Marriage

After 14 months of marriage, I still pinch myself on a weekly basis.

Is this real? Am I really married? It’s hard to believe that after 14+ years of hoping and dreaming, I’m now married.

Marriage if everything I’d hoped for and not at all what I expected. Or maybe the other way around. Or maybe neither and both.

All my dreams of marriage couldn’t come close to the reality of sharing life with my husband – sharing our minds, our hearts, our bodies. I couldn’t have grasped the wonderful mundane of sharing our days, discussing the news, reading his papers, laughing at Facebook videos of our nephews and nieces.

There are certainly some things that are better than I expected, some things that are worse – and some that are just different.

I (foolishly) expected that being married would make me content. I learned that my heart is an idol factory. It moves quickly from marriage to babies to quitting my job to be a full-time homemaker as potential saviors. Contentment continues to require work.

I expected marriage would include fighting. Everyone tells us that. When they hear that we haven’t yet fought, they tell us to just wait – that first one will be a doozy. I begin to not believe them. Daniel and I argue, we disagree, we both get emotional and hurt one another. But we haven’t fought. At least not the way people describe marital fights. Instead we talk through things, we learn to forgive, we keep short accounts by the grace of God. Maybe it’s our personalities, maybe (probably) it’s purely grace – but I pray this will always be true of our marriage.

I expected Daniel would be the stereotypical man: he wouldn’t really care what I got him for Christmas (’cause all he really wants is sex anyway), he wouldn’t care how I decorated the house, he wouldn’t really want to know every detail of my day and my thoughts. These and dozens of other stereotypes, I internalized without realizing it – and discovered that I was dead wrong. Daniel is picky about gifts and aesthetics. He wants to know every detail of my thoughts and feelings. He doesn’t have an “empty place” in his head where he retreats such that he honestly answers “Nothing” when I ask him what he’s thinking.

I thought having a husband for a head would mean that my only struggle would be submitting. Things would be easy because I could let my husband make decisions and he could be strong for me when I was falling apart. This turned out to be only partially true. Yes, Daniel is frequently strong for me when I am falling apart, reminding me of truth when my head is clouded. Yes, some decisions Daniel makes easily, which means I don’t have to make them. But I also have to be strong – I am my husband’s helper when he is confused or overwhelmed or anxious. Decision making is more often a joint venture, in which I need to help Daniel research and clarify issues – in which I need to learn how to communicate both my thoughts and my feelings, as well as how strongly or not strongly I think/feel them. Yes, marriage has lightened the load in some ways – but in other ways, it has made strength and good decision making more necessary rather than less.

I’m sure if I were to think more, I could come up with dozens of ways marriage has been different than I expected – but, for now, the biggest one is the crazy weird weekly wonder that I’m actually married. It really is unbelievable.

What surprised you about marriage?

About a month ago, Melinda and Carrie from Wholesome Womanhood asked me if I would be willing to participate in a blog carnival answering the questions:

“How did you transition between singleness and marriage? Was it difficult? Were there some things about marriage that surprised you?”

I immediately agreed, thinking I’d love to share my (very) recent experiences. What I wasn’t necessarily thinking about at the time was what the really honest answer to those questions would be–and how hard it would be to write those down.

The truth is, to answer the questions in reverse: Sex surprised me. It was difficult. I’m not quite sure how the transition happened–except with lots of grace, lots of patience, and lots of communication.

I want to give a warning to my readers. I’m not going to be graphic, but I am going to talk about sex pretty frankly–since that has been the most difficult change for Daniel and I.

In retrospect, we were given some warning. Kevin Lehman talked in Sheet Music about how married sex is different than illicit premarital sex (I am so glad neither of us had to deal with comparisons there!) in that you’re learning what makes *one person* tick. My mom cautioned that all the books in the world couldn’t tell me what *Daniel* would want or what would feel good to *me*.

Still, I somehow had the impression that sex would just be a matter of doing the right things. Furthermore, I read three different books on sex (Kevin Lehman’s Sheet Music, Gary Smalley and Ted Cunningham’s The Language of Sex, and Ed Wheat’s Intended for Pleasure) so I had a good idea of what the right things were. Or so I thought.

I learned pretty quickly that my perception was completely wrong.

What I learned is that Daniel is not just any man and I am not just any woman. I am myself, he is himself. Just because the books say men prefer this or that doesn’t mean Daniel prefers either. Just because the books say women like this or that doesn’t mean I like either. Instead, we had to learn (mostly from scratch) what pleases one another.

What I learned about sex as a newly married woman (Okay, so I’m still a newly married woman–just three months in) is that sex is hard work. Sex requires practice, persistence, patience. And it requires communication.

We learned that we had to relax our expectations. Sex will not necessarily be amazing every time. Sometimes it might hurt. What seemed to work a few days ago may not work today. We learned that trying to make every time we had sex a “10” just stressed us out–and too often resulted in tears of disappointment instead of tears of joy. We had to relax and focus on intimacy, on learning about one another, on enjoying the small (and sometimes large) pleasures. As we did, our overall experience improved–as did our outlook towards the more “ho-hum” moments.

We learned that we had to be willing to experiment. A lot of the practical advice in the books I read was centered around spicing up a boring sex life–which I suppose is useful for a couple who’s been married for a while and maybe has gotten into a rut. But for the couple who hasn’t really figured out what works for them? The books weren’t too helpful. We had to learn to experiment on our own–with different positions, different types of foreplay, different ways of communicating with one another what we liked, different brands of lubrication, different times of day. We had to be willing to retry things that didn’t quite work, switching up a variable or two. As we did, we learned more about ourselves and each other–and added to our list of shared experiences.

We learned that we had to keep on communicating. We both of us had to be willing to say “That’s really not working for me” or “Why don’t you try…” We’ve had to be vocal about when we were enjoying something. We’ve learned that we need to keep talking about differing expectations for frequency of sex, length of sex, whatever. We’ve had to learn to ask when we don’t understand each other’s facial expressions or sounds. Even though we discussed sex, including our expectations, prior to getting married, we have had to keep on discussing sex frequently since then.

We learned that we had to be patient.

Sex isn’t learned overnight. Great sex doesn’t happen in a week-long honeymoon or even a month of regular practice. There are plenty of things that we still need to learn about each other and how to please one another more fully. But, the good news is that we know that practice and patience pays off. Communication and care produces results. And we have the rest of our lives to continue to learn how to have truly outstanding sex.

Please note: When I had my husband read this over, he reminded me that what I’ve said above isn’t really new. The books *did* warn of these same things–but in our premarital optimism we somehow glossed over those things. Daniel says that the most important thing *he’s* learned has been from the paragraph that starts “What I learned is that Daniel is not just any man and I am not just any woman.”

Don’t forget to visit Melinda and Carrie’s blog post to see how other women transitioned into marriage.