Spring, that time of year when, as the poet says, "a young man's thoughts turns to love."
That's true of young women too, of course, and that is why there are always so many weddings in the Spring.
My own wedding occurred in the Spring, 14 years ago. My wife and I just celebrated our anniversary a few days ago in fact, and like many other people who are in their late 40's, I've developed a strong desire to help younger people who might be in need of some guidance as they navigate the seasons of life I've already passed through.
So I'm hoping this blog will be read by anyone who is either newly married or getting ready to be married and that the experience and observations I'm going to attempt to share will be of some benefit to someone. I hesitate to call this "advice" because a conclusion I've come to in my nearly five decades of living on this planet is that advice is kind of overrated.
No two people are alike, and so no two journeys are alike. Trying to tell a younger, less experienced person what they should do, or not do, based on one's own experience, is seldom helpful, because the younger person is on a different journey, living through a different season of history, and on their way to a different destination. So any "advice" they get is more likely then not to be "bad" advice or at best "irrelevant" or otherwise unhelpful.
For instance, because my parents got divorced when I was 13 (and had had a very unstable marriage for several years before they got divorced) I was given some very well-meaning advice by several people not to get married myself, because statistically, I was likely to have an unstable marriage and eventually also get divorced just like my parents did. It would be better, these well-meaning people told me, not to get married in the first place.
Some of these people even quoted passages of Scripture to back up their advice, and I would be lying to you if I said I did not give it serious consideration and even came very close to calling off the wedding because of it. But in the end, I decided that I had good reasons to think I would not make the same mistakes my father had made and thus I would be a better husband and father then he had been and so I would not divorce this woman I was about to marry the way my father divorced my mom.
In the event, I turned out to have made the right move, and some of the people who advised me against getting married have quietly come to me and told me they're glad I didn't listen to them.
So, all of that is to say, brothers and sisters, that what I'm about to tell you is indeed just some of my own thoughts, musings, analysis and observations based on my own experience and the experiences of people I've known, some of whom had (and still have) great marriages and some of whom stayed married to someone even though they didn't want to and some of whom got divorced WAY too quickly and later regretted it and others who got divorced and said it was the best thing they'd ever done.
Like I said, everyone's on their own journey, and you can learn things from everyone, even or perhaps especially if they're making mistakes.
So, with all of that in mind, here's a few anecdotes and the things I learned from them, starting with the warning from II Corinthians 6:14-15.
My wife and I are products of two VERY different times and places. I grew up in the United States in the 1980s and 90s, while she grew up in the Soviet Union in roughly the same time frame. The USA is (or maybe I should say WAS) a Western country with a strong Judeo-Christian foundation, while the Soviet Union was an Eastern country with an Orthodox Christian tradition but which was officially Atheist. The music, movies, books, plays, etc. I grew up listening to, reading and watching were VASTLY different then everything she grew up consuming. The same is true of the food we both grew up eating, many of the things we both learned in school, and, needless to say we grew up speaking different languages.
Our family situations were also quite different, beyond what I've already mentioned about my parents getting divorced and hers being still married. In fact, when we started dating, I had been living by myself for many years after leaving my mother's house at the age of 18 and she was living in a small house here in Jerusalem with not only her parents, but her younger sister who was married and had three children. Yes, that's right, my wife was living in a small apartment with seven other people, while I was living in an apartment by myself. I didn't even have a goldfish.
For the first year or so after we got married and my wife moved into my tiny little apartment to live with me, there were a LOT of issues that came up because we were both used to very different circumstances and personal living space arrangements.
But there was one thing we had in common and that was Jesus Christ. In fact, that might have been the ONLY thing we had in common, and it turns out that this was enough. All the other issues were manageable because of this, and over time, we made NEW family traditions, adapted to NEW personal living arrangements, and so on. In time, we became ourselves, and not just the sum of what we had brought with us into the marriage from our previous experiences.
Now, after 14 years (and counting) I can say without hesitation that my marriage is in fantastic shape and I know my wife agrees, because I ask her about it on a regular basis. This leads me into my next point, which is about communication.
