posted
This is specifically, I guess for married folks, or those who have been married, though anyone can pipe in with observations (they would anyway <grin>)
Is the first year of marriage the hardest or most rocky? (other than perhaps the ending of the marriage...)
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It wasn't for us. I don't think we've hit a really rocky year, though. We're still living in la-la land. Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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A friend of mine swore there was a study done on brain chemistry during relationships. There's supposed to be a dopamine drop during the third and seventh years, making them the most difficult. Since we all know nothing's true til we see in on Hatrack ( ) I'm curious to see if anyone else is familiar with the study.
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I've been married for a whopping four years now, and lived with Christy for two years before we got married, and I haven't noticed that any of those years were particularly hard. The challenges change, though, and I could see how people might have different reactions to different challenges. It would depend, I suppose, on what kind of thing you find most difficult to cope with.
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We've been married for over 5 years now, but didn't live together before we got married. I wouldn't say our first year was really hard, but it was definitely harder compared to the years after that.
We were both in our 30's and pretty set in our ways. It took some time to mesh our lives together.
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I would say it depends on how well the couple knows each other and what they expect.
My wife and I datd for 4 years before we got married. We talked about almost every thing so knew what to expect when the time came.
We also knew that it would be a time of compromise and learning how to live with the other person.
I would say that one of the hardest times can be when a child is just born. The female is can be so intent on being a mother that she forgets to be a wife. The father forgets that he is no longer the only other person in the family and has to learn how to share.
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My own experience: I've got a bunch of friends who have gotten married recently, yeah I'm just at that age. I can think of three who appear to be having or have had relatively smooth first years of marriage.
The rest have been rather rocky. Two of the three "smooth" marriages had huge fights and issues during the first year of their relationship, so it seems like they got it out of their system then. All of these people had been in relationships for 2-4 years before marriage and generally appeared to have strong solid relationships.
I realize it is a small sample and it could be just the group of college friends I had. There are a extremely high proportion of female engineers and engineer-engineer marriages in the mix.
And I'm mostly hearing about it from the female side of the person in the relationship as well. It is possible that the male partner in the relationship is simply blissfully unaware of the issues, though knowing how loquacious my female friends are, I kind of doubt it.
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We have been married for 4 1/2 years. The first year was a lot easier than this one - I also think it depends on how old you are when you get married and how much you change each year, there is a big difference in how mature you are at age 22 and age 26. Also how willing are you to tolerate changes. I also think that living together before you are married also makes things easier. Year 1 was a breeze compared to now - but we have had a lot of changes in the 4 years.
[ November 22, 2004, 11:24 AM: Message edited by: Arthur ]
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posted
The rule of thumb here, and it's one to which I adhere religiously, is that engineers should not mate with each other. While having a single engineer on hand is often useful, there is no situation in the world to which adding a second engineer is a preferred solution.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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It appears that the toddler stage is also rough on a marriage with kids. I'm sure in any lasting marriage, you keep meeting and overcoming obstacles and some are more difficult than others.
I believe my own mother said that her first year of marriage was the worst too. My parents didn't live together before marriage though, and a lot of the adjustments were the "living together" variety. I'd say in one of my friends cases this is definitely true. While they were engaged, due to employment obligations they lived apart for the better part of two years before they got married, and merging the households together was definitely rocky.
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I think Christy and I got lucky, in that she had been living in a dorm and I'd been sharing an apartment with friends before we moved in together; consequently, we didn't have very established households to merge in the first place, and built ours from the ground up.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Secondly, I think that female engineers have a very hard time attracting males outside the engineering disciplines. We think very differently from the average female and it takes a certain kind of guy to appreciate it. Most of the time they are engineers. Every now and then there will be an artist husband, or a professional person like a lawyer or a doctor but I'd say with engineering women, a Very large percentage marry engineers. (I'm finding this true in the professional world, not just college.) This isn't really taking engineering men out of the general mating populace because the numbers of males in engineering do so vastly outnumber the females.
