Expecting and Accepting

 I want to start this blog post off by saying I am thankful for those of you who read this. I know reading about family science isn't always the first thing you think of when you have a moment to spare. I promise that what I am writing will bless you and your family! Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments, I would love to hear about them. This week we learned about the transition into marriage. As someone who is not married yet I found a lot of this information to be helpful and it helped me be more excited for when that transition comes for me. From the discussions we had in class I realized 3 things. Marriage involves team decision-making. Second, an engagement is a great time to test a couple's ability to work as a team. Third, it is essential that the engagement process is a time of merging lives together and not simply living lives together.  

Before I went to class I had to make a list of the types of challenges I would expect that a couple is likely to encounter in the first month of marriage, and the first year of marriage. Those challenges included things such as finances, learning the personalities of each other's families, aligning religious beliefs, balancing finances, making a joint bank, making time for one another, figuring out who cooks dinner, getting used to the way one another lives, and even just being around each other so much. For me, I can imagine a lot of stress is involved in merging lives together, but if it is the right thing to do then it should be worth it and each partner should be willing to put in the effort to make sure there are peace and harmony within the home. If the partners aren't putting that effort maybe they should be checking to see if this is the right direction to be taking in their relationship or lives. In the reading one of the first topics was expectations. And this made me ask myself: What are my expectations for marriage? We all expect that marriage will make us a happy ad that it will be fufiling and that our spouse will be faithful. But that is not always the outcome. This isn't to put a damper on the excitement of marriage. But is to say that we all have the ability to choose, and we all are capable of making decisions that will hurt our spouse. Ultimately marriage is a contract between two people, and it is legal! The contract is an agreement to commit oneself self to another person and to be involved for all their life. As I typed that last sentence I realized that this is something we have to accept. We can expect but we also have to accept. I expect my future spouse to stay faithful and to be devoted to me for all of his life, but I accept that my future spouse will have their own agency and has the ability to mess up. 

The last thing I want to briefly mention is the wedding reception. You may ask: "The wedding reception? what does that have to do with a good marriage? I asked the same thing in class. But as Brother Williams spoke I understood that planning the wedding reception is a good predictor of how marriage will turn out. If a couple relies heavily on their parents to plan a 50,000 dollar wedding then the research shows that they will more likely rely on their parents for other financial things. I want to leave this idea of the reception being a predictor for the quality of marriage open for discussion. What other factors of reception could influence a couple's marriage? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.  

I hope this was helpful and that you guys learned a lot. Thanks for reading!