First Year Struggles
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Marriage on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 8:19 PM
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A while ago I got an email from a reader asking for advice on thriving through the first year of marriage.
My first thought: Whoa. I am not the right person to be asking!
My husband and I have a wonderful marriage now. He is my partner in the best sense of the word. I love him and wouldn’t want to live without him. But our first year… well, it was a little rocky.
I think I honestly expected our marriage, at the beginning, to look like Anne’s and Gilbert’s in Anne’s House of Dreams. I expected a year-long honeymoon period. We’d take dreamy-eyed walks, laugh as we did dishes together, and revel in our newly-hitched state.
Imagine my surprise when our honeymoon period lasted only a few days longer than our actual honeymoon. From then on, while there were walks and dishes, there were also plenty of long, emotionally intense “conversations” (my preferred term for arguments, ha!). Sometimes marriage was great, but often it was no fun at all.
I’d been so excited to get married, I hadn’t realized that once I actually made the leap, I’d need a grieving period. Letting go of the life I had before, making a new life with my husband, was an adjustment. Often it was a very difficult adjustment.
But somehow we did get from there to here, where I count my marriage among the greatest blessings in my life. How did that happen? I needed something to tell my reader.
Looking back, I think that there were two things that made the difference. First and foremost was God’s grace, including the grace of the sacrament of marriage (and also our knowledge of its indissolubility). Second was my own mental shift: I’d been thinking of marriage as something that would serve me and make me happy. By grace, I came to see it as something that would enable me to serve my husband and my family, and become a better servant of God as well.
That makes it sound like it was simple. It was not! It still isn’t, despite having become more rewarding over the years. It is absolutely worth it, though.
When I was confronting marriage’s first challenges, I wish I’d known that it wouldn’t always be that way. Of course I planned to stick with it, but I think part of me felt - after I realized that my House of Dreams fantasy was exactly that - that since I wasn’t blissfully happy then, I’d never be so again.
On the contrary, marriage to my husband has turned out to contain plenty of blissfully happy moments. We just have to work for them. It turns out they’re very good that way.
What was (or is) your first year of marriage like? How’d you get from there to here? What do you think we can do to encourage newly married people?
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