ethical exceptions). You get to work out all of those pesky financial and schedule and “it was your turn to clean the cat boxes” problems beforehand, so that you can actually enjoy the marriage part.
Then again, I have one of those jsgoddess marriages, so maybe we’re not typical. We’ve been “that couple” since sophmore year of college.
Late marrier(?)here, married at 37 after dating two years…first year more difficult than I thought, just getting used to sharing space and time 24/7 was difficult to say the least. Lived ina crappy, noisy apartment where you had the open the windows to get some air in the summer but the coffee shop parking lot across the street held all night fights and parties.
Talk about tense! But we made it - married almost five years and holding!
We’re nearly at the 6 month mark and both very happy. I think it helps that we got married late (early 30s), own a condo and both have decent jobs. Money is not an issue. Being that we both lived alone for a long time, we are both capable of doing the laundry, cooking dinner and cleaning up after ourselves, so no problems there, either. We did live together before we were married, but only for about 6 months and we were already engaged. The biggest thing we argue about is which of our dogs is cuter!
Jeevwoman you bring up an interesting point, and quite a valid one if I must say so. Level of financial security is very important in some cases*, and it should be learned early on in a serious committed relationship that finances should either be delegated out to the person who want to do them…with consent of course…or done in conjunction with each other. Struggling financially can put a large and horrible strain on a newly wed couple. Those who know that with time finances usually turn around…debts are paid off eventually, and savings grow etc…etc…This isn’t something they teach in relationship classes and is something that is often over looked.
**Money does not equal happiness. My grand parents had not a penny betwen them at one point but found it within their relationship to be happy.
Our first year of marriage was … weird. My husband was in the Navy and spent 6 months of it deployed. We weren’t together for our first anniversary. Being older when we got married (me, 26; he, 33) helped the situation a lot because we were both independent and had lived on our own for quite a while beforehand. And of course we made the most of the time that we were together because we knew that the deployments were coming.
The advice I’d have for any young couple is to make sure you can take care of yourself before you live with someone else. I’ve never thought it a good idea for someone to move from Mama or Daddy’s house straight into hubby’s or wife’s.
Our first year was neither the best nor the worst (we’ve been married 4 1/2 years). We got married right out of college with not much to our names. We did have trouble with some adjustments, especially figuring out how to handle the money and tried a few different things over the years (separate accounts, joint accounts, dividing bills, etc.) It was an issue for us because we have different approaches to money. We also had to get used to what the other’s expectations were of things like how much time would be spent together, chores, etc. The first year though, we still had that wedded bliss, exciting time of setting up our apartment and all the firsts of being together that made it an overall happy and exciting year. I would say the second year was harder, there were job issues and illness and more trials but we got through them. Having been married almost 5 years now I would say it has definitely gotten easier, not harder.
I would encourage any couple about to get married to sit down and talk about things like money and priorities in detail. All the practical stuff - who pays the bills, how much spending money do you get, do you want to consult each other before purchases, how much do you want to save, etc. It sounds easy but wait until someone wants or needs something the other doesn’t, or you don’t have enough money to fix the car. Also, deal with issues when they arise and work on finding permanent solutions to them that you both can live with. Anything that gets put off will become a recurring issue and there is nothing more boring or frustrating than fighting about the same things over and over. I also would say, learn how to fight with each other! Equally important, learn how to come to a real conclusion and make up and get past it.
I look back on our first year fondly but I don’t look back and say I wish it was like that again - we are both stronger and happier now and I’m glad. Hopefully it will keep getting better.
Well my experience has been vastly different from everyone else so far. I married when I was 18, freshman year of college. My husband was 24. We lived, and still do, with my mother for financial reasons. We have been married about a year and a half now, but going strong
We had a lot of stress early on, though. He has a considerable amount of personal debt and has struggled with depression and stress. I have struggled with stress. We are both now on medication for stress (I’m not joking). When we married, he was an illegal alien, with no family here in the US. I work part-time and go to school full-time, while he works full-time and goes to school part-time. Our house is very crowded. In a three bedroom house, we have my mother, my sister (who just turned 17), and my uncle (Starving Artist). To top this all off, we have three cats and three dogs, all of which are indoor pets. Space, who needs space? We do fight, and we have gone days without speaking to each other. It always works out in the end.
