When did you know that you'd marry your spouse?

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EqualinHim

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Recently I was talking to a friend of mine. She’s a devout Catholic who spent two years in a cloistered benedictine convent where she became a novice. Unfortunately, it was clear that the life was not for her and she left the convent, but remained on good terms and stayed a practicing Catholic. She’s been away for several months and her readjustment to life outside the convent has been ‘interesting’. She recently complained to me that one of her relatives was trying to set her up with someone. This was the gist of the conversation that she had, which involved another friend of ours. She’s 21 years old, btw.

Me: So what’s so bad about the guy?

Her: He’s nearly 40 and I barely know him.

Me: Ugh. I guess I can see why you’re not interested. Now that you’ve left the convent, do you feel called to marriage?

Her: NOT TO HIM!

It was a hilarious conversation and she had such a perfect delivery of the last bit that everyone in the room started giggling. But, that brings up the question that I wanted to ask you brave folks of CAF:

When did you know that your spouse was the one you were called to marry?
 
EqualinHim said:
When did you know that your spouse was the one you were called to marry?
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Well, I knew him much better than “barely” and he wasn’t 20 years my senior.

We dated for a little over a year before becoming engaged. It was a discernment process that we undertook together, not unlike discernment of religious life.
 
EqualinHim said:
When did you know that your spouse was the one you were called to marry?
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About the third “date”. (We hadn’t even got to the point of actually going out on real dates.)

Spouse told me he remembered having a dream, which he said was unusual because he never remembered dreams. He said in the dream, he and I walked down a long pier together. We came to the end of the pier, stopped, and smiled at each other.

I knew at that point that we would end up married. I’d like to say I was thrilled about it, but at the time, I wasn’t, as I was not sure I wanted to get married at all and if I did, I was not sure I wanted to marry a guy like him. However, I realized that was how it was going to be. It was just a matter of time.
 
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I don’t feel like I’ve ever been called (in the summon by God way) to do anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband dearly and I certianly feel responsible for keeping my vows and growing through our marriage but there was never a trumpets blasting kind of moment, lol.

So, when did I know I was going to marry him? When he asked.
 
Sometime in the first few months. I don’t remember an exact day but I remember being slightly disappointed that he didn’t ask at Thanksgiving. We had started dating in June.
 
I met the man I would marry my Freshman year of college. He had spent a year in seminary, and had recently been discharged from the Army after serving as a chaplain’s assistant in Vietnam. He was still considering the priesthood when I turned his head. His roommate told me after we were engaged that he actually told everybody in his complex (there were 8 to a complex) that he had met the girl he would marry.
I was young and nowhere near thinking about marriage. What I did have was a list of desired traits for a mate. When I was with him, it was I who had those same qualities. It was actually after one of our many heated arguments that I really discovered that I loved him.
 
This is different for each person.
The only thing I can say, is: people know when they know. Not something that can be predicted. Choose well.
 
JetteZ said:
I don’t feel like I’ve ever been called (in the summon by God way) to do anything.
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Yeah, I feel the same. I suppose I let go of trusting any sort of intuition as I’d been certain once before. Had my heart not gotten so trampled on and had I married the guy, I would have totally been one of those romantic people insisting with a dreamy smile on my face, “You just know.”

I wouldn’t say I made the best decision when I agreed to marry my husband. We both brought a lot of baggage into our marriage. I wouldn’t advice my daughter to tolerate the type of behavior I tolerated both in him and even other people in my life at the time. But making our marriage work challenged us both to grow. It was really our mutual commitment and the support we had through extended family that gave us the ability to get the therapy we needed to make our marriage work. And now things are pretty good. The skills we had to develop are still less developed than other strengths, but we manage them better and are much better at resolving problems.

Romantic love is just romantic love. It isn’t strong enough to cause a marriage to be happy. It’s like recognizing it’s important to marry someone you’re attracted to or that you can actually be friends. But in the end, the foundation of your marriage is on your vows. It takes just one person to give up and run away from a marriage whether it’s simply disengaging from problems and leaving the relationship suffering, or actually physically abandoning you.

With all my husband’s flaws, the one thing I really trust him on is the effort he puts in our relationship, the willingness to get help.
 
I wouldn’t go as far as to say i knew we would marry at this point, but there was certainly a moment that sticks with me. We had been dating for about 3 weeks and were watching a TV programme together. I have a somewhat unusual personality and am pretty easy to misunderstand and or dislike. Anyway, i asked my now wife to turn up the volume and she left it on volume 17. This is an unacceptable volume to me, acceptable volumes are multiples of 5 or 3 (yes being married to me is a laugh a minute). Anyway, i gave a disapproving noise but not words and didn’t look at her. She knew exactly what the problem was and put it up to 18. I think she thought all even numbers were ok but that’s close enough. Anyway, at this point I realised she was someone who was actually interested in learning about me and why i am the way i am. It made me want to do the same for her and we’ve been married 4 years now and i’m grateful for every day.
 
When we were kidding each other about what our kids would look like by only naming our negative features.

Married 30 years, happy to report our children look nothing like our then descriptions. 😉
 
The very first time I saw her [truly!]

God Had [has] a plan; this past July we celebrated our 50Th wedding anniversary
 
I knew I could marry my husband on the day he asked me on our first date. I knew for sure I was in love with him and going to marry him in our fourth date.

It took a bit for him to catch on though. :bride_with_veil:t2::man_in_tuxedo:t2:
 
It wasn’t long after we were going out, and I think that he then started feeling that way towards me too, as we both had qualities that each other was looking for, in a spouse.

He was and still is, a very solid person. He’s very dependable, and that was very important to me.

He had many qualities and values that I was looking for.

Plus, he had/has a really great sense of humor, and could really make me laugh, and still does, all of these years later. 🙂

I think that if you can laugh at life together, it can help you through the rough times together if you can keep your sense of humor about things.
 
EqualinHim said:
When did you know that your spouse was the one you were called to marry?
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I had a fair idea that I wanted to mary her from about 3 months into the relationship. We met through CAF and started chatting on skype and praying together. We didn’t meet in person until about a year after that. I actually first started chatting with her just after spending a year as a Dominican novice.

The first time I met her in person I knew I would ask her to marry me. And that solidified into reality when I asked her to marry me about 8 months after that.
 
My husband and I met in July of 2015 and began dating a month later. I wanted to marry him within the first few months. We got engaged in June 2016 and married this past July.

The engagement period was the most difficult with the most conflict, but we both knew we wanted to get married in the first few months of the relationship.

My parents dated for four months and then got engaged. They were engaged for about a year before marriage.

It really depends on the couple! 🙂
 
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