As I said before, my wife and I grew up speaking different languages. In fact, on our first date (which happened without any planning whatsoever from either one of us) we both had very poor Hebrew, but we talked to each other because everyone else in the group of people we were there with didn't speak Russian. I was the only one who spoke any Hebrew at all, so I felt obligated to make sure she didn't feel left out, and the only way to do that was to talk to her in Hebrew, despite the fact that I wasn't very fluent (and she later told me she barely understood anything I was trying to say to her that day but she appreciated the effort I was making so she did her best to understand and she WAS somewhat entertained.)
From that inauspicious beginning, our relationship grew. The very next day, I asked her (again, in my lousy Hebrew) to go to a restaurant with me after work, just the two of us. She told me later that she opened her mouth to say "Nyet" but instead heard herself saying "Okay" and off we went. It was very difficult to talk to each other, and we both used a lot of sign language in those early days, but with time, we both got better at Hebrew and the rest is history.
I know I said I wasn't going to give advice, but I do NOT recommend this path for everyone. If possible, try to fall in love with someone who speaks the same language you do, because there are a lot of things that a married couple (or even a dating couple) need to work out that require a common language.
However, once again, it CAN be done, and that leads into my next point, which is about expectations.
Some people will disagree with me, but I think a lot of what determines whether or not people are happy or satisfied depends on what they were expecting. The circumstances they find themselves in might not be bad, but if they're not what they were expecting or hoping for, they're likely to be unhappy about it.
I regularly ask my wife if she's happy and she usually says "yes" but when she says "no" I ask her why she's unhappy and I try to help her address the issue if I can. Most of the time, it's because something isn't going according to her plans, and obviously, that's what is also most likely to make me unhappy about this, that or the other. So if I'm really unhappy about something, I tell her and ask her to help me with it. If we're working and praying together, most of the problems we have get worked out pretty quickly and we can go back to being happy.
Now, here's a piece of advice I WILL give.
Everyone has hopes, dreams, and expectations going into marriage. If you don't tell the person you're planning to marry what your hopes, dreams and expectations are, and ask them to tell you about their hopes, dreams and expectations, you're kind of setting yourself up for problems you don't need and certainly don't want.
Don't assume the person you're madly in love with wants the same things you want, has the same hopes for the future you have, the same priorities you have, etc. You need to talk about these things, set some ground rules, accept some possibilities, make peace with the things you can't agree on, decide which things you can come to some kind of compromise about and (this is the tricky part) if you discover in the course of these discussions that there are some things that you're a bit too far apart on, you need to do some hard thinking (and praying) about whether or not you want to actually go through with marrying this person.
Before you get married, it's a really good idea to talk about expectations. Sit down and ask each other about what the plans are for the future. Where do you see things going in a year, or five years, or ten years, or whatever? Be realistic, but don't be cynical. Don't stomp on the other person's ideas, even if you don't think they're very practical. Be patient and kind. Be ready to work hard to help each other be happy and content.
But before you get into the long-term things like careers, home ownership, etc. start with some more basic things you'll probably be dealing with almost right away.
Things like how long dishes can sit in the sink before "someone" needs to wash them, or how many days should go by between washing sheets, pants, etc. General home maintenance is something that people can have surprisingly different ideas about, and you need to get that part straightened out because you're going to be living together in the same space.
That includes the refrigerator, and so you should also talk about what kind of food you're used to eating and what foods you don't like and would rather not have in the house (I hate eggplant and my wife likes it but said she can live without it, so it only gets bought at the grocery store once or twice a month and it works well that way.)
You should also talk about money. Most people are surprised to hear this but the Bible talks about money more than any other single topic, and I think the reason is simply that this topic causes more drama and problems between people, (including people who are married to each other) then anything else. So before you get married, it's a very good idea to talk about your thoughts on money and get it straight who will pay what bills, how much you'll save, what you'll invest in, what you DON'T want to spend money on, etc. If you have debts before you get married, let your future spouse know about that and try to think about ways you can manage this issue together. It's a VERY bad thing for a spouse to be surprised by that after the wedding, so it's better to clear the air beforehand.