But that's a side track from my original question, in true hatrack form.
AJ
(I'd also say that Steve's and my relationship probably more closely parallels yours and Christy's, but we aren't married, and there are a lot of people who *don't* actually completely live together before marriage. The couple that I mention actually *did* basically live together for a year in college, but were apart for three years after that.)
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I did not live with my wife before we got married. In fact we were both virgins. The idea that living together makes it easier is a load of bull.
It is the expectations of the people involved.
This is said tounge in cheek, but the women,after the marriage says, "Now I can change him" and the man says" Now I never have to change".
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My first year was technically the most difficult, because we had a new baby, moved twice, and my mom got cancer. All of that can put a strain on a couple. But, as far as our relationship went, it was probably the easiest because we were newlyweds. It helped us survive all that crap.
I would definitely say that year three of four has been our most difficult so far.
I've heard about that seven-year-itch thing, but if it's about as difficult as our third year it won't be too bad.
Bottom line: Our marriage has been very difficult because we've had so much crap happen to us in the span of four years. But our relationship is still very good, so in that way it hasn't been TOO hard. Does that make any sense? We've been teammates rather than competitors through all the struggle.
edit: I think, technically, it was our fourth year that was so hard. It was the space between our third anniversary and our fourth, so that's the fourth year, right?
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PSI, I believe the "crap" you describe in your marriage was real. I'm not trying to belittle my friends marriages or anyones, but could it be that actually uniting together in the face of adversity strengthens the relationship.
I'd say that the majority of the group of friends I'm referring to *didn't* have huge major obstacles to deal with in their first year of marriage, though a few did.
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I completely agree with you, AJ. I have said that I'm so glad all those things happened to us early on because it made us so close I don't think we could be pulled apart.
For the record, some of that crap happened to us before we were married and I feel like it made us closer before we were married than a lot of people are even after they've been married for years.
It also made it easier that I essentially went from a parent-type household right into my husband's household. There wasn't much merging to have to deal with.
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We didn't live together before getting married and had known each other for just under a year when we got married. Our first year of marriage was relatively easy, as was the second year. I think it this third year that is hardest.
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"I'd say with engineering women, a Very large percentage marry engineers."
Well, in my own experience, this is because engineers only tend to socialize with other engineers. j/k
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posted
In my first marriage, the first year was one of the easiest. Only after time did our roles in the outside world start to change, and that affected how we related to each other. It got harder as we went along.
My second marriage has been the opposite, despite many stressors (my heart surgery, my mother's death, job searches, etc). Although the first year was still wonderful, we seem to grow closer and easier with one another each year.
[PS: never lived with the first before marriage, did live with the second before we married. No other live-in boyfriends, just the typical college roomies. All chicks except for the occasional guy in the house we rented, otherwise full of women -- and all those guys had other girlfriends.]
[ November 22, 2004, 12:32 PM: Message edited by: Sara Sasse ]
Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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My husband and I lived together for a year before we got married. That year was okay, though we were under pretty much constant, severe financial strain, and that contiued throughout the first two years of the marriage as well. There would be periods of a few months here and there where one or both of us would be working and things would be better, but those first two years after saying "I do" were a nearly unrelenting grind of poverty, unemployment, depression, and stress. Not fun to think back on. Things are better now that I have a grown-up job and we're more financially secure, plus we went to couples counseling for most of this past summer and fall and that helped a lot with working out our (originally badly mismatched) expectations of each other.
So, to summarize: one year of being poor but mostly happy, two years of being mostly poor and mostly miserable, and about six months of being not-poor and mostly happy Posts: 957 | Registered: Aug 2002
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I think our first year or two was hardest. I've been married for thirteen years now. It really isn't that it was bad, but that it just gets better.
Looking back, things that were resolved were understanding certain personality traits that don't often come into play while dating, cultural differences (you might not think that this applies to you if you are from the same country, but families often have different 'culture' too), and financial difficulties. We also had in laws living with us for some time, and that was pretty hard, especially with a strong willed, European MIL when I was a young bride.
