So I’ve been married now for a little under a year! I’ve heard the first year is the hardest and i’ve also heard that it’s the honeymoon phase. I’m going to pitch my tent somewhere in between the two. I don’t think it’s the honeymoon, but I don’t think it’s particularly hard either.
So I thought I’d talk about some popular ideas people have going in. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember if these were the specific ideas I had (this is why I should go back to journaling). Anyway, here goes.
That You Would Change
I think one of the biggest expectations is that somehow the wedding ceremony just leads to this dramatic change in personality in both couples. If anything, it leads to a more dramatic change in other people. For our wedding, we booked this huge hotel suite and after the reception, we went back to the hotel with some of our drunk friends looking for another drunk friend (a long and random story). We all collapsed in the living room and me and my new husband eventually went to bed. When we woke up, I expected to be greeted by friends in various stages of their hangover looking for breakfast and ibuprofen. Instead, I came out and everyone was gone. That was a huge shock to me, like what? Where did you guys go? Apparently, they felt like the right thing to do was give us space because we just got married. That trend continued for a while and I personally think that’s the worst idea ever. When you get married, you’re signing up to be with someone forever- who wants to be alone with someone else forever, come on.
That You Would be More Mature
It’s hard to remember what I thought before I got married but I know I definitely had vague notions of some level of maturity happening. Maybe we would have an eating schedule and have structured date nights and somehow just know more adult things. None of that happened. We are exactly who we were before we got married. I didn’t start cooking more, we didn’t get more organised, we haven’t had “date night” in like forever and to be honest, date night is not a concept we practised when we were dating, so unclear to me why I imagined it would automatically come with marriage. We are the same as we were before we got married.
That Spending So Much More Time Together Would Lead to More Arguments
I thought this for sure because before we got married, I always associated our big fights with spending too much time together and I was quick to go back to my house when we had a fight. Turns out, spending even more time together led to less fights. I do think our fights can get way more intense and that’s probably because I’m not immediately going “home”. Before we got married, our longest fight was like 24 hours long. Since we’ve been married, we’ve probably bumped that up to 3 or 4 days.
That We Would Get Tired of Spending Time Together
This hasn’t happened yet. On our honeymoon, we were together 24 hours a day for 3 weeks and it was honestly fun. It helps that we spend a lot of time just existing in the same space rather than constantly talking or doing the same things.
That You Would Not Think of Leaving The Person
There have been times where I’m like “shey I can always leave”. It’s comforting in fights, knowing you have the freedom to stay or go and staying is a choice.
I would say this year has been very different to what I expected, but marriage has been more good than bad (if bad at all). It has been amazing to have an inbuilt support system and I like seeing my husband everyday. I hate that now because he sleeps so late, I sleep later than I used to. My tolerance for pepper is also way higher because he uses too much of it when he cooks anything. I asked my husband what has changed for him and he couldn’t think rolls eyes.