Obviously, you should talk about sex, and the closely related topic of children. These are topics that you can be quite certain your future spouse has hopes and expectations about. If those hopes and expectations aren't met, the disappointment can and probably will bleed into many other aspects of your relationship. If your sexual relationship is going well, everything else will be good or at least manageable. If your sexual life isn't going well, everything else will be more difficult and usually less enjoyable.
Another thing you should speak at great length about is each other's family of origin. What were parents like? How many siblings were in the home? Were there pets?
These are important points because they're part of the expectations your future spouse has for what they hope and want the family you're going to make together to be like.
For instance, despite the vast differences in our formative circumstances, I sometimes suspect that my wife married me because I'm so much like her father. The first time I mentioned this possibility to him he nodded matter-of-factly and said "Kan Yeshnah" which is a Russian phrase that translates into the English phrase "of course" but depending on the tone it can also mean something more like "well, YEAH! Obviously!" and I think that's what he meant.
Another example is that a few years ago, my son wanted a dog for his birthday. My wife wanted to get a breed of dog that her family had when we started dating, but I had had a different breed of dog when I was a kid and that was the only kind of breed I thought I could be comfortable with. She graciously agreed and that's the kind of dog we got and it turned out to be a good choice for everyone. I might have been able to cope with a different breed of dog and maybe that other breed would have been okay for everyone else too, but I'm glad things turned out the way they did.
As a footnote to this example, a neighbor of mine who lives on our street has three kids who absolutely love our dog, and they come over to our apartment to play with her sometimes. I told him to get them a dog of their own, but he refused, for a surprising reason. He said he had a dog when he was a kid and he loved that dog very much, but it got hit by a car and was hurt so bad that his parents had to take the dog to the vet to have him euthanized. That event traumatized my neighbor so badly that he never wanted to have another dog himself, and he doesn't want to risk his own children having to cope with something like that happening to them.
This leads me into my final point, which is about baggage.
Everyone brings baggage into their marriage that their spouse has to deal with.
This baggage consists of attitudes, ideas, habits, standards, memories, traumas, triumphs, expectations, etc. that are all informed by everything that a person experienced leading up to their wedding day.
I've talked about some of the sources of baggage in this blog. They include music, books and movies people consume, the things they saw their own parents and other married (or perhaps not married) couples doing and not doing, other relationships they might have had, things they learned in school, or church, or on the street, or wherever.
Not all of this baggage is bad, but even the good things we bring into marriage usually need to be adjusted a little in order to accommodate the other person and THEIR baggage.
Once again, the more you discuss each other's baggage BEFORE getting married, the easier it will be to make the necessary adjustments after getting married and moving in together, living in the same space and eventually having children together.
Conclusion
Brothers and sisters, there's a lot more I could say on these topics, but this blog has already gone much longer than usual, so I'll sum it all up thusly.
If you think you've found "the one" for you and you're ready to get married, congratulations. It is one of the most exciting and exhilarating times in life, and having a good marriage and a happy family is one of the best things in life.
Just remember that it takes a tremendous amount of hard work, sacrifice, having grace for each other (and later for the children), and above all it is absolutely imperative to keep a sense of humor.
The more you communicate with each other, seek counsel from trusted elders and spiritual leaders, pray together, and plan together BEFORE the wedding, the more likely it is that you'll be happy with the result. The opposite is also true. If you don't communicate with each other, seek counsel from trusted elders and spiritual leaders, pray together, and plan together, you'll start breaking down almost immediately, and you'll be very unlikely to go the distance.
In any event, there will be good days and bad days, there will be easy days and hard days...you get the point.
A last thing I'll say is that some people will tell you that each partner must give 50% to the other in order for a marriage to work. This is incorrect. Each spouse must give 100% to the other in order for it to work. The mathematicians among us will say this is impossible, and they're right. But that's what you gotta do.
Oh, one last thing.
The best breed of dog for a family is a Welsh Corgi. Some people will disagree with me on this point, but they're wrong.
That's what I've got for you this week brothers and sisters. I hope it blessed someone. If you know anyone who is getting married this Spring, feel free to share this with them.
