💍 3 Reasons We’re Getting Married After Living Together

😞 How to Help Your Spouse Deal with Anxiety

✋ 5 Signs You Need Some Alone Time

💢 My Fiancé and I Are Fighting All the Time

💛 What I’ve Learned During My First Year of Marriage

5 ways your relationship changes after you get married

By John Daum

What if I could tell you about the future of your marriage? For the moment, let’s say I can. (Because I can.) Brace yourself, my newlywed friend. I come from over 25 years in the future of your marriage. What do you want to know?

This isn’t some Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or The Time Traveler’s Wife kinda stuff. This is way better. See, I’ve been married for over 27 years, and I’m neck-deep in marriage research. I stuffed all that in my time machine and set the coordinates for your present.

★ I’ve got five bold reveals about what your future marriage holds. Ready?

5. You’ll begin to take your spouse for granted.

4. You’ll discover that you (and your spouse) need individual time alone.

3. You’ll have sex less frequently, but it’ll be more satisfying.

2. You’ll fight a lot (especially the first few years), but you’ll learn to fight better. 

1. Your wedding was not the most important day in your marriage. Today is.

conversations every engaged couple should have before they say, “i do!”

While you’re engaged, conversations tend to hover endlessly around the wedding day, and naturally so. Though working out the details and planning your celebration is exciting, having conversations about other topics is important, too.

You and your fiancé are stepping into something beautiful—a promise of commitment, a proclamation of loving each other now and falling in love over and over again, a 24/7 best friend, and a person who wants to love you at your best and through the worst. You owe it to each other to take the time to appreciate what you have and to continue the pursuit.

One way to pursue each other is to sit down and have important conversations like…

🗣️ Talk about the importance of marriage, what it means to you both and what you hope for it to look like.

🗣️ Do you want children?

🗣️ How do you handle conflict and what rules do you want to establish on how to fight when you do?

🗣️ Talk through your finances.

🗣️ Intimacy in your relationship.

Get personal with your sweetheart. Start out your marriage with the muscle memory of talking through tough conversations, how you want to love each other and what’s important to you. The more you communicate, the richer the potential for a lovely life together. Now who’s ready to say I do?