Transitions into Marriage

Everyone knows that the transition into marriage can be difficult, whether you have experienced it yourself or have heard it from others. There are many different factors that go into this transition into marriage–there is more to it than just getting used to living with another person. Marriage is merging two completely different families together, which is no small feat.

Personally in my marriage, there have been so many different transitions that I didn’t even think of when my husband and I were dating/engaged. The first few months consisted more of learning how to live together, how to share a bathroom, preparing meals for each other every day, learning how to split up chores and other responsibilities, budgeting/finances, etc. These things were definitely a big transitional period, but after a few months, we had it down and now it seems like that transition never even happened.

The transitions that were harder were the big ones that happened in the first year to year-and-a-half of marriage. One big one was when the holidays came around. I never even thought about how hard it would be to decide whose family we would spend the holidays with. For one thing, both of our sets of parents are divorced, so instead of having two families to spend holidays with, we now have FOUR. Most couples choose to switch off spending the holidays with each side of the family, but that is significantly harder for my husband and I because there are not only two sides to switch off. My husband’s parents live in the same town, so holidays are easier with them since we can spend half of Christmas day with one of them and the other half of the day with the other. But when it comes to my family, my parents live across the country from one another which makes seeing them for holidays so hard. Someone always ends up getting hurt and we always end up having to choose one over the other.

This isn’t the only aspect of holidays that is a huge transition when going into marriage. Everyone has their own holiday traditions that come from their family growing up, and trying to merge those traditions together can be difficult. Fortunately, this is not something that my husband and I have had to deal with yet since we don’t have children yet, and we spend all our holidays with our families. But I can imagine that once we start celebrating Thanksgiving and especially Christmas with our kids, there will be a lot of transition and figuring out our own traditions to celebrate with our own little family.

Another transition that my husband and I have been experiencing lately, at a year and half of marriage, is preparing for our first child. We are currently 11 weeks pregnant and are finally getting past getting used to being pregnant and moving into the planning period of getting ready for the baby. It is a very exciting time, but also a major transition from being just a married couple to starting a family and having another human being to care for.

There is also a lot of transition when it comes to our parents because there are so many of them, and so many different opinions when it comes to the baby. One thing that we have to remember is that this is our child and when it comes down to it, our opinion on how we raise the baby and what we buy for the baby is our decision. It is important to become our own unit, and that perhaps is the hardest transition of all.