Things I Wish I'd Known Before We Got Married: We Plan the Wedding, Not the Marriage

The complaint tends to arrive a year or two after the wedding. The friend whose feed was nothing but couple photos while she was dating now sighs into her coffee: “I was sold a bill of goods.” The boyfriend who once anticipated her every need, who treated her like a princess around the clock, now leaves cigarette packs and empty bottles in his wake and drops his socks wherever he takes them off. The male version is just as pointed: “I was promised a good wife. Instead I come home to a living room that looks like a landfill and a sink full of dirty dishes.”

Cue the old line: marriage is the graveyard of love. So where did it go wrong? Did she marry the wrong man? Did he marry the wrong woman?

Before blaming marriage, ask a simpler question: how long did you spend preparing for the wedding? A month? Three? Half a year? For one perfect ceremony you tour venues, choose invitations, choreograph the entrance, hire a planner, and still enlist friends and relatives so that nobody else’s ideas collide with yours. Money, energy, favours — none of it is spared. And the ceremony itself lasts perhaps two hours.

How much deliberate study and planning went into the marriage that comes after?

Probably none. We spend our most lavish preparation on an event that lasts an afternoon, and almost no homework on the thing that lasts a lifetime. Most people are not unwilling; they simply never realise there is homework to do. Settle the questions that can be settled before the wedding, head off the friction that would otherwise surface after it, and you can cut a good half of the mess.

That is what Gary Chapman’s Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married is for. Chapman is an American marriage counsellor with decades of experience and a caseload full of marriages on the brink. His argument is blunt: learning early how to run a marriage is what keeps love fresh.

Premarital preparation comes in two halves. The first is understanding your partner: read your future life together through his family, and learn to express love in the way he can receive it. The second is inoculating yourself: accept that your personalities differ, learn to compromise and apologise so that arguments do not damage the relationship, and agree on chores and money in advance so that you face the future as one team.

Two Years of Hormones, and Then?

While dating you want to be glued together, and to please each other you would fly from one hemisphere to the other for a birthday. Chapman’s warning: infatuation under hormonal command does not last. On average, two years.

After that the pull fades, the relationship settles into calm, and you become what people call an old married couple. Which is why so many people, a few years in, cannot help wondering: have we fallen out of love?

You have not. What has happened is that you can no longer feel the other person’s love. This is the point at which love has to move into its second stage: loving someone in a language they understand.

Anyone who has read The Five Love Languages will remember the taxonomy: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, physical touch. Inside a marriage, if two people do not speak in the language the other recognises, one of them broadcasts at full power while the other’s receiver is switched off. Eventually the one who receives nothing gives up.

How do you find each other’s language? Two routes.

First, notice how you express affection to other people. If your default way of caring for a friend is to invite her for coffee and a long talk, quality time is probably your language. If your best friend keeps bringing you biscuits she baked and jewellery she made by hand, hers is likely gifts.

Second, list the things you complain about, or insist that others do. If you are forever grumbling that your partner works too much and never helps around the house, what you are asking for is acts of service. If every time you finish a task you want to shout, “Look, aren’t I good at this? Praise me,” then words of affirmation are what you crave.

Once you know, the effort lands. Your husband fixes the laptop and waits, visibly, to be praised; you silently hand him a glass of water. That mismatch will block more love than you can supply. A single “wow, you actually fixed it, that’s impressive” can outperform ten glasses of water.

You Marry a Family, Not Just a Person

“You are not marrying one person; you are marrying a family.” The line is a cliché, and it is accurate. The classic case is the mother-in-law problem — and when it blows up, it does as much damage as a small war.

Two reasons to study your partner’s family before the wedding.

One, read the characters you will be dealing with. Marriage joins two families of origin, and his parents will involve themselves in your life to some degree. This is the age of instant messaging: sleep in on a Sunday and the mother-in-law who rises at six may know before you have had breakfast; have a bad month at work and your father-in-law may be on the phone. Meet them early, learn how they operate, and let them learn who you are, so that you can adjust — or agree on ground rules — before you need to.

Two, his family is a window into him. The family of origin leaves deep marks, from what he eats to how he deals with people. Your partner carries some of his parents in him. If you notice that his parents turn every small thing into a fight, the odds are higher that he will fixate on small things after you are married.

If both families are easy to be around, wonderful. If they are not, plan ahead.

Step one: write the flaws down. Each of you lists the flaws you see in your own parents’ character and behaviour. If you have both spent time with each other’s families, add what you have observed there.

Step two: discuss, and check yourself for the same patterns. Suppose your partner says, “Your mother talks like a machine gun and your father never gets a word in.” You think about it; it is true. Then watch that you do not replay that scene in your own relationship.

Reading each other’s families is, in a sense, a rehearsal of your married life. Adjust the parts of yourself that resemble the worst of your parents, and you will avoid a great many arguments.

Different Personalities Are Not a Dealbreaker

No amount of preparation prevents friction after the wedding. And while you were courting, both of you were unconsciously performing and accommodating; the “we are so alike” of the engagement may simply have been concessions. Once you are married, the truth arrives: “God, we are nothing alike.”

Does that mean you should not have married? Chapman is not that pessimistic. Difference in itself is not the obstacle; what matters is how the two of you handle it.

