Being in love is an amazing feeling and what’s more amazing is getting to spend the rest of your life with someone you’re in love with. However, before embarking on the journey to forever, there are some very important things other than wedding preparations that you have to discuss with your partner.
In fact, they’re so important that they have to be discussed even before you start planning your wedding because the wedding is not the end goal. Your marriage is,seeing as it’s supposed to be for a lifetime.
To ensure that you grow old and grey with your partner in love and happiness, it’s best to discuss these 9 things so that you both can be on the same page and be less at risk of having damaging marital issues.
Here’s What You Have to Discuss:
Of course, in every relationship especially marriages, there’s bound to be disagreement every now and then. It’s only normal but what isn’t normal is when such disagreements are profound and not trivial. What’s more, it’s quite disheartening when such disagreements could have been totally avoided by discussing the 9 things below pre-marriage. In no particular order, here are the important things to converse with your partner about. Added advantage? You get to strengthen the bond between yourselves
- Finances:
Money is capable of putting a lot of strain on any couple and money centered arguments are known to be the top predictors of divorce. Prolonged financial arguments often decrease satisfaction and peace in any marriage. This is not dependent on how much either of you earns or how much you worth. This is why before saying “I do”, you and your partner should talk about reaching a compromise if you have different views towards money. Your partner might be pro-investment while you’re pro-savings, you might have no issues with loans while your partner cringes at the mere thought of an overdrawn bank account. You might be a penny pincher while your partner is not so frugal. Compromise on issues like this should be reached before marriage to avoid money-related conflicts that can suck the joy out of your relationship.
2. Kids:
There are a lot of children related issues to discuss. To start with, do you both want children? If yes, it doesn’t stop there. You have to come to an agreement on how many children you want, how much spacing you want between them, how long into the marriage do you plan to start having children. Go as far as discussing plans and strategies you would put in place to ensure that having children (if you both decide to) would not put a strain on your relationship because studies have shown that marital satisfaction of new parents is likely to decline.
3. Where to live:
One of the highlights of getting married is having to live together. Deciding where to live could be confusing especially if you both have conflicting interests. You might be a city person while your partner would rather live in a small town. One person might prefer living in a condo while the other, a bungalow. Where you both decide to live will influence some other factors of your life, so it has to be discussed and agreed on. Be sure to take into consideration factors such as professional opportunities, proximity or not to friends and family, cost of living.
4. Career:
Talking about your respective careers is equally important and even more important if you’re planning to have children as parenting in itself is a career. That aside, you have to both be willing to support one another when the other is looking to make career changes or breaks that might affect your collective income. Discuss if you would be willing to relocate for your partner’s career to thrive and how you intend to achieve marriage and career life balance.
5. Individual Families:
In as much as your marriage is about you and your spouse, your individual families matter as well. You can’t separate or ignore family relationships and so, you should discuss each other’s family cultures, which to imbibe or drop as well as the level of influence family members should have in your marriage.
6. Household Labor:
If you’re going to live together then you might as well decide on how house tasks would be divided. Decide on who would be in charge of laundry, doing the dishes based on what chores each person prefers doing. Know if you’d be employing the services of help to assist with some of the tasks or not. This would go a long way in preventing housework related conflict since tasks have been duly assigned.
7. Social Life:
There’s likely to be personality differences between you and your partner such as temperamental differences that would make one person more outgoing than the other. Discuss what would happen when one of you would rather spend the weekend outdoors and the other just wants to stay in all day, as well as how frequently you would hang out with both mutual and personal friends.
8. Religious views:
While it might seem like this is only for couples who are religious, it isn’t. If you’re both religious but practice different ones, then to avoid issues in marriage, you might want to come to an agreement on if one person has to compromise and change their belief or if you’d both be maintaining your respective religions, how you would work to avoid clashes of any kind, how you would raise your children. If you are both not religious, talking about it still helps. Are you going to impose on your kids? Or you’d be fine if they decide to believe in religions.
9. Future:
Discuss what your individual life goals are as well as what it is as a couple. Talk about your retirement plans, as well as what’s on your bucket list (if there’s any), your dreams and aspirations too. Be sure to write down all these together
There’s no way to shield any marriage from disagreements but there’s a way to minimize it. A lot of understanding has to be done and compromises, be made to have a blissful and satisfactory marriage life. Irrespective of how long you’ve been together, there’s no such thing as too much information about your partner and so, before saying “I do”, be sure to fully discuss the 9 things above and be well on your way to a good marriage.
“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
~Mignon McLaughlin
