After the Glitter Fades
By TwistieRecently, I watched an episode of the WE TV series Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?, that blandly unconsidered look into the world of wedding planning. This episode, however, was more interesting than most. It was a look back at several couples featured on the show with updates about their lives and marriages. The first couple profiled had had a bad first year of marriage. In fact, they’d been on the verge of divorce around the eight month mark.
How can any couple hit the skids that hard that fast? Well, listening to the bride was like hearing a recipe for disaster in the making.
The couple had first started dating near the end of their senior year of high school. Upon graduation, she headed to another state to go to college while he stayed in Florida. He even stayed in their home town. They continued the relationship long distance. Eventually, they decided to marry. She kept her job and apartment and life in the midwest while he kept his job and home in their hometown. She planned the wedding long-distance to be held in Florida. He took little part in the actual planning.
All of this wouldn’t have been a big problem except for one thing: they never discussed how she felt about moving back, giving up the job she had, or what their plans for the future were. That’s how he never knew that moving back to Florida felt to her like going backwards when she wanted to be moving forward. That’s how she never came to articulate her feelings about giving up her job and never quite had a conversation with him about how it might affect her career. He began avoiding coming home for fear that each day might be the day she’d say it was over. She spent her days focused on the things that were making her unhappy in between rounds of dog walking. That’s how they found themselves eight months into their marriage on the verge of not having one.
In their interview for the follow-up show, the bride said she wished someone would have counselled her to slow down a bit and really talk with her intended about how to handle things. She wished she’d taken the time to move back well before the wedding and resettle herself. She wished she’d discussed her desire to keep moving forward, and told him what that looked like to her.
The good news is that they got into couples counselling rather than throwing in the towel. Several months in to the work, they’d learned to communicate better and were working on a plan for a future that would make both of them happy. I wish them nothing but good luck, of course.
But their situation is a reminder to us all that beautiful wedding gowns and fabulous centerpieces - while wonderful things - do not a marriage make. It takes communication, consideration, and a lot of compromise. Somewhere along the line, it’s just good sense to sit down and discuss what comes after the honeymoon. After all, that future is where you’ll be spending a lot of years.
So while you are planning, take some time to really talk about the big issues with your intended. Money, children, career paths, religious observance, pets, even which way to hang the toilet paper roll…if it’s important to you, the time to talk it over is before the wedding.
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
My fiance would never have married his first wife had he known what a mess her finances were. She hadn’t filed taxes for four years, had scads of unopened (and unpaid) bills, had lots of consumer debt and had never gotten a SSN for her 10-year-old daughter.
He teased me about our pre-marital counseling, but their church didn’t require it, so there was no convenient forum to discuss these issues. He and I had the abbreviated version (I guess they figure if you’re both in your 40s, you better figure it out on your own), but my cousin and her husband went through the real deal — they had to put together a budget, answer the questions about children, who’s going to take out the trash, where will they live, who works, who stays with the kids — the issues that can torpedo a relationship.
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 am
I’d rather hope that those things were discussed before the proposal. When it is clear that the basic views of life match, it will be safer to enter a marriage (if the divorce is something to be avoided). You wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it and comparing different choices. Watching those wedding shows makes me sick because of how often the people don’t seem to know each other or talk to each other at all.
“No marriage before sex!”
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Yikes! Class-Factotum, that is one scary situation not to know about. I bet he’s glad to be out of that situation!
Johanna, yes, ideally these things should be discussed before the engagement, but even if they have been I’m a big believer in discussing them once the engagement is on, too. After all, some things that seem fine in theory can take on unexpected emotional baggage when they’re about to become reality.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
How do you not discuss these? I just don’t understand how you get that far without talking about where you’re going to live. I’m glad that they were able to work through those issues but I’m totally baffled about how they got there.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I wish our church would provide pre-marital counseling like what my parents took before their marriage. However I don’t think they offer that. The pastor will talk with us a few weeks before but that’s it.
I think Mr Dent and I have tried very hard to be sure both of us are honest and open about our feelings for the future and where we see ourselves. We both agree that we want to stay in the same town, wait on children for a few years, and we have been working on a budget already.
Johanna, I’m not sure if you are serious or not about the “no marriage before sex” comment. I believe marriage requires open communication but I don’t think anybody should have to sacrifice their personal beliefs to make sure somebody is the “one”. I am so surprised at how many women make comments like, “How are you supposed to marry the guy if you don’t know if he’s good in bed or not?!” Shouldn’t a married couple be able to communicate if something isn’t satisfying?
