Does happiness after marriage

[Irishmom2]

I believe that happiness is overrated.

Okay, what I mean by that is this. Yes, everyone wants to be all happy like the day they were married. But the truth of the matter is that those early days are not what the rest of your life will be like in some cases. Life gets complicated through no fault of your own sometimes. It may become a struggle in many ways. And your married life might not be “happy.”

So what though, if you are committed to one another? You know you can depend on each other, and later, when the clouds clear and you are still there for each other, you see that happiness is not always what is most important. Commitment, dependability, faithfulness, kindness and most of all, LOVE are way more important than happiness to me. Sometimes a steady, strong love is worth more than happiness.

 

[Chochy]

Dear Ones,

I answered other. My husband and I have been together forever! I began dating him, (my brother’s best friend) when I was 14 and he was 17. I always tease, and say I could never leave my husband, because my brother and family would keep him, and dump me.

All kidding aside, our relationship is alot like the stock market. It goes up and down and has even crashed, but overall we’ve stayed focused and are in it for the long haul. The end result will most likely be favorable.

Blessings - Chochy

 

[maryjk]

I was just watching a video about the psychology of love. I didn’t agree with a lot of what he said, though he did acknowledge that love is a choice. He put up a happiness graph of years after marriage. The graph showed that the happiest day of your marriage is the day you get married and it goes down hill till it levels off around 5 years. Around seven years it starts picking up a little bit, but it never returns back to the levels of when you got married.

When I got married, it was the happiest day of my life. Or it was up to that day.

I’m thinking this graph may be based on how we choose who we marry and what our expectations of love and marriage are. Perhaps it is indeed common, though I’m not sure about that either. I was told by my in laws and many others that the first year you are married is the hardest.

Our first year wasn’t the hardest. In fact, I can’t think of a year that my marriage was difficult.

Not that we haven’t had hard times. Just that the hard times would have been much more difficult without each other.

Well, my husband and I did have a very hard first year: difficulty consummating our marriage, job problems, pregnancy, insurance problems, two deaths in the family within two months of each other, economic insecurity, etc. We are reaching our 2 year anniversary next month. I feel like we have both grown so much and that our relationship is so much stronger. I love him far more deeply than I did the day we married. I am far happier with him than I’ve ever been with him when we got married or even when we were courting. In fact, I completely did not expect to be this happy married to him. We still have our external struggles and stresses, but aside from the joy and stresses of having a one year old (the joys definitely outweighing the stresses), these things would be a part of my life with or without him.

I agree, as much as I loved my husband when we married, I love him even more today.

My Dad always says he loves my mom more and more everyday. Do you think it is possible for happiness to go uphill the longer you are married as you learn to grow and love each other better and better?

We have been married 20 years. Happiness is still going up.

The other thing he said was that happiness goes up in marriage after children leave home and its just the two of you again. But while it does take effort to make time for each other, i would say our daughter brings such joy into our lives she increases the happiness and makes our marriage more complete. Anyone else feel similarly?

I don’t know how I will feel when our son moves out. I can’t imagine not loving my husband as much as I do now. So I have to think that we will continue to grow in our love.

 

[Debora123]

Increased.

 

[NSFrame]

I put increased. I think it’s because we’ve both matured so much since we got married, which is I think pretty natural when you marry in your 20s/early 30s. We are both better at not just giving in silently and then fuming in our heads - we now aren’t afraid to disagree and hash things out a little better.