There will be plenty of times that your spouse will say something or do something, whether purposely or unintentionally, that will piss you off. There will be times when each of you will make mistakes. You will say things in the heat of anger that you don’t really mean. Discuss it. Tell your spouse what’s bothering you and how his or her transgression made you feel. Work out the issue to your mutual satisfaction.
Not married anymore but:
- That she wasn't done partying
- That her family was a bunch of judgmental idiots
- That she'd return practically every gift I'd ever buy her, to have the money instead
- That commitment was just a word to her
Do you have a “goal” of getting married by a certain time? Have you ever said, “By the time I (choose your milestone), I want to be married.”? This may be an acceptable dream when your 10 but it’s bad news as a presumably mature young adult. There are no time tables for meeting the right person or developing the right relationship.
When you're young, marriage is usually a poor idea. To (over)generalize, perhaps, but at the younger ages women want marriage to have children, men want marriage to have sex, and once the children arrive there are huge stresses on the relationship for which neither is truly ready (plus the stresses of careers, money, etc., etc.). Besides, when young many haven't truly matured into the person you become once you're in your 30's and 40's, and your priorities and perceptions change. The person you married has also changed, and often you do not change in mutually beneficial ways.
Marriage can be a joy when you're older! Getting to that stage is the challenge, I think.
So, I wish I'd known not to marry until I knew how to find a truly compatible life partner.
When my wife and I got married, we did not know how to fight correctly. We did know all of the wrong ways and unfortunately we utilized every one of them.
We yelled and screamed. She hit and I pushed. (Definite no-no’s.) She threw things at me and I put my fists through walls and doors. She purposefully said things just to get a rise out of me. And when I tried to leave the battlefield to cool off, she would follow me and continue to lob verbal grenades. It’s incredible that we never killed each other.
LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES. DON’T DO WHAT WE DID. Learn the constructive techniques to fighting. Set some ground rules to all of your fights and NEVER break these rules. Fight fairly and allow cooling off periods.
Not a guy, but wish I'd known to 'stick with my gut'. . . once a liar, always a liar! I kept telling myself 'we're all only human'. So he lost his license (and lied about it), so he got laid off/fired (repeatedly). . . I'm not perfect either, right? Well, it's a far cry from not perfect to pathological liar!
I wish I knew just how much work a marriage takes
When I got married the first time I was only 23 and we already had 2 kids together, I put all my energy into planning the perfect wedding and raising the kids, and completely forgot to put my energy into the marriage and my husband.
i wish i had known how he treated the others before me, wish i had known what little respect he had for marriage, wish i had known i was the fourth wife, wish i had really gotten to know him better than i did. marriage changes no one, they are still the same person as they always were.
There is no way that I can talk about this enough. My relationship with God is the fuel that drives our marriage and our family. When my relationship with God is running on fumes, our marriage suffers. Not only that, the relationship that Trisha and I have isn’t a civil contract…it is a spiritual relationship that has been ordained by God, set apart and designed to make two individuals one. There is also a spiritual battle that rages against our marriage. We have an Enemy that attacks our marriage every single day. It is so easy for me to focus on earthly things and forget about the forces that are trying to pull my wife and I apart.
I wish I'd known that I'd never get to pick a show to watch on the best tv in the house!:-)