Be prepared: What nobody tells you about being married

I have been happily married for four years now and there are so many things I imagined before committing to this wonderful affair. There were also a million things I was told by society and things I was not told by my parents. You are never truly prepared unless you are in the real thing. Experience really showed me what I am made of.

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People I know who are happily married could not put into words exactly what it was, because they probably never thought about it this way. I’m going to divulge. 

1. Everything everyone told you about your problems not going away when you’re married is wrong. 

People are lying to you. Or they married the wrong person. Or they didn’t understand their situation from the bigger picture. Or they’re unhappy people in general. Sometimes people live their lives with their eyes closed.  There’s a lot of reasons people can say this. 

When you get married you have a completely different mindset. You are inspired. You’re in love. You are ready to take on the world, walking on clouds, no one can stop you. 

You have a completely new mindset when handling these small things that once seemed like monumental issues. Someone is there to hold your hand through it. You also hold yourself more accountable, and want to be the best version of yourself in front of this person. So it really does make things better. 

There’s a behavioral conjecture tested in clinical trials showing that people can’t hide anything after knowing each other for two years. That’s the time people seem to give up any acts they’re trying to present. At least if they’re not psychotic or manipulative. This is simply because people grow, and they get tired of their own childishness, which is absolutely a good thing!  

My husband gave me a more digestible way to handle my problems and break situations down to reverse engineer them to make them easier to solve. For example, I used to panic at the idea that I would only have to live off my savings for retirement. It wasn’t enough to support however many children I want, and my future freedom. When my husband sat me down and said, “Here’s what we do. Write down a number you feel safe about, add tax, and add a cushion for accidents. We’ll work backwards from there.” He makes me realize oh. It’s easier if I take a breath and apply this stripped down knowledge. 

2. It can be stressful if you haven’t figured yourself out and are still growing as an adult / individual. 

If you’re watching this and you married young, it’s going to be even more of a journey. Humans are meant to change over the course of time and that’s okay. It’s a sign of growth and sometimes we outgrow people, so don’t feel guilty about it. 

There’s also a lot of people who are still 44 and aren’t fully grown up funny enough. Sure, they MIGHT have more experience in their lives, but men are definitely slower in development, biologically speaking, and some just don’t absorb their experiences or learn anything from them to begin with. It’s not a perfect statement, it’s empirical.

When marrying the right person, they will grow with you. And/or they will do the best to understand what you’re going through and accept & support you. The more they love you, the more they can be influenced by you and your growth. That’s a sign of love. Influence. 

I heard a quote from a little girl who said, “Love is when you tell a guy I like your shirt and he keeps wearing that shirt.” If he’s the right person, he’ll accept, try to understand, and listen to what you’re going through, and be by your side through it all supporting your decisions. 

3. Being physically intimate is important. 

It’s not everything, but it’s a driving force that will keep you together for years, especially if you’re young – meaning middle age and under. If you love someone in the romantic sense, you will feel passion intrinsically, and want to express it. 

It’s not supposed to feel like a chore. But you want to make each other happy, so it’s going to not always be on your terms where it’s ideally romantic. That’s okay too as long as you’re having fun on the ride, and are exploring things together. When you guys love each other, you can do no wrong, and you’re learning new things together.  

4. You won’t want to compromise if you’re not used to it, but you will need to. 

This is a really big one and I never fully understood this until I married a really stubborn man. And I’m just as stubborn. Possibly more so. When dating, it was easy for me to walk away. When guys I dated showed their commitment by staying after a disagreement, I was impressed. But marriage makes it harder to leave. 

I heard the quote, “I learned from my marriage that I didn’t want to be right. I just wanted her.” That quote moved the mountains in me. I was so touched when I heard how much this guy loved his ex wife and learned the hard way. I just love when people talk so lovingly of their partners and people around them. That’s a level of regret and gratitude I don’t see often.

There’s multiple ways to do this, but most of all, both of you have to make it work. You’re going to fight, because wires get crossed and communication gets lost sometimes. You’re both busy living lives and trying to include each other as best you can. It happens. But preventing it is a decent step you can take for the both of you. 

Compromising is making mutually acceptable negotiations. Negotiation is tough when you don’t know where to start, and I do this for a living so I know. A lot of people are afraid to put their needs up front without seeming selfish. Which is why compromise is such a weird thing to me. 

I always saw it in this way: You want to wear blue shoes, but your partner wants you to wear brown shoes. The compromise where both of you would technically win is if you wore one brown shoe and one blue shoe. It doesn’t work. None of you actually enjoy this. 

What you have to do is take a step back and reevaluate your long term goal. What would make both of you happy? Truly happy in the long run. Sometimes it’s a little sacrifice of being comfortable and practical in the blue shoes. But if you say yes to your partner now by wearing the uncomfortable, impractical brown shoes, you will not get an earful later, or resentful passive aggressive encounters. So you do both win in the end if you have a little compromise / sacrifice for now. 

There has to be a balance of this, and it can’t be one person giving up their desires to become a doormat all the time. 

One way to do this is by playing a numbers game. I heard this from a married couple. And I also played this a limited amount of times, so let me know if you try this and find it to be a feasible tactic for compromise. 

I say, “I want to go out tonight.” My husband says, “I want to stay in.” I ask for valid reasoning on why, and shape my argument to compel him to rethink his motivation. 

5. The reasons a marriage falls apart isn’t because of one simple thing.

People ask the really watered down, simple question of, “Why did you guys break up?” when someone is single again. There isn’t just one reason people break up, unless a couple just started dating and they immediately witnessed a huge red flag, so they cut them off. Which is fine. You don’t want to dig into a can of worms when you don’t need to. 

I heard a quote that women don’t blow up at one simple thing. It’s a buildup of things that turn into resentment and then they explode. When it’s a serious relationship, it’s an accumulation of a bunch of things happening. Some small, some mighty and exponential. 

Remember, a lot of life is in the details. It’s the little things that make you happy sometimes that can be chemical and hormonal. Or actions from a person specific to that individual that makes you like them. The similar goes for breaking up. You might want something specific that they just can’t give you and it presents itself in a multitude of ways. 

Life is how you react to things and and you’re relationship is just as good as your communication. It’s a collection of memories of how that person makes you feel. How you make each other feel, so make every small moment count. 

How to make all these positive things happen

Here are some serious things to think about before jumping into the fun idea of marriage. It’s nice to come home to someone. It’s a fabulous feeling seeing the person you love walking through the door after a long day. 

If you’re young and you’re watching this, if you’re older and you’re watching this, remember these things. Work on yourself first. Shape your life to be the way you already want it to be when you are married.

What you can do now to be ready for marriage – if you want to be married – is think as that person. Put your married shoes on as if you were already married and act as if you would in the best version of yourself. This creates habits that turn you into the person you want to be. 

You can create a list of things with the things I mentioned as a template with your individual goals. 

The reason goals are so difficult for people to achieve is because they are so detached from that person who has reached the goal. It’s hard to imagine yourself in those shoes. You have to put in the work first to make changes happen, you can’t just expect an instant result to occur. And the more work, the more results. Action is power. Not knowledge. You know everything I said in this video. You could be the smartest person in the world, but then do nothing with it, so you technically aren’t the smartest with all the power. 

So make sure to live a high quality life that you’re willing to present yourself with, and that will attract an equal or better! Because you might not see how high quality your life is now or when you go on the journey of working on yourself, but someone else does and it shows through them. We really are a reflection of who we surround ourselves with. You’ll also find someone who’s constantly working on themself. 

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