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"Dear Bridestory, I just got engaged to my fiancé and I am very much looking forward to our wedding and us being married. I have been asking my married friends how they keep their marriage happy because I want to learn from them. But, almost all of them told me how their first year of marriage was one of the hardest years they had. They said how they fought a lot, found out things they didn't know about their partners before and it was generally not a great time. This scares me and makes me worried that my fiancé and I will go through the same thing. Is it normal for the first year to be bad? I don't want to panic out of nothing." - CuriousAndWorried
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Dear CuriousAndWorried,
Congrats on your engagement! For anyone who is willing to learn about marriage and then finding out the not so nice things about it must not have been easy to hear. First thing's first is that yes, it is a very common and normal experience to have for the first year of marriage to be difficult. However, this is not always the case because there are also plenty of married couples that have had wonderful experiences during their first year of marriage. Therefore, there really isn't any need for you to panic or to worry about going through 'hell' with your husband in the first year as every couple will be different. However it would be helpful for you and your fiancé to know the main reasons why some couples do struggle in the first year of marriage. This way you both can talk about them together prior to actually living the married life. Talking about these things will definitely make it easier for you both once reality of marriage kicks in and it will also be less shocking.
The first big thing that causes a lot of challenges in marriage is the fact that you both are now living together. If you have been used to living on your own years before, being independent and liking your own space at home, adjusting to living with your spouse and seeing them on a daily basis can be a bit tough. You may struggle with not having as much as personal space anymore and doing whatever you like, whenever you like and however you like at home. Living with your husband is a very different experience to dating your husband. When you may have only seen him in his best (physically or emotionally), now you will see him in all his colors and sometimes it may not be that pretty. To some people this may come as quite a shock especially if they have not spent that long getting to know their partner and going through difficult times before marriage.
The second biggest thing that you will get to experience is each other's personal bad habits, which may never have been very visible beforehand. A lot of couples get irritated with each other's habits such as putting dirty clothes everywhere and not in the laundry basket, leaving the room messy, sleeping really late or taking way too long to get ready to go out, etc. What used to not be a big deal before will most likely get magnified during marriage because if you have to see it everyday, it can really get under your skin. The key is to stay open minded and learn to not get into heated arguments so easily over each other's habits, which essentially do not really cause any harm. Choose your battles – sometimes these things are better off left alone.
The third big adjustment is having to endlessly make decisions together – all the time. Once you are married, every part of every day and every routine in every chore will have to be decided on together. No longer are you only thinking about what you want or what you need, now you will have to always take your husband's wants and needs into consideration from the smallest things to the biggest things. When will you both eat dinner? Who will do the cooking and the cleaning? What sort of furniture do we want in the house? These sorts of questions, which would normally be so quick for us to answer if we were only thinking about ourselves, now turns into long conversations and discussions. Therefore, constant communication and compromise is inevitable and very much needed in marriage. It cannot work otherwise.
As you can see there are certainly be there are a lot of new things for you and your fiancé to adjust to once you are married. This is often why many couples struggle in their first year because they may have underestimated the changes they would have to endure. If you and your fiancé are informed of what marriage might be like – then you both will be more likely to prepare for the changes to come. Good luck!
