What Do You Wish You’d Known When You Got Married

A young person of my acquaintance, who may or may not be headed in the marriage direction, asked me what things I wish I’d known before marriage.  Interesting question.  Tough question.  Here is what I came up with.

1.  Physical health influences mental health and marriage quality a lot.
2. The manhood, womanhood thing.  Each man and each woman is  unique, so it is impossible to have a fully detailed roadmap, but there are general trends.  I wish I had known more about the general trends.  For instance, it wasn’t until shockingly recently that I really internalized that my wife likes my physical strength.   This is pretty typical for a woman.  I assume that it feels good to know that the guy who is supposed to bring protection to the table in your marriage appears to be more capable of it than you.  I wish I’d known this earlier.
3. A marriage can get into really awful hopeless times, perhaps even thinking it will never get better, but still rebounding to peaks of happiness.
4. Its possible to have a great marriage, just perpetually awesome.  I read about those couples like, I think, the Hinckleys, who never went to bed mad and figured that was just swank.  Impossible.  I really did believe it was impossible.  Now I don’t.  It would have been impossible for my marriage, because my marriage had me in it and I had some growing to do, but I think its possible for most people.  The average person is capable of reaching much greater heights than they know, if only they set their sights high enough.
5. Don’t want until a problem or a fight is resolved to resume loving on each other.

My wife adds

6.  Your spouse is crazy insecure.  Everyone is.  Much reassurance needed.

I don’t  think this advice is for everyone.  For some people, maybe the opposite of what I’m saying may be what they need.  But this is what I wish *I* had known before marriage.

What about you?