Oh the things you are never told about marriage (female, young, call)
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I think the "living together" is not a wise thing at all.
If you were to look at a house because you want to buy it, you will walk through it and inspect it. You know, the reasonable things you do when you check it all over. If you like it you put a purchase agreement on the house. (engagement)
You don't move your stuff in and live there wondering if you will like living there. (Living together)
After you committed yourself buy signing the agreement to purchase the home it's yours. (Marriage) It's exciting and fun to own this beautiful house. You can live in it and take care of it.
However, there WILL be maintenance and upkeep on it. It's not going to be sparkling perfect forever and ever. Just like a wife.
You want to rent-obtion-to-buy. Every house is different. You highlight the positive aspects of that house to make it great!!! You know, just like you would a wife.
Renting is for people who are ready to pick up and move as soon as trouble comes. Home owners are committed persons you can trust.
Sorry, but I don't think your analogy works. When you buy a house, you know what you're getting. You know if the house is in need of repairs, how much space you have for your stuff, how much things will cost, etc. If you marry someone without living with them first, that would be like buying the house based only on what you read in the listing and not actually seeing the house for yourself. Being married to someone means being able to live with them. Some people can be madly in love, but be unable to live together. What if one person is a neat freak and the other person is a slob? What if one person loves to have parties all the time and the other person doesn't? What if one person likes things all contemporary and the other person likes things country? What if one person hogs the bathroom all the time? Granted some of these things you're likely to discover before you ever get engaged. But a lot of things you don't discover until afterwards. And what you think are minor things that you can put up with do build up over time. I remember dating someone and thinking she was perfect for me. And even though I had spent plenty of time at her place and saw how she lived, it wasn't until I actually spent a full week at her place while mine was being worked on that I realized just what it would be like to live with her and she realized what it would be like to live with me. After that week, we joked that if we ever got married, we'd need separate houses.
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Originally Posted by Morphous01
Sometimes I wonder tho, if people live together to get all the benefits of being married without going through all the work/fear of getting married.
It isn't the work they're afraid of. Often, it's the difficulty in splitting if things don't work out. Divorce is messy, but if you just live together and if the place belongs to one person, then it's easy to move out. No fights over who gets what. But I don't think that's a good reason to live together first cause if you have that attitude, your relationship probably won't last.
I ALWAYS recommend to live together before you get married. But I also recommend that you (especially guys) live alone for as long as possible before having a woman move in with you. But again, I think its an absolute must to live together first before getting married.
I think getting married and then moving in together is irresponsible although a lot of bible thumpers would disagree with me.
[quote=DennyCrane;7008306]Sorry, but I don't think your analogy works. When you buy a house, you know what you're getting. You know if the house is in need of repairs, how much space you have for your stuff, how much things will cost, etc. If you marry someone without living with them first, that would be like buying the house based only on what you read in the listing and not actually seeing the house for yourself. Being married to someone means being able to live with them. Some people can be madly in love, but be unable to live together. What if one person is a neat freak and the other person is a slob? What if one person loves to have parties all the time and the other person doesn't? What if one person likes things all contemporary and the other person likes things country? What if one person hogs the bathroom all the time? Granted some of these things you're likely to discover before you ever get engaged. But a lot of things you don't discover until afterwards. And what you think are minor things that you can put up with do build up over time. I remember dating someone and thinking she was perfect for me. And even though I had spent plenty of time at her place and saw how she lived, it wasn't until I actually spent a full week at her place while mine was being worked on that I realized just what it would be like to live with her and she realized what it would be like to live with me. After that week, we joked that if we ever got married, we'd need separate houses.
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I think most of these things would be known prior to engagement. Part of the wonderment of marriage itself is learning about your spouse as you go along in your marriage. We don't need to know every nuance about someone in order to make a decision on whether or not we can be married and thus live with them. And seeing that people change over time, the person you marry and live with, may be different years down the road. I don't think that living together first determines the success of a marriage. It's all about the ability to compromise, realizing that people have faults and the ability to overlook some faults in exchange for the positive things that your spouse provides to the marriage. Things like hogging the bathroom, how many parties to have or attend and being messy are all things that can be changed to a degree, again with compromise. There is no way a couple can live together until death do us part, without being flexible and able to put up with some habits or behaviors in our spouses that we don't necessarily like. I have come to realization that my husband will never put the dishes in the dishwasher and will always come home, change and throw his work clothes on top of the dresser. I'm a homebody and he loves to go out. So he stays home with me more than he'd like and I go out with him at times I'd rather stay home. We compromise and are able to enjoy ourselves despite whether we're home or out. He declared 3 months ago that he no longer wants to eat red meat. That came out of the blue. So now we don't eat it because I'm not making 2 dinners every night. Changes happen and you have to roll with them. We could have lived together for years; it would not have changed our decision. When we met, I was a saver. Saved everything. He was more of minimalist. I now am like him. People will adopt habits from each other. I realize that being a pack rat was hard to manage. When we dated, he wasn't much of a traveler. I told him that travel was my passion and he said that he'd travel if we married. And he has and now loves it. I could have run for the hills after seeing clothes on dressers and knowing how much he liked to go out. He could have decided that there was no way he'd marry a pack rat who spends too much money on traveling and otherwise like's to be home. But it's been 16 years and it's worked out great. Finding someone that you like to be with, that you can trust, talk to, respect laugh with, cry with, learn from, etc. and who feels the same about you, is awesome. Things like how messy they are trivial. My biggest concern with him early on is that his parents divorced after many years of weekly arguments and eventually sleeping in different rooms. My parents have a glorious marriage and I was blessed with an example of what a healthy marriage is like and how much more harmonious my childhood was compared to his. He told me that he did not want to repeat his parents' pattern and found that their divorce had negative effects on him and his siblings. He was open to my suggestions from the observations of my parents' marriage that we could apply to ours. Ironically, I have 6 aunts and uncles and over 30 cousins. In my entire family, only 1 cousin has gotten divorced. I do think part of this is because none of our parents did. We were able to learn how to manage conflict in marriage by observing them. And none of them by the way, lived together first. No one in my family has. Maybe we just have 4 leaf clovers around us? It's not because of religion. It's just something no one has seemed to do because most of our parents would not be happy about it. I'm off of my soapbox now. Marriage is a fave topic of mine, if you can't tell.