One, understand each other. Having found the difference, both of you need to lower your own standards a little and look at it honestly. Do not stare at the places where your partner differs from you, and do not impose your way of living on him. You are a talker; he is quiet. Stop complaining that he does not talk. Put yourself in his position: perhaps he is naturally introverted, perhaps he has simply had a long day.

Two, find the balance point. Difference is a given; erasing it is not realistic, so negotiate something both of you can live with. You like things clean, he is a mess, and neither of you is comfortable being the one who gives way. Agree instead: clothes can be left lying around, but never on the bed; plates need not be stacked in order, but they must be washed properly. A few ground rules remove most of the conflict.

Learn to Fight Before You Fight

You meant only to reason with him, to point out what he was doing wrong; he would not listen. One thing leads to another, tempers rise, old grievances get dragged out, something gets thrown, and then the silent treatment. Small arguments are tonic; big ones are corrosive, and no relationship survives many of them. Three skills worth acquiring before the wedding.

One, listen. When there is friction, sit down and calm down first. Listen properly while he speaks and try to understand why he holds the view he holds. You want to change jobs for better pay; he objects immediately. Hold your temper and ask why before you answer. Perhaps he has thought of a benefit you overlooked; perhaps he thinks stability matters more than a raise. Listening defuses the argument, and it also makes your decision better informed.

Two, compromise. One step back and the horizon widens. Two people who lock horns every day will wear each other out. Compromise is not endless capitulation; it is stepping aside for love when it matters, and letting your partner see that you can bend — which, oddly, often gets you further. He insists you watch football with him tonight and you could not care less. Agree, and add a condition: “Fine. Tomorrow you watch my show with me.” Trading a step back for a step forward beats two people fighting over the remote while nobody watches anything.

Three, apologise. After an argument, even with the person closest to you, it is hard to admit fault. But if you paper over it, he remembers; the hurt does not evaporate. You have planted a time bomb: the next disagreement will dig up grievances from years ago. A sincere apology is the precondition for real reconciliation. If the words will not come, change the form: buy a small gift, write an apology by hand, offer to cook and do the dishes. (On how to apologise so that it can actually be received, see Chapman’s The Five Languages of Apology.)

Chores: Make the List Before the Wedding

Sanmao once wrote that love does not last long unless it settles into the concrete stuff of daily life — groceries, cooking, cleaning. Married life means handling ordinary chores as well as personalities and habits.

Now that more women work outside the home, the old division of “he earns, she keeps house” no longer holds. If you have not agreed who does what before the wedding, you drift into a situation where nobody is responsible: you think, “I work all day, he should do it,” and he thinks the same, and the pushing back and forth ends with the flat looking like a dump.

Chapman offers a three-step routine.

Step one: make the inventory. Look at what actually gets done in your home over a day, imagine your future home, and draw up the list: shopping, cooking, washing up, sweeping, mopping, cleaning windows. Write each item down and let your partner add to it.

Step two: each of you tries everything, and takes notes. Set aside time and have each of you do every item on the list once, noting how long it took and how it felt. Perhaps you love cooking and bake well but cannot stand cleaning the bathroom. Taking notes on housework sounds fussy, but it is a quick way to surface both of your strengths and preferences.

Step three: negotiate the split. Divide by preference and strength. You are the shopper who finds good produce cheaply; he has never been to a market. He can cook; you can set the kitchen on fire. So you shop and he cooks. Whatever neither of you likes or does well, alternate: you cook this week, he cooks next week.

Money: One Ledger, Not Two

Surveys keep finding that more than eighty per cent of marital problems involve money. If you cannot manage money together after the wedding, the quality of the marriage suffers.

Everyone arrives with a ledger in their head. Some are spenders: credit cards maxed, nothing saved. Some are careful to the point of austerity. Some chase high-risk, high-return trades; some want slow and steady, and count a savings account as an investment strategy. Two ledgers collide, the old one no longer works, and you have to design a household ledger together.

One, be of one mind. After the wedding there is “our money,” not “your money and my money.” Be honest about income and debt. Lending to a friend or making a large investment is a decision you discuss first — the single most effective step for avoiding money fights.

Two, write the plan. Decide before the wedding who keeps the books, and do not use tradition as the reason. Look at who budgets better and who keeps better records. Then write a joint financial plan, with proportions for day-to-day spending, a flexible buffer, and savings and investment. If your attitudes to spending do not match, set an allowance each of you can spend freely — anything under, say, two thousand, without the other commenting.

Three, ask people who know. If you lack experience and do not know what a household actually costs, talk to couples who have been married a few years and live in similar conditions. Their numbers will make your plan far more realistic.

Two people on the same side, sharing income and planning spending together, is how the quality of life actually rises.

Conclusion

The book takes the premarital homework apart piece by piece: how to express love, how to face each other’s families, how to handle incompatibility, who does the chores, who manages the money. For the already married it is remedial; for the engaged it is a preview.

There is a song that goes, “The most romantic thing I can imagine is growing old with you.” Growing old gracefully and happily depends less on how spectacular the wedding day was than on having the conversations beforehand. Do not wait until the house is a mess and the arguments are routine to say, “I wish I’d known.”

Further reading: our review of Nonviolent Communication supplies the technique this book leaves out — how to argue without doing damage; Why Men Love Bitches starts from the same premise — have your own boundaries before you negotiate a shared life.