What do you wish you had considered before getting hitched? No pretext is required of me here really.
Can’t think of anything, but I wish I’d been less nervous about the whole thing. I’d gotten into the habit of fearing marriage, and that was dumb. I was much happier once the ceremony was all over.
First marriage–how we would handle money, sex, communications and conflicts. But then again I got married at age 19–who would have thought to consider those issues.
Second marriage–nothing as we discussed all the above prior to getting married. But then again I got married the second time at age 46 and thus had years of life experience behind me to know that you have to consider those things.
Doing it sooner! 
I can’t think of anything I wished I had considered. There are a few things I wish I had known before hand, but honestly, there was no way to forsee the challenges we were going to have to face.
But, my wife and I were (and are) very methodical people. While we were gooeily in love with each other, neither of us saw marriage in a romantic light, and we sat down and went through everything we could imagine, and actually paid attention to the advice we were given. These days, we’re not quite so gooey. 
If you’re looking for advice, all I’m really willing to offer you is that you need to know how to handle both success and failure without losing respect or affection for each other.
No where near the pessimism I had be expecting! I’ll soil my knee next summer sometime, we’ll have been together 3 years, lived together, travelled extensively together, had our families mingled, nearly all our friends become mutual, and shared deep darks secrets never uttered before. I think it’s a match, and I’m staunchly anti-soulmate, painfully honest, and I think we agree quite well on big issues (agnosticm, money, child rearing), and disagree on moderate issues (mainly to do with our professions, debating over social policy, and how best to aid youth etc, as she’ll be a social worker and I’ll be a high school teacher).
I suppose the only reason bring it up is I might have waited slightly longer if she wasn’t moving to a different city with me. We’re about two and a half hours apart right now, and she’ll be done school before me, then come down. It’s alot to ask a girl to move away from her family and friends, but the career oppertunities here in town are better than where we’re from. I feel good about it, I’m just curious if there are any issues that people wish they’d paid more attention to.
Maybe I should be posing the question to the divorced rather than the married
I’ve been married for 14 years and got hitched when I was 22 years old. I was very young and naive (and so was she), but despite that, we have a relative happy marriage.
The questions you need to ask yourself is do you feel you’ve sewn your wild oats? Are you ready to take a huge leap in responsibility and identity. I feel a marriage works best when you merge your identity with your spouse. Not in an unhealthy and dependent way, but treating her/him as another part of you, with the same respect and honestly you would afford yourself, not keeping secrets from each other, relinquishing your selfish nature and accepting that marriage makes you a more than just a couple, and elevates your relationship with some serious promises to each other. Don’t go in with one foot already halfway out the Divorce “Escape Hatch”. Tell yourself the marriage is irreversible, come hell or high water. Are you ready for that?
I like the way you worded this. I was raised in a fairly modern christian environment - and had become comfortable with the one flesh idea. Since that time I’ve disposed the idea of spirituallity, but of course alot of old principles and knee jerk reactions still reside in my mind, so in that way yes, I do think I’m ready for that.
That’s good! And from the sound of your earlier post, it seems like you’re considering the right things. Good luck… here’s hoping she says yes. 
Like the other posters here, I don’t feel like we missed much before we got married. We’d already been together for four years by that point and living together for at least one, so we knew what to expect from each other.
Before we got married, we made sure we talked about religion, what would happen if we had kids, child-rearing philosophies (as much as we were able; nothing can actually prepare you for the reality), finances and other things. So, by the time we got married it was really a formality. The only thing I wish we’d done different is I wish we’d eloped instead of doing the whole song and dance. If that’s the only thing I really wanted to change, though, I think we’re doing pretty well. He feels the same way.
Married for 6 1/2 years here. An issue that’s come up for us that never came up in pre-marital counseling and doesn’t seem to covered in all the advice books and articles is that of how much changing you expect to do, and expect each other to do, to accommodate the other’s desires. (This would actually be a great thread topic.)
It turns out I think that, as much as possible, each of us should just put up with the things about the other we wish were different, on the grounds that everyone comes as a package deal where you take the good with the bad, “to thine own self be true,” and it’s really difficult to change if you don’t actually want to. In other words, people shouldn’t be expected to change much, and shouldn’t prod their partners to change much, either. (Obviously this is not an absolute- there are times to try to persuade the other to act differently. And, for the record, there ARE things about her that I really don’t care for and wish were different- it’s not that I don’t expect her to change because she’s already practically perfect. )
My wife, on the other hand, feels that no, in marriage each partner is supposed to put the other’s desires ahead of their own, a willingness to try to change shows love and respect, and there’s a benefit in that, in the long run, each person gets a partner they like even better. In other words, people should try hard to change to suit their partner’s wants and needs and should be free to ask their partner to do the same.
I’m not sure that we’d have done anything different had we discovered this difference in philosophy earlier, but it might have been easier had we thought about it and discussed it early on rather than discovering it through hard-won experience and a fair amount of frustration on both sides.
I think that to maximize your own happiness a married person ought to consider the fact that an unhappy spouse makes for an unhappy couple. Clearly there are stipulations and limits, and your own responsibility is to find a mate that is rational, and similar enough to yourself that any minor differences will be ignored, changed, or prehaps eventually endeared. I can think of dozens of things I now do out of habit, or no longer do because of her and vice versa. And they’re almost certainly all positive things.
So yes, I do think it’s reasonable to expect your spouse to change to some degree (for they’re sake), and it’s improbable that being married wouldn’t change you.
Edit: To add to this I don’t think it’s reasonable to put your spouse’s desires ahdead of your own, I think that is unhealthly and probably impossible, but putting your own desires first you ought to keep your spouses desires a close second (in a marriage of good faith of course).
Nothing, really.