The Dreaded First Year

Everyone is happy for you when you first announce you’re engaged. They ask questions like “when are you getting married?”  “Where will you live?”  “How many kids do you want?”  “Will you send your kids to public school, private school, or home school?” “Where will they go to college?”

However, the pleasant peppering of perfectly relevant questions you have ALL the answers to quickly wears off, and people enter the “kindly concerned” phase where they go over everything that may go wrong.

To be fair, most newlyweds comment something to the effect of “you should elope—planning a wedding isn’t worth it.”

But after that, the number one warning we received was “your first year will be hell.”

This was usually followed by horror stories of, well, first year hell.

I’m not going to lie—my first thought when people issued this warning was to think, “eh, that won’t happen to us.” I was even tempted to look down on those who claimed to have “awful first years.” But then again, this warning often comes from really cool people who seem to have it together. So it became a little scary to think about as we approached our first year.

Accordingly, it’s been with bated breath that my wife and I have entered into our dreaded first year of wedded bliss. We’ve wondered aloud about what we may clash over. Would it be my leaving the toilet seat up, or would it be her squeezing the toothpaste from the middle? (Turns out, it was me sitting on the decorative pillows on the couch.)

Actually, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that the first month and a half have been nothing except AWESOME! Sure, we’ve had disagreements. Yes, we’ve had some conversations that I’m not proud of, and yes, I’ve already had plenty of apologizing to do.

But by and large, it’s not been bad.

That being said, I get the warnings. I really do.

It turns out that even though we’ve known each other for more than a year, there were a number of areas we could not understand about each other without being married. I had no clue that she feels like she can’t function in life unless the kitchen is clean, that she likes to sleep with the thermostat set to ZERO, and that she cannot take a nap. She had no clue that I am an insane morning person, that I frequently talk in my sleep, and that I am Batman (she’s still not convinced of that last one).

My point is: I think the “beware of your first year” warning is valid. It turns out that we’ve enjoyed all these odd things we’ve discovered about each other, but we could just have easily been horrified to discover personality traits that rub us wrong.

Either way, I don’t think marriage is something you can ever be fully prepared for. Whether you’re planning for your budget or going over relationship books to “figure out each other’s personalities,” there are bound to be areas for which no amount of preparation can make you ready.

The only way to learn is by doing.

As a closing note, I realize that my wife and I are only a month and a half into the whole marriage thing. There’s still time for our first year to become hell. So I’m in no way saying that we’ve arrived at happily ever after—only that I understand more of why those warnings are given by experienced couples. And I take comfort in the fact that basically every “first year of hell” warning was followed by assurances that marriage gets [even] better after the first year, and is actually downright awesome.

And that’s some advice I like hearing.