Please don’t misunderstand me. I have no problem with those who don’t wait until marriage (I didn’t either) but I think it’s silly to say knowing how good your lover is in bed is a prerequisite for marriage.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Dent, surely it was in quotation marks to incline it is not something I would say, only quote. Waiting is just as fine if that’s someone’s choice. But I do love that it is said and have nothing against premarital affairs if contraception is handled and no STDs transmitted.
The saying is lovely because it symbolizes the freedom of choice (and the importance of pleasure) and simply the fact that marriage should not be entered upon lightly. I will not contradict or agree with any religious or other reasons for abstinence. I myself feel good about knowing for a fact that my fiancé is The One in EVERY aspect.
About the discussion about future plans, I think some guys feel it’s unnecessary to dwell on subjects that have been talked over already. Like the middle aged relative who declared he’s said he loved his wife once, he’ll notify her if the situation changes. But hopes and dreams develop over time and any couple who feel free to speak to each other will know the direction their spouse’s thoughts are taking.
Twistie, I agree, future plans are a heavier burden when they are becoming reality.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Oh man, I made sure The Beard and I went through everything I could think of before tying the knot. This was important to me because I knew folks who split up because one wanted kids and the other didn’t, because one person wanted monogamy and the other didn’t, and because one person had a criminal background they’d never thought to bring up. Ouch, right?
I needed to know that we were on the same wavelength where the vital, you-can’t-really-compromise stuff was concerned.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:51 pm
NTB, my husband and I did the same thing. We talked about everything! Not only did we do the 5 session pre-marital mentoring provided by our church, but we read marriage books, and asked his mother (whose marriage we really respect) to come up with a list of questions for us to go over. All of those things were really great. We’ve gone through a lot of hard things in our first nine months of marriage from many outside factors. The amount of time we invested in preparing for our marriage (rather than just the wedding) really helped us to be so solid with each hardship that has come our way.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:25 am
I have seen that episode of “Whose Wedding” before. It really is no surprise that these couples who hire the fancy wedding planners are so caught up in the “wedding” part that they forget about the “marriage” part. We all know it’s a lot more fun to pick out pretty napkins than it is to hash out how you’re going to handle finances, child rearing, jobs in the future, etc.
I was surprised by the episode, because that show generally tends to lean toward the frivolity/let’s spend lots of $$ side of weddings. I thought it was pretty responsible of them to show what happens when you don’t tend to ALL aspects of planning… including actually planning for life after the big day.
May 4th, 2008 at 11:04 am
We did church counseling as well, even though The Beard isn’t particularly churchy, Dianasaur, and both found it to be quite enlightening. We were lucky in that the pastor who married us had worked closely with my late grandfather (also a pastor) so it was someone we were comfortable with and could trust. Interestingly, the program he used was a secular program developed, I think, by the University of Michigan? it’s used by a lot of religious institutions, but also by tons of state-sponsored pre-marital programs and other counseling organizations.
May 4th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Kristin, I do think it’s possible to hold a fancy wedding with all the bells and whistles without losing sight of the reason behind it, but I kind of got the feeling this woman was concentrating on the wedding so hard in part so she wouldn’t think too hard about what came after. I was, however, somewhat impressed that such a shallow show chose to profile a couple who prepared so carefully for the wedding, but entirely failed to prepare for the marriage to follow.
May 4th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
We went through pre-marital counseling at our church. We felt like it wasn’t really necessary for us–we had discussed all the questions they brought up long before we ever got engaged.
We had to go to one day-long counseling session along with several other couples, and I was amazed to see how many of the other couples hadn’t discussed the big questions at all or hadn’t come to an agreement on really important issues like how many children they hoped for or whether to have a joint bank account. One couple even announced at the end of the day that they were going to postpone their wedding because obviously they still had a lot of things to sort out! It’s sad to postpone or call off a wedding, but better that than to get married and find out later that it isn’t going to work.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
My mother gave me a copy of this: http://tiny.cc/qoxvz from the NY Times quite a while before I got engaged. It’d been stuck to the fridge forever, but I finally took it down and we started working through the questions. We knew the answers to most of them, but it’s been a good exercise to make sure that we’re on the same page.