But we are happy together. I can’t imagine having married someone else, and I truly do want to spend the rest of my life with him. It will be interesting once we are finally on our own, though!
The first year of my first marriage was hell. Of course that might explain why the marriage didn’t last much longer then a year.
My second marriage? There has not been one day in the past six years that would have been better with out him. We had a couple of big fights that first year, but mostly because of misunderstood expectations. We have never had a fight about anything important.
The first three months were great, as were the two years we lived together before the wedding. Everything after that falls squarely into the catergory of Absolute Living Hell.
Things have been much better lately though, what with me not even knowing what state he’s in now.
It will be two years married in May. The first year, and continuing into most of the second, has been difficult.
One month after returning from our wedding in Europe and Mediterranean honeymoon (sounds like quite the dream, huh?) I was laid off from a software company out of the Pacific Northwest. Two months later, my wife began graduate school, paid for and required by her career position in banking. Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine a job market so bleak that it has result in such an extended unemployment on my part. Although financially we keep our heads above water, it is a constant source of stress. Added to the stress of graduate school and a full-time career, well… it has been challenging and not the way either of us expected to start our life together.
I worry that if things do not change we may not survive the prolonged difficulty we’ve lived in for a year and a half. I regret, on a daily basis, the passing of accomplishments we had hoped to achieve in the first couple years together as man and wife. I fear that my prolonged situation has resulted in the loss of respect from the one person I admire more than anyone in this world.
Unbelieveable highs of a dream wedding and honeymoon to smack-you-in-the-face reality can be a real bitch.
MeanJoe - My first year was very difficult as well…but we endured. If you are still unemployed keep at it. Something will inevitabley come up…Do you and your wife communicate often enough … feels, concerns, hopefuls etc…etc…?
Married 11 years this May. Known each other/dated/engaged a total of five years before that.
The first year was loads of fun for us: Both of us lived at home respectively until we married and we built our own house - which as we said all those years ago that it wouldn’t sink in of how lucky we were to build straight away and it really still doesn’t sink it at times. - we both flushed our money down the toilet, traveled, had sex, did stuff and reveled in it. Metabolisms still operated at a normal level.
He is possibly the most tolerant, patient man on the planet or clearly the most insane for marrying me.
We have never fought, per se, except that one incident when i was 8.5 months pregnant and recovering from being really really really sick and not sleeping for weeks. He had it coming and I was right, anyway. So that doesn’t count. He ran into my knife …he ran into my knife 12 times.
Hell. The first year consisted of addiction, rehabilitation, brain seizures, hospitalizations, and job loss resulting in financial devastation and destruction of trust. Year 2 included all of the above plus hip replacement surgery and the sudden unexpected death of my father in law (leukemia).
Ours was hellish, but because of outside forces, not each other. We got married a year to the day after we met. We had his sisters trying to break us up, and his vengeful psycho ex-wife trying to make our lives miserable in any way possible. (Why, who knows, because it was her cheating that broke up the marriage. He had filed for divorce months before I met him.) We had to deal with supervised visitation (for his ex-wife, not him, we had custody). We had to deal with his older daughter being a spy for his ex-wife, and also having horrendous behavior problems. His younger daughter had some health problems that we suspect stem from pretty much being starved while his ex-wife had custody. (Those are better now, although she’s still awfully small.) We got our house foreclosed upon, due to the expense of the custody battle and nasty tricks pulled by his ex-wife’s sleazebag attorney. So we also had to move. The only good times we had we basically because we had each other. However, I suppose if our marriage can withstand all that, it can withstand anything. Our 2nd anniversary is coming up in May, and we’ll be having a baby any day now.
We had decided we were not ment to be a couple when my then girlfriend discovered she was pregnant. She had no health insurance and her student visa had just expired. As a result my only hope of seeing my child grow up was to get married so she could stay in the country.
Thre was a LOT of tension. I was working about 60 hrs a week and she felt alone and unsupported in her pregnancy because I was rarely around due to my work schedule.
After 7 years of marrige we’ve managed to put most of those bad experiences behind us. We’ll never be one of those “Truly, Deeply in LOVE” couples but life ain’t so bad. We don’t fight as much as we used to and when we do it’s not nearly as hostile as it was in the begining. We’ve even come to the conclusion that it all worked out for the best. If this keeps up we may even become “normal” eventually - but I doubt it.
