Married couples: What do you wish you knew about sex and marriage during your marriage prep?

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stinkcat_14 said:
Washington DC is a ridiculously expensive area, I almost ended up there 25 years ago and I am thankful that I didn’t. I even toyed more recently with moving there, but the housing prices are just too high.
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It probably would have been OK, had you bought 25 years ago.

We got there in 2001 and got to sit through the run-up to the housing bust–the neighborhood I was looking at literally doubled in cost over 4 years.
 
Xantippe said:
The pastor who was prepping us said some very wise things about finances that didn’t sink in at the time. I think we would have done very well to take a whole course on finances (like Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University), but we had no idea at the time. Nothing utterly catastrophic happened, but we were disorganized for way too long. (Both of our families of origin do some weird stuff with money, and when I was a kid, my parents were very dysfunctional about finances and had lots of huge arguments about it.) But at the time, I didn’t even realize there was a problem. It took us 9 years to figure out there was a problem and get on track.

Another thing I didn’t realize at the time (and I don’t think that anybody could have gotten it into my head then) is that having just two children is harder than you think. At the time, I had kind of drunk the Koolaid and thought that parents of two are just selfish, lazy and materialistic. I fully expected that we would have 4-6 kids and homeschool, just like all the cool Catholic parents. I was also going to be a fantastic cook and housekeeper, not a domestic underachiever like my mom…

🤷

As it turns out, we have three children now after 19 years of marriage, but we had only two for our first 14 years. Our oldest is on the autism spectrum, as is the youngest. As it turned out, I have not officially homeschooled a day. At some point (probably around the time Big Girl was in preschool) it became clear that homeschool was not going to be a good option for our family. I also have housecleaning help twice a month and don’t cook a whole lot–but I’m actually a pretty OK mom and wife.

I was guilty of a lot of arrogance and inexperience as a young bride. Some of that was coming out of a family where my parents had a weird marriage and not getting a sense of what reasonable household expectations are. The other issue is that as a convert, it took me a long time before I realized what the distinction is between actual Catholic teaching and conservative Catholic US culture (which are not exactly the same thing). I eventually realized (thanks to reading the blogger The Practical Conservative) that conservative religious expectations for women are nuts. Homeschool a large family alone while cooking and cleaning perfectly on a small income–suuuuuure.

I also could have benefited from the books “Boundaries in Marriage” or one of John Gottman’s books as a young bride and young mother–but I was very busy at the time! I could have gotten even more from the book “How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids” as a young mom, but as it came out just this year, the only way to do that would be with a time machine…

All in all, we could have done a lot of things better (and there were some embarrassing mistakes along the way), but none of the mistakes were fatal.

On a more positive note, the sex stuff went very well, despite inexperience.
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I have never been married, but I think this is a perfect example of a good marriage. You grew as a couple and had to actually live X number of years in order to have X year’s of experience. To expect you would have been any diffferent because of something someone taught you is unrealistic. You actually have to live through stuff to learn how to deal with it
 
Anglewannabe said:
I have never been married, but I think this is a perfect example of a good marriage. You grew as a couple and had to actually live X number of years in order to have X year’s of experience. To expect you would have been any diffferent because of something someone taught you is unrealistic. You actually have to live through stuff to learn how to deal with it
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Thank you!

Yeah, I think you have to expect there to be a bit of a learning curve. But some things it would have been easier to learn faster!
 
Xantippe said:
Thank you!

Yeah, I think you have to expect there to be a bit of a learning curve. But some things it would have been easier to learn faster!
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Yeah, but then would you really have learned them ? Or just been spared some crosses ? And I think your statement can be applied to any aspect of life, not just marriage
 
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