The M Word

Marriage is intimidating. Why?

The task of early marriage: Trying to become one.

Once the honeymoon phase is over, it's time to start establishing a family, right? This process is made up of so many things, including, but not limited to: learning to live with someone (which, I discovered ten times over as a missionary, is not an easy task), aligning very personal things such as schedules, setting boundaries (both between yourselves and with other people; the former boundaries should look very different from the latter), setting up a household and figuring out how to share spaces, sorting out rules of the household and the roles that each partner will fill, getting to know each other on a completely new level, figuring out finances (and differing mentalities as they apply to finances), and managing to remain friends with each other whilst in all these processes. On top of all of this, there has to be a limit to how much of what is happening inside the relationship can be shared with other people, especially other family members. Mom can no longer be the primary source of help, to whom you turn in every distress; even if you and your spouse are fighting, you can't tell anyone about most of the difficulties you face together.

I'm not engaged or married, but as I've been moving steadily in that direction of late, I've been surprised to see how many of these subjects have already come up. I've known my boyfriend for almost two years and I've been dating him (albeit long-distance) two months. While I knew that some things, including what I listed above, need to be considered before marriage, I think I subconsciously assumed that many of them would be initially brought up during engagement, and some would be brought up in the early phases of marriage itself, once they actually became really applicable. Since marriage is the direction that we both would like our relationship to go, we've had a lot of opportunities to make hypothetical plans and go through hypothetical scenarios, and every time we've talked about one of these things, though, or something that fits in this category, I've been amazed at how comforting it is to sort out things like this beginning before marriage. These discussions have provided opportunities for me to see into his character on a deeper level, and see if he really is someone that I would want to spend my life with.

From my (thus far) limited experience, he and I are really very similar people in a lot of ways, but we do have our distinct differences, which is kind of scary. Conflict isn't something that I really "do" -- my response to its approach used to be quickly rolling over, full of incessant apologies and absolutely certain that I was the one in the wrong and deserved to be kicked. But I think that this is where the crucial part of successful early marriages comes in.

The key: In essence, selflessness.

This doesn't mean being a rug; selflessness, especially in a sensitive relationship like a marriage, can, I think, often be misconstrued as complete submission, something that is never healthy between two people in a relationship in which they are meant to be equal partners. But there is so much value in caring more about what your spouse wants equally as much, if not more than what you want.  Everyone marries someone from another culture, in some respect. This requires a lot of adjustment, no matter how much you love someone. But change is absolutely necessary for a healthy lifestyle, and I'm convinced that when two people are willing to counsel together and change together for the better, marriage (and especially early marriage) will be hard, but it doesn't have to be full of conflict and strife as people ford the first few years.