Well, I’ve only been married a year, but I can say what’s worked well for us. I’d say we have a pretty good marriage–say a B+ on an A-F scale.
Before we got married, while we were engaged, and since we’ve been married, we talked about everything. I mean everything. We clarify a lot. If one of us says something that might sound hurtful and it wasn’t meant to be, that person immediately says “and by that I mean…” and explains, rather than leaving something up in the air that could mean that the other person feels hurt. Before we got engaged, we agreed to never, ever, ever expect the other person to read our minds, and that if one of us thought something needed to be talked about or fixed, that person would take the responsibility of bringing it up while the other person would listen. This is probably due in no small part to the fact that we’re both fairly logical people, we’re both introverted, and, quite frankly, we’re both pretty awful at reading nonverbal cues. However, we both admitted that last, and the way we work around it (ie, talking about and clarifying everything) works very well for us.
We also don’t fight. I know that sounds improbable, but we just don’t. Never have. If one of us is angry, he or she will walk away or be quiet until he or she can say what needs to be said without being unkind. This does not mean that we’re doormats: it means that we do not use the other person as an emotional punching bag. In short, our relationship is based on courtesy and respect: if we wouldn’t yell at a stranger or call him names, why in the world would we do that to the person we love most, even if we’re really angry at him/her?
We do have disagreements, certainly. Married life isn’t perfect bliss (though for us, I’d say it’s pretty close.
) We overcome the disagreements by talking it out–sometimes pretty vigorously, I must say, but never nastily. It isn’t that we don’t feel strongly about our own opinions; we just let our ideas and beliefs about a certain matter speak for themselves, rather than resorting to yelling or the “cold shoulder” treatment. We’re each willing to give in on the small disagreements, so we don’t even let those get to the point of arguing. We also know that our big disagreements aren’t going to be over something that has to be resolved immediately, so we have no problem, having had the initial discussion and not come to a conclusion, in shelving a topic for a period of days or even weeks until one of us has another insight or idea about it and wants to discuss it further.
With
extremely rare exceptions, we do not bring up our disagreements or private matters (sex, babies, etc) with people outside the marriage. I don’t know if he does this, but there was one time this year when I needed an outside perspective on something we disagreed on and weren’t resolving, so I went to my best friend and asked her opinion on it. I did this because a) she’s a strong Catholic who has been married longer than I am, and being outside our marriage might have a different and good perspective, and b) because I knew she would never mention this to anyone else and would not hold it against either of us. I also knew she’d only give constructive suggestions, rather than just engaging, as some friends might, in bashing the other person.
We don’t go to bed angry, and we always kiss each other and say “I love you” before falling asleep.
One very major thing which I see in a lot of the troubled marriage threads is a lack of communication. As I’ve made clear, we communicate about everything. Some of the big topics you’ll see on those threads are money, sex, NFP, birth control, Mass attendance, etc. Well, we discussed all of those pretty early on in our dating. Not in detail, especially sex/NFP stuff, but we did have the basics in place so that by the time we were engaged, we knew we were on the same page about NFP use, for example. We knew that we’d never use artificial birth control because we both believe it’s wrong. We knew, very generally, what sort of reasons we might use to postpone children via NFP, and how we’d divide responsibilities when using NFP. We knew that weekly Mass attendance wasn’t optional, it would always happen. Etc. Ergo, we’ll never fight about those things. Laying a good foundation for marriage by talking about these things will not prevent every argument, but it will definitely reduce them!
. Since I’ve started reading here, I’ve become more and more afraid of the future. I definetely don’t want a marriage like my paren’ts (too much drama, don’t want to spill everything here) and I’m now so confused about my boyfriend who I love very much but I start wondering if he’d make a good husband, wich in itself is not a bad thing, but I’ve become more scared about marriage too