Things No One Tells You About Marriage

Like a first vacation to Waikiki Hawaii and the destruction of the images in your mind collected from a lifetime of fantasizing about the lush tropical Hawaiian Islands…

Marriage can also deal a death blow to many long held fantasies of what married life would be like.

There’s a great article about marriage and the 7 things no one told you about it that offers some direct viewpoints and useful suggestions. For the full article visit:

Seven Things No One Tells You About Marriage

Here are some of the highlights:

1. You will look at the person lying next to you and wonder, Is this it? Forever? When you get married, you think that as long as you pick the right guy — your soul mate — you’ll be happy together until death do you part. Then you wake up one day and think to yourself, “This is so not what I signed up for.”

2. You’ll work harder than you ever imagined. Early on, when people say, “Marriage takes work,” you assume “work” means being patient when he forgets to put down the toilet seat. In your naivete, you think that you will struggle to accommodate some annoying habit, like persistent knuckle cracking or flatulence.

3. You will sometimes go to bed mad (and maybe even wake up madder). Whoever decided to tell newlyweds “Never go to bed angry” doesn’t know what it’s like inside a bedroom where tears and accusations fly as one spouse talks the other into a woozy stupor until night meets the dawn. If this scenario sounds familiar, I’ve got three words for you: Sleep on it.

4. Getting your way is usually not as important as finding a way to work together. I can be a bit of a know-it-all. There, I said it. It’s really not my intention to be hurtful or brash with people I love. It’s just that a lifetime of experience has taught me that in most areas, at most times, I am right about most things. What shocked me several years into my marriage, though, was the realization that the more “right” I was, the more discontented my husband and I were as a couple.

5. A great marriage doesn’t mean no conflict; it simply means a couple keeps trying to get it right. As important as it is to strike a balance, it’s also important to have a big, fat fight every now and then. Because when you fight, you don’t just raise your voices; you raise real — sometimes buried — issues that challenge you to come to a clearer understanding of you, your man, and your relationship. I wouldn’t give up our fights for anything in the world, because I know in the end they won’t break us; they’ll only make us stronger.

6. You’ll realize that you can only change yourself. There is a bit of that makeover fantasy in all of us — something that makes us believe we can change the person we love, make him just a little bit closer to perfect. We may use support and empathy or shouts and ultimatums, but with dogged conviction we take on this huge responsibility, convinced we’re doing the right thing.

7. As you face your fears and insecurities, you will find out what you’re really made of. The strange beauty of marriage: It’s full of hard times and hard lessons that no one can ever prepare you for. But in the end, those are the things that give richness to your life together — and make your love even deeper and stronger than when it began.

Summary from article by Ylonda Gault Caviness for Redbook