What if one wants to and the other does not? Does anyone know of a good compromise?
This happened in my marriage. He wanted to and I didn't. We made a list of "pros" and 'cons" and opted to move. After 1 year, I wasn't happy and wanted to move back, which we did. Moving is not permanent. You can always move back if you want to or need to. So that's the way we looked at it. I tried to acclimate to our new state, but had difficulty and missed people back home. I have no regrets and did make a few life long friends in our new state and am really happy that we had the experience. We moved to a place that was very different from our hometown, so it was very interesting. If you can afford to move and save some money, try it! We rented after we moved and didn't get ourselves tied down with a house and that turned out to be a really good decision since we only lived there for a year.
No one ever told me that once you get married you'd grow to despise the one you married much more than you ever thought you could in the span of only a short few weeks. Thank god for annulments!
1.) How much work marriage requires. No one can ever prepare you for how much work you must put into a marriage in order to keep it going and to keep it strong
Any relationship is hard, live with a girlfriend and it's the same, each person has their idea of what a marriage/relationship should be and that is where the trouble may begin.
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2.) Your in laws will probably bug the crap out of you more than once. Lord knows mine do.
Only if you let them...
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3.) The first 5 years are the hardest, not just the first year.
Because your still getting to know each other, each of you have their own ways of doing things, which could bug the heck out of the other person. There are a lot of things that should be over looked and a lot of things that should be discussed as two mature adults.
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4.) You and your spouse will change, and neither of you should expect the other to stay as they were when you first met them.
No one ever stays the same, we all evolve, with life and life experiences, we grow, we mature, and we change, even our feelings and priorities change...but no one ever stays the same.
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5). Money is the root of all evil, but you must have it for bills and needs and sometimes wants.
You need to not over extend, and make certain you play together, put money aside in your budget to do fun things, cookie things, and plan get away weekends.
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6.) Do not compare your marriage to others, because each is different
True, but if your marriage is failing, it's hard not to compare...it depends on the success of a relationship, but yes, I agree, what works for your friends will not work for you. There is a way of looking at things and realizing, everyone has problems. Problems you wouldn't dream of. So view the marriage of others as an example of what you might not like so much in the end.
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7.) The grass is not always greener on the other side, this is important to remember when you have a fight or when you are going through bad times.
Yes, and everyone has disagreements, the point is, respect for the other person's feelings. To listen...communication is not one sided, it listens, really listens, but the other person must be reasonable and mature. We are so conditioned by our parents to think and believe as they do, and when we marry, we expect our mate to be just like them...and it is very important to understand, that they are not and never will be, that they have their own personalities, that they also learned from their parents.
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8.) There will be times when you don’t "like" your spouse, that does not mean you should stop loving them
I love you, but do not like you right now or what your doing right now, which is unconditional love. It doesn't mean, you allow others to deliberately hurt you. But love understrands and patient, as no two people are ever on the same plain at the same time.
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9.)Children do not make a troubled marriage better, if your having trouble do not get pregnant thinking it will help things because it probably
Absolutely and any adult that tells you differently, has no awareness about life
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10.) Your love will change. If you have made it past the things listed above you will probably grow to love your spouse more than the day you married
As I stated above, human beings change...evolve....so does love.
I would like to add, that it's easy to see that these 10 rules are correct, but there are other major factors in the life of a marriage.
Why is one going to marry?
1. Does one marry to be taken care of
2. Are you getting married b/c family members think it's time?
We are who we are by the way we were conditioned to think and believe by our parents. That includes our whole beings, spiritual beliefs, moral beliefs, political views, which entails a whole lot of characteristics...
We forget these things when we're dating and sometimes accept a person b/c we are so in love with the idea of love, or lust.
We forget to really sit back and study the person we are choosing...and be really honest with ourselves, asking ourselves, does this person have the same moral upbringing I have. How does he view infidelity, how does he talk to his parents, or relate to his family? Is he angry and talk about them, is he insecure, is he considerate and able to allow others their thoughts and ideas or is he black and white and expects you to think and feel like he does.
When we marry, sometimes we compromise who we are, our thoughts our feelings, even what we like, we give that all up for the person we're married to...b/c it is not what they enjoy. We cannot do that and stay healthy. And the person we marry cannot expect us to do that.
Will they be supportive if you decide you want to go back to school, or want to pursue another career? Or will they fear you going ahead without them? And so, they will try hard to discourage you from growth, from evolving?
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