How we dream before we marry!

Are you living the married life you dreamt of and discussed when engaged? How high did you fly then, and when did reality set in?

You plan to climb the mountains, to stand together and survey the plains, to travel the back roads together and discover a new world not yet found. The children, a boy first and then a girl, as easy as that, made to special order, they're delivered without any pain or problems. The house out in the country, the holidays at the beach, the cars one always wanted, all within easy reach. Ah, the dreams made together, the realities something different.

The wedding is over, the honeymoon too, and then the realities of marriage, the permanent fixture, comes all too soon. Was this what one pictured? So many marriages become a wake up call within the first few weeks of permanent life together. The husband's hidden habits, the wife's too, not something discovered before the time begin to scratch the tolerances of the other. These are the smaller things if not confronted early can destroy a marriage before it has begun.

So many couples, frowned upon for living together before the ceremony, discover these nuances of the other and either learn to tolerate or accept change before a permanent bond made. The love of one for the other, on many occasions creates an understanding of the small things that evoke agitation, and with clear communication, adjustments are easily made. Harmony in the home, and understanding that the other is an individual, yet part of a pairing, the secret to a happy marriage.

The wake up call is normally felt later in conjoined life, when the first desperate love for each other begins to wane, the discovery of becoming complacent. The high life of engagement and pursuit now over, the man will normally feel that the quarry is firmly captured. The women will begin to miss the evenings out, the very pursuit the man evinced, the wooing, the courting, the attention that he gave. This is when the niggles begin, this is the realities of life. The neolithic existence of the capture and enslavement of a women, the “beat her on the head and drag her home”, attitude of some men only manifests itself after the fact. His difficulty of sharing an income that he has in the past controlled himself, for himself, now a bone of contention.

Women beginning to set up a home, may have other ideas of how to create it, this easily a different idea to the man’s. His bachelorhood days of less needs, happy with a beer and a pie, and the woman's need to create her nest, her environment her home, a natural-born instinct. Few man can grasp this need, to understand that she's already thinking of the future children, that you discussed many months or years ago. The finances no longer stretch as far as they did, the living from pay-day to pay-day a reality. What of the dreams of country houses, the cars to boot, the adventures planned, the holidays at the beach, all seem now so far beyond reach.

This is when a marriage made or broken, this is the time that the very basis of a marriage called to the fore. Love and understanding, compromise, planning, team building and a will to persevere, this is what makes the long time marriages. Not a difficult negotiation, the realities fairly obvious, the time of clear-headed decisions that concrete the foundations of the future.

The arrival of the first-born, was the delivery as planned, the sex of the child required received, the pain of delivery bearable, the man certainly never felt a thing. This is when a wife changes her loyalties, she changes from being a wife, to that of a mother. Her priority, her offspring, he or she has been with her for nine months, nine months longer than with the man, the attachment a natural instinct, the protection and nurturing her top precedence. This now for some men difficult to handle, they love their child, yet miss the undivided attention, a dangerous time in the marriage as some, (and I say some) easily now mislead. The craving for that attention may lead to the out of marriage affair, a time for understanding that ones marriage will never again be the same, and now to adjust to the future anew, readjusted with reality in mind.

This is where the true commitment to each other, realisation that the pre-arrangement, the plans made years ago, are now never, or nearly always never, going to reach fruition. No one can predetermine the future cost of children preceding their birth, all planning of years ago, fast discovered a dream upset by mother earth. Yet this is the time when a re-commitment to each other, normally guarantees a long and happy union.