What We Bring With Us When We Marry

When we marry, we carry baggage with us.

We bring our attitudes toward life and our expectation and values. We believe that all good things will happen if we are true and faithful to our spouse. Sometimes, we can think that life will be good, and we will live happily ever after. It doesn’t go like that. We come from different backgrounds. I know this was the way with my husband and me. He was from the East and was a convert to the church. He was raised in a very strict environment. I am from the West and have generations of family members, all members of the church. “Two people who go through life's ups and downs together grow in ways neither may foresee. Because each partner changes, they do not just celebrate an annual anniversary but rather what could be called a "remarriage." Two people celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary, for example, are not the same two people who married at age eighteen. A pioneer woman who built sod huts, plowed fields, bore and buried children, fought off Indians, dug wells during droughts, and twice nursed her husband back to health would not be the same debutante her husband first met in a quaint St. Louis sitting room. Having been through such adversity together, however, they would most likely end up loving each other in a deeper, more personal way than when they first met. She would have changed, he would have changed, and their love would have changed. And with each change they would recommit—redeclare—their desire to be married to each other (Poduska, 2000). I had an experience with this. I was showing a woman in my branch a picture of me with my three boys when they were 4, 3, and 1. She said to me when she looked at my picture, “Wow, you don’t look anything like you do now!” Well, that was 40 years ago. I have raised 5 children and one of them was a special needs child. I have had good and bad times. I have worked all my life. I didn’t think that I would do that when I got married. My mother never worked. Life changes and as you get older and sometimes, you don’t even realize it.

Another change when couples get married is creating marital identity. "’Parents give their children two things: roots to grow, and wings to fly.’ “The first task of a newly married couple is to separate from the families in which they grew up. One component of separating from families of origin involves creating a marital identity. It helps a newly married couple to think of themselves as existