I got divorced (from a doper* - Hi ex husband!) not long after my second anniversary. First couple of months of marriage were great. It was downhill after that. We couldn’t agree on the color of the sky, especially if you tried to relate money to it. Add a baby on top of that and we were not oil and water - we were oil and fire. It came down to me thinking he is irresponsible and him thinking I am a controlling bitch. Both are probably right.
Dating was fine - marriage seemed to bring all that out. I think we both let alot of stuff go while we were dating and both decided to “put our foot down” about certain things after the vows.
I have seen hell. It is the first year of marriage. My ex-husband would agree.
*We do get along ok now so I don’t think he’d mind me saying all this publicly. I just won’t go into the specifics for his privacy’s sake.
We knew each other for a year, just about, before we got married. Moving in together (after the wedding, we waited ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo) was both very natural-feeling and a little difficult. He lived in an apt. that had been previously occupied by several guys in a row, and there was junk in all the cupboards, which I got the happy job of cleaning out, and he felt a little like I was taking over what had been his space.
Anyway, we mostly had a great year, but we were also learning how to live with each other, how to disagree without thinking the world was ending, that sort of thing. So things did get easier later on, but during that time we wondered why people always warned you about “the difficult first year.” It was only afterwards that we could look back and say we knew what they meant.
The hardest part was that I kept getting sick. It was like my warranty ran out, or something. I developed an insane prediliction for contracting bad UTIs, which would frequently then lead right into yeast infections. This happened about once a month, and I had never had either problem before. You can just imagine what that did to our theoretical bunny-like sex life. Then, I also managed to have two bouts of iritis, of all things, which is very painful indeed and rather inexplicable, as it usually accompanies particular illnesses that I didn’t have.
But overall, I give it a thumbs-up. Some great memories of the poor-married-student kind, and we took a trip to the UK which was hugely fun.
We met at 18. Started dating at 19. Moved in together at 23 and married 8 months later.
That was almost 8 years ago.
We did almost everything wrong. We met young. We decided to get married only weeks after we started dating. We moved in together right from our parents homes. My husband had never dated anyone before me and my dating experiences were limited to a couple high school boyfriends.
We never fight. We’ve never considered not being together. We have two amazing kids. Our first year was easy. We had a blast, picked out furniture, planned a wedding, drove to Canada! If you can spend 14 hours in a car alone with someone and not argue - that is true love that lasts! The following years have been much of the same. Little bumps from outside stresses that we’ve faced together. We love eachother and we like eachother. Many days the like is more important than the love.
In some ways I think going from your parents house to your spouse’s is easier than living alone for a while since you are used to sharing space. But whatever works for the couple should be the route they take.
Our first year was great. We had lived together beforehand, so we didn’t have to iron out roommate issues, and could just focus on being goofy newlyweds.
We did have a couple of weird arguments over trivial issues. I instigated one of them, and couldn’t figure out how the fight even happened. My sister explained it to me: when you first get married, you project the minor irritations you would have otherwise ignored onto your lifetime together, and all of a sudden feel pressure to nip those things in the bud sooner rather than later. Once we got past that, it was smooth sailing again.
Been married nearly 12 years. We’re both 33 now. He was still in college and I was working–we lived with his mom & stepdad. We had lived together for about 1-1/2 years. It was rough financially and schedule-wise. We fought some, but mostly, we had this “it’s us against the world, look out!” attitude that I think helped us sustain. And even to this day.
It definitely wasn’t the best or worst year. Has just about always been wonderful, but life changes (such as career, financial woes) can definitely put a strain on things. The thing is (I think), if you can remind yourself that you’re a team, you can make it through anything.
It wasn’t hell, exactly, but if that’s the best it’s ever going to be we might as well just get divorced right now. It was rough. Really, really, really rough, and I don’t think I could stand two more years like that, much less fifty.
He was working 80 hours a week and was chronically sleep deprived, physically, mentally, and emotionally drained by his job. I was working nights and trying to adjust to sleeping (or more often not sleeping) during the day. We were almost never home and awake at the same time, and when we were, we were both exhuasted, grumpy, and uncommunicative. Just to add a little fun to the mix, we had moved to a new state about six months before the wedding, where we had no family and hardly any friends and our schedules weren’t conducive to calling up the folks back home for emotional support. We were both constantly exhausted, emotionally isolated, and periodically depressed.
We didn’t fight, because we were both too damn tired to fight. We didn’t talk stuff out, partly because I was hesitant to bring anything up when we were both so worn out and hanging by an emotional thread. By the time it penetrated his exhaustion that there was a problem, I was too depressed and withdrawn to talk about anything. I still don’t really understand how we managed to hold it together, other than maybe I was just too exhausted and depressed to leave when things were really bad.
We married July 1, 1968. About February 1, 1969 I left for Vietnam. But the time we had before that went pretty well. We lived away from our families, in Washington, DC. That was a plus, I guess anyway. I don’t remember any real problems, except being butt-ugly broke all the time. I was making about $300/month. But she had grown up pretty poor so that didn’t bother her so much. And our most common source of entertainment didn’t cost anything.
We got married when I was 18, right after I graduated high school. A month later, we moved out of my parent’s house, and about 500 miles away from any friends and family. We had a tiny, tiny apartment without air conditioning, and we moved to So Cal in the middle of July. It cost $600 a month, and we were both unemployed and living off our credit cards. I didn’t know the area at all, and I got lost more often than not. We couldn’t afford a computer or the Internet, and we couldn’t afford cable, obviously. Looking for a job was the worse part. Talk about despair.
It should have been miserable. It should have been the worse year of my life, but I don’t remember being miserable at all. We were so excited to get out of the house, so excited to be starting a new life together, and I was so excited about starting school, that it kind of outweighed the bad parts. We’re still poor, but we both have jobs, we have a bigger apartment, school is great, and we’re in a comfortable holding pattern. It seems that we should have been doomed to failure that first year, but we weathered it out.
Our first year of marriage went just fine, but that’s mainly because we’d been living together for three years up to that point, so nothing really changed. Our first year of living together, on the other hand, was closer to hell than salad. I got laid off a little after we started living together and went through a few months of unemployment with a lot of uncertainty about whether I’d ever find a job (basically, I was 27 and the best looking thing on my resume was still my college diploma). While I was getting rejected by company after company and watching my savings shrink down to nothing, she was working at an office that required almost a 90-minute commute and would complain very loudly and on a regular basis that she wanted a place in a nicer neighborhood (read: a much more expensive neighborhood). Pretty stressful, and resulted in a lot of shouting matches.
So far it’s been great. I’m under lots of stress at work; she’s been under lots of stress, losing one job and having to find another. It’s having each other that helps with the stress. Once I see her, I start smiling.
We lived together before we got married, and that first year of living together - well, probably only about 6 months of it - was hell. We had just graduated from college in a very limited-opportunity field (natural resources), and were both working part-time jobs with no full-time jobs using our degrees in sight. Very little income + no full time jobs using our degrees + student loans payments = much suckiness.
Add to that mix the fact that WinkieHubby moved in with me and my roommate, in an apartment that really wasn’t big enough for three people (although it did at least have 2 bedrooms ) Also, I’m an only child and except for a short time my freshman year of college had never shared a bedroom with anyone, ever - nevermind the closet and the dresser and my bookshelves …
By the time we got married a year and a half later, we both had full time jobs and a bigger apartment without a roommate, and life was happy!
We’ll be married one year in May, and have been together for 5 years before that. Personally, I think things have been going really well. We have the occasional arguements, our financial situation is… ugh. We’re keeping our heads above water, but we’re up to our necks in student loans and consumer debt that we ran up while we were finishing up school. It causes some stress, but we’re both working and we know that we’ll be fine.
I think we got all the major kinks worked out in the first five years–we’ve had plenty of time to get used to each other. Plus, we’re a little older and wiser (he’s 27, I’m 32), and having that little bit of extra maturity has definitely helped.
I have to agree with my beloved CatLady above, to say that our first year could have been a hell of a lot better.
If either my job (medical intern), my marriage (the usual stresses of a new marriage, learning to communicate with one another in all the new ways that you have to), or my relationship with my family (moving away and having three close relatives die within six months, two very unexpectedly) had been the only problem I had all year, it would have been the toughest year of my life. Instead, I had all three hit me at once. Between that and the problems that she was having (her own employment and family issues), the fact that we survived, much less that our marriage survived, is amazing.
I’d love to say that love conquered all, but as she mentioned, it was probably more inertia than anything. Maybe that’s the benefit of marriage–it makes it that much harder to give it up in tough times. All I know is I’m glad we made it, because I can’t–and don’t want to–imagine my life without her.
I would describe our first year as Salad Days. This was back in 1978 and we moved to California from Missouri. We found a neat little place in the Santa Cruz mountains and the rent was cheap so we didn’t have money worries. We spent lots of nights looking at the stars, staying up late and working in the evenings. We both worked at a nice resturant and had a lot of fun after the day ended. We never had arguments and were the best of friends spending all our time together. A few years later we started a family and were able to purchase a house in an area now that is extremely expensive. We have been remodeling and upgrading it to our tastes as the kids grew. We feel fortunate to have the security of a home in a beautiful area that we could not afford had we had to do it today.
I was 42, recently divorced and marrying a widower with three mostly grown children. We had met over our Commodore 64’s on a local BBS. We used marriage as a threat against each other until one of us called the other’s bluff.
There ensued a tumult of thumb wrestling to the infinite power for a period of two years. He had to learn that * I will be in contol of myself* didn’t mean the same as I will be in control of you – and that he could work that rule to his advantage too. I had to learn to be responsible for my own happiness. He had to learn that sausage balls are not supposed to be the size of tennis balls and I had to learn that the chess set has to be Staunton. He had to learn that he was loved and I had to learn that being loved didn’t mean that he would ever buy me jewelry.
Some people just seem to marry smoothly. Some of us have had a rocky time of it no matter how much we love each other. Working through the hard stuff is what has made us a team.
I would describe our first year as Salad Days. This was back in 1978 and we moved to California from Missouri. We found a neat little place in the Santa Cruz mountains and the rent was cheap so we didn’t have money worries. We spent lots of nights looking at the stars, staying up late and working in the evenings. We both worked at a nice resturant and had a lot of fun after the day ended. We never had arguments and were the best of friends spending all our time together. A few years later we started a family and were able to purchase a house in an area now that is extremely expensive. We have been remodeling and upgrading it to our tastes as the kids grew. We feel fortunate to have the security of a home in a beautiful area that we could not afford had we had to do it today.
Beautiful and sometimes difficult. It’s been just over a year for us. I was 24 and he was… 22, I think. Yes, his birthday is in February. Right. We got married, moved in to a very very small studio apartment, our cat suddenly needed $1000 surgery, then Mr. Lissar got his wisdom teeth out, developed complications, and lost his job…
Then I lost mine.
We’ve been in and out of work, and mostly in debt, since the cat’s surgery. In spite of everything, we rarely fight, and the fights are always resolved within an hour, tops. We agree about almost everything.
Oh, yeah, and now we have a LOUD kitten who requires about as much time and energy as the average baby.
So far, and amazingly, it’s been very good. I’d hate to see what state we’d be in if we weren’t wonderful together. I can list all the awful, stressful things that have happened, and they don’t seem to matter- my memory of the last year is one of pretty uniform happiness. That sounds drippy and blissed-out, but it’s true.
Mr. Lissar says the above is accurate. The kitten says she isn’t loud.
Marriage is wonderful. I was/am really in love with my sweetie.
However (you know that was coming) there were a few awful things in that first year. We had moved halfway across the country and he found that he hated his job. He felt trapped there, in a job he hated, far away from the last one (that he could have come back to), away from friends and family, and yeah he took that out on me a little but that’s to be expected.
His parents decided to come and visit us for three weeks. I don’t mind saying that I didn’t want them there. A week would have been puching it. This was right after we got married, and I wanted some us-time.
He couldn’t tell them no. He refused to tell them no. So for three weeks I was absolutely miserable. They stayed for our first Christmas. Yes, I had to open my presents in front of my scowling mother-in-law. I cried on Christmas morning and pretty much every other day that they were there, and I’m not a crier. I don’t think I’m ever going to forgive them for that.
And there were my ongoing panic attacks to deal with. Plus I couldn’t find a job to save my life and I felt really guity for not contributing.
Now we’re back home and he loves his job, has finally learned to tell his parents no (I hope), and my panic attacks are gone, so life is pretty perfect now. I am also going to law school, so life is looking up for me.
I developed an insane prediliction for contracting bad UTIs, which would frequently then lead right into yeast infections. This happened about once a month, and I had never had either problem before. You can just imagine what that did to our theoretical bunny-like sex life. Then, I also managed to have two bouts of iritis, of all things, which is very painful indeed and rather inexplicable, as it usually accompanies particular illnesses that I didn’t have.
) Also, I’m an only child and except for a short time my freshman year of college had never shared a bedroom with anyone, ever - nevermind the closet and the dresser and my bookshelves …