Lessons to learn
Love and marriage are wonderful, but pressures on relationships in early marriage can be very intense.
As well as setting up home together, there are other issues to be considered including finance, priorities, new responsibilities and working together to protect the marriage.
My story is one of divorce. We only celebrated our first anniversary; by the second I was five months pregnant and discovered that my husband was having an affair. Looking back I believe that there were some other issues, apart from the affair, that destroyed our marriage.
No challenge, nothing to work together for
We moved into our first home fully furnished, courtesy of his parents who kindly gave us many items of furniture they no longer wanted – it became an extension of his parents’ home and therefore he said he never really felt ‘at home’ in ours.
Different priorities
My priority was to make our house a home where we could raise a family. His priority was to buy a bigger and flashier car. The loan repayments cost more than our mortgage! Our greatest priority was to encourage each other and protect our relationship. We blew it.
Responsibilities
New responsibilities changed the way we viewed each other, having a mortgage and bills to pay often meant making sacrifices. This was hard because we didn’t work at it together.
Money and materialism
New jobs meant a higher level of income for both. However things changed when he lost his job and overnight our income was reduced by two thirds. Easy credit meant we soon ran up large debts.
Communication
This was big one for us – we just didn’t talk about the things that really mattered. We denied there were problems and talked to other people instead of each other.
Disposable society
We live in a disposable society - when we tire of something we just throw it out, because ‘we can always get another’. He left me for the person he had an affair with and so we divorced. This wasn’t my choice. It was something that happened to me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I had to grieve the death of my marriage and learn to live with myself before I could live with anyone else. It took time, but recovery was possible and I am now married again, having learnt many of the above lessons.
Written by Liz Gardner. Posted on 2nd November.
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