Posts: 438 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote: I think that female engineers have a very hard time attracting males outside the engineering disciplines.
But I don't want my dating pool that limited. Engineering boys are scared of me! Luckily/too bad I wasn't thinking about relationships before I went into a PhD program.
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sarah I feel your pain. I scared every non engineering boy and most of the engineering ones I know too. It takes even a rare engineering boy to like an engineering female.
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AJ -- perhaps the first year of marriage is the hardest on those who are very independent, and who didn't live together first, so they have to get used to "sharing their space"
But overall, I didn't think the first year was the hardest. Of the relationships I have known, it seems like the years after year 5 are harder (that's why they call it the "seven year itch") because the couple begin to get more complacent about the marriage -- begin to slack off on taking care of each other's needs as much, get bored, get apathatical, etc. You have to work at it to keep it interesting...
quote: sarah I feel your pain. I scared every non engineering boy and most of the engineering ones I know too. It takes even a rare engineering boy to like an engineering female.
I find that statement EXTREMELY weird. All the nerd guys that I know *love* 'nerdy' girls.
Hell, if I find out a woman reads fiction, has even a vaguely nice personality, and doesn't attract buzzards, I'd be all over her like white on rice. I bet every other guy on the board feels the same way.
quote:The rule of thumb here, and it's one to which I adhere religiously, is that engineers should not mate with each other. While having a single engineer on hand is often useful, there is no situation in the world to which adding a second engineer is a preferred solution.
What evidence do you base this on? My parents are both engineers, and theirs is one of the happiest, smoothest marriages I've ever seen. I suppose it's possible they could be hiding problems, but they don't seem to be good enough actors to pull that off for nearly two decades without my brothers or me noticing. Additionally, my aunt and uncle are both engineers and that seems to be working out for them as well. At any rate, I think this might have biased me toward other engineers as potential partners. I certainly tend to get along better with them, since we care about the same things. And BannaOJ is very right about engineering females thinking differently from the majority of females. I'm convinced that the reason my male friends don't hit on me more often is that they consider me 'one of the guys' and it never occurs to them that they could date me. Either that, or they are flirting with me and I'm just too much of an engineer to notice...
AJ is also right about scaring away most guys. Even my engineering friends from my honors physics class tend to put me on a pedastal. Non-engineering guys tend to look at me funny as soon as I start talking about the things I'm interested in ("Hey, did you hear about the NASA scramjet test?")
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Storm Saxon, they might like you for a friend, but if you are actually possibly more nerdy then they are, then they become intimidated and insecure in their own nerdiness and think you'd never in a million years be interested in them. I've seen it happen in my own life a gazillion times.
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"how do porcupines mate?" --Very carefully. (yeah an old joke but I'm thinking of the scene in the Thomas Crown Affair)
I think Shigosei is completely right as well. There's a particular variety of Engineering Oblivion when it comes to romance that female engineers are not exempt from. On the other hand you can make putting in a hardwood floor with power tools a romantic activity.
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Two of my best friends are engineers and just celebrated their 10th anniversary. Not only are they both engineers, but they both geotech engineers. They met in grad school. As far as I've ever been able to tell, they're very happy.
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Yeah, engineer romance is weird. One of my engineering friends was telling me about the "dirty equation" ∫e^x = f(u^n). So I asked him if he wanted to prove that. And silly him, instead of taking it as a suggestive comment, he started thinking about ways to prove the equation...
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We've been married 3 years, and lived together for a whopping 2 months before the marriage. Our first year was definately the hardest. Though we communicated very well about expectations before marriage it was still difficult. On a good note though it's been great since then.
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My wife and I will be celebrating five years in a couple of weeks and our first year was remarkably easy on us.
The third year was probably the toughest. We both lost our jobs and basically hit close to rock bottom and almost lost everything we had. The financial situation did cause a couple of quarrels but we realized something very important: money is just money, but a marriage is forever. We struggled through it and are still working on getting back on our feet, but really, compared to the marriage, the rest of it is small stuff.
