The New Eve - Lewis Robert [42]
Finally, read a few good-quality books on marriage. Two classics I highly recommend are Willard Harley's His Needs, Her Needs and Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages.
If all of this makes marriage sound like serious business, it is. The majority of the happiness you will experience in life as a woman will come from it. That's the wonderful upside. So don't ignore learning about marriage even as you enjoy this high-intensity season of love.
Newly Married/No Children
Now you've arrived, right? Actually, you've just begun. You've trained, studied, sought advice, and looked deeply into the vital issues of marriage, and now the first thing you need to do is keep on doing these things. Keep reading. Every year make it a point to take a class on an aspect of marriage. Go as a couple to a marriage conference. Seek wise counsel when conflicts arise. This is also a great time for your husband to go through one of my Men's Fraternity curricula, such as Winning at Work and Home or The Quest for Authentic Manhood (www.mensfraternity.com). Like professional athletes, keep up your training regimen at all times. Keep investing.
Today 43 percent of all first-time marriages end in divorce. That sobering statistic means you will have to take your marriage much more seriously than much of the world does. Maybe even more seriously than your parents did. Seek third-party support for your young marriage. Find a couple who has been in the marriage game longer than you. Go to this husband and wife for advice. Open your life. Drain tension. Get wisdom. Make them your life coaches. Let them peer in through the windows to your soul. Let them ask hard questions. It will feel invasive at first, but windowless lives almost always have trouble. Don't close yourself off from the help available.
It's also vital to erect some firm financial disciplines early in your marriage to which both of you agree and adhere. You'll probably both be working. This season invites that. So develop your abilities and gain confidence and experience in a career path. Establish yourself. Remember, what you gain from work now can be leveraged in other seasons of life as something to fall back on or as something with which to open new doors. So make the most of it.
But be careful with the money you make as a couple. A double income is seductive. You can overbuy, overextend, and destabilize your marriage. You can quickly become enslaved to financial obligations and commitments (car payments, mortgages, and loans) that demand you work even during seasons when you long to be home. A radical and wise step would be to live on one income from the start. My wife and I did that. Every month we put her entire teacher's salary into savings. We knew when kids came along, she would want to stay home with them while they were young. So we purposely lived a one-income lifestyle from the beginning. We bought used cars and limited our purchases.
Besides, what we really desired in this opening season of our marriage was not stuff but rich experiences together. Fun. Some of the money we saved during this time gave us this opportunity in a big way. After a year of disciplined living, we made a memory most couples only dream about for their retirement. We packed our bags and took off to Europe and the Middle East. We rode camels to the pyramids, sailed down the Nile under moonlight, scampered