When it comes to getting married, too often the burdens of expectation are not jointly delivered with the education to support life after marriage. For many of us, products of mixed, blended and single-family homes – there is no automatic assumption of what one does when one gets married. In fact, when I got married I remember thinking what do I know about marriage?
Seriously, what did I know? I knew how to be me. I knew that my husband and I were best friends. I knew that we could have a great time together. I knew we’d enjoyed getting to know each other, learned how to live together and we’d accomplished a great deal in our time together. But what the heck did I know about being a wife?
I know I’ve talked about the fact that living together is not the same as getting married. It took more than a year of marriage for the gleam to dull enough that I could recognize the changes that happen when you are married. There is a new level of expectation – whether you were conciously expecting there to be or not. These expectations are on both sides.
For example, it floored me that while my husband totally respected my self-sufficiency and my ability to take care of things and to contribute – he wanted to be the provider. He wanted everything I did to be because I wanted to do it – not because I had to. It took me years to understand that and it wasn’t something that he recognized directly either, but there it was.
Life Management Skills
It seems absurd that a class added to the high school or early college curriculum should be required because teaching life management should be the purvey of the parents. But there are so many things that are not just presumable anymore. I grew up with my mother and my grandmother, I didn’t have a lot of experience in managing balancing family and career as well as problem resolution.
The class I am envisioning as life management teaches financial, psychological, emotional and home management skills. The class would need to teach more than just balancing a checkbook, but teaching you how to check your balances. Balancing life, career, goals and dreams with love, commitment and caring is not easy.
But the life management skills should not just be taught by a teacher who is giving facts and figures, but a married couple that can talk realistically about balancing the efforts versus the ideas versus the ideas and ideals. Life management skills are offered by many religious organizations, but this is more than just faith – this life and faith, though important and intrinsic to the lives of many, does not reach everyone.
With so much focus on our fairy tales and happily ever after, balancing it with real life data about what can happen and how to cope with the unexpected – that would be a great way to check the balances.
What ideas or suggestions do you think we can offer the young to help young married couples out?
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