I think I remember seeing a study once that said the majority of divorces are caused by the same arguments and situations that couples that remain happily married go through. It's just that in divorces, one side or the other doesn't want to work or wait the problem out.
That doesn't work in all situations, but I figure that my wife and I are going to stick together and ride out the worst of times. No matter the situation, I know that her absence would be worse for me than anything that could come along.
Posts: 472 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Thanks, Sadly, this morning I received an e-mail from an old friend that had moved away. He told me that he and his wife of 10 years were looking at getting a divorce. I remember introducing them and I remembered when they moved off to Nashville.
I haven't gotten any details on the situation, but I have to wonder what got to them?
Posts: 472 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Congrats, Pretty Flower! When's the big day?
In my experience, the first year was fairly smooth. Probably TOO smooth; issues that should have been resolved were just sort of smoothed over. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The big day was the 13th of this month, I'm contemplating having my landmark post being about it. Lol...the big 500-but I figured 5 years was long enough to wait for a landmark. So you'll just have to wait until I post it to find out how things went.
Thanks for the congrats, Rivka!
Posts: 44 | Registered: Mar 2004
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I intimidated the heck out of pretty much all men, and I'm not an engineer. I'm just a geek. But way too much of a geek for men out there. And this would be why I married Fahim. Cuz he's even more of a geek than me. It's a match made in heaven. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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JenniK and I have been married for just over a year, as of October 18th. This year has been very good for us, but we are both a bit older than most couples...I am 34 and she is 29.
I had roomathes before dating her, but had never lived with anyone else that I was in a relationship with, nor had Jenni, so it was all new ground for us. We lived together,although her formal address never changed, for over a year before marriage, in a single room efficiency apartment I was renting.
Living that close to each other helped us adapt at a fast rate, so when we moved to this place, a two bedroom apartment, we felt like it was a mansion!
We have argued a few times, but just normal things that every couple has to iron out. I don't fold her laundry anymore....apparently I do it wrong...lol...
And we share all our finances, which was a real change for me. I had a girlfriend steal over $1500 from me, so I was always really funny about sharing accounts and finances....but it doesn't work if you don't, so right before we got married we combined most things. I still find it weird sometimes...not because I don't trust Jenni, but because I had to relearn how to trust someone with that part of my life again, after YEARS of refusing to do so.
I imagine it differs according to personal experiences. If you are 20, and have always lived in your familys house, you are going to have a hard time relearning to do things their way, or coming to some sort of accommidation about it. Little things like how to make dinner and how to fold laundry can be a trial when you are not comfortable talking about it.
Also, I think that if children are involved in the first year it changes everything. It places a lot more stress on the relationship,and sometimes it can all be too much.
They are worth it, but I am glad that Jenni and I agreed to wait a bit before starting a family.
quote: The idea that living together makes it easier is a load of bull.
How on earth would you know, given that you have no basis for comparison on such a subjective issue? Or are you just preaching?
Cor and I lived together first, and my gut instinct is to consider it irresponsible to marry without doing so. But I'm willing to agree that for some couples living together first is a good idea and for others it is not, and leave it at that, and not call any notions "bull."
-o-
Our first month living together was kind of tough in terms of adjustment, but our first year of marriage was pretty easy, as was our third. Or maybe my hind-sight is rose-colored. Having special needs kids has been the toughest thing we've had to go through, along with the financial difficulties we've faced for the last year or so. We have almost completed our eighth year of marriage, and if I had to pick, I would say the seventh was the toughest so far.
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Oh, good job Banna OJ. See what you did? Now some really lucky guy is going to be miserable for the rest of his life. Its a crime. Truly.
Posts: 288 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
Okay, it should have said, " Now some guy who was destined to be really lucky before Kama read this thread and swore off marriage is going to be miserable for the rest of his life."
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