Commitment After the Honeymoon is Over

You’re wedding day was a success. The two of you either had a short honeymoon somewhere close to home or a longer honeymoon visiting some special place.

You arrive at your new home together. Maybe for the first few days, weeks, or months you still feel you are on your honeymoon. Life is great. You see only sunshine and flowers. Life starts to get into some kind of routine. Perhaps you both have a job and you go back to work. Or maybe just one of you is working while the other stays home dealing with the work that is involved in making this house your home.

Either way, you begin to see that neither of you are perfect. We are all selfish human beings. Sometimes even the most giving person has a selfish streak somewhere hidden. And if you really truly are unselfish it is because you have worked very hard to get to where you are at. It is hard to consider the other person’s feeling over our own.

When my husband and I were first married, I had to quit my job. It wasn’t a hard decision since the grocery store my husband and I both worked for didn’t allow spouses to work together at that time. My husband had worked for that company longer than I and was making more money per hour. We agreed that I would be the one to stay home.

The first two years of our marriage was probably the hardest. I was not used to being at home by myself. I had grown up with a brother and a sister at home. I don’t think I had ever really been alone much. So it was a struggle for me to adjust to being home next door to my family while he worked and went to seminary.

I attended seminary with him for the first year of our marriage and I believe some of the things I learned there helped a lot. However I was not prepared to stay home and keep house. I kept finding myself going over to my parents for visits and not having things kept up at our home. This was before our first child came along. Looking back I don’t know why it was so hard for me to adjust to married life.

I remember during one of our “interesting discussions” as newly weds. (We never used the word argument, I guess we wanted to be able to say we never argued). Anyway during one of our arguments “interesting discussions”, I was in tears begging him to let us move to some place away from my family.

Why was I wanting to leave my family? My husband got along with them. They let us make our own decisions. The reason was I was sorely tempted in my own mind to spend all my time over there. We were very close knit and I realized that all the time I spent over there was creating a void between my husband and myself. I felt that moving away would help.

Do you notice something here? I was not arguing with him. I didn’t look at him as the problem for my own mistakes. I didn’t look at our marriage as overbearing. I was trying to find a way to solve my own issues. I felt moving would cause me to have to figure out how to do things on my own.

My husband hated seeing me cry. He too was having to learn how to live with someone that wasn’t perfect and didn’t know how to do all the things he used to do growing up as an only child. He didn’t have help doing dishes and cooking. What he was having to learn was how to talk to and get along with another person that grew up completely different from him.

Communication and commitment was what kept us together during those trying times. Divorce never crossed our minds. We knew that if we didn’t work out these differences we would being living our entire lives miserable. We didn’t want a miserable marriage. We wanted a happily-ever-after marriage.

Now it’s your turn. What do you remember being the hardest time period in your marriage? Was it the early years or did your honeymoon phase last longer? Please share with us in the comments. I love to hear your experiences.

This is Day 15 of 31 Days Building Commitment. Tomorrow I will be discussing more on marriage and how to build trust and friendship even when your spouse isn’t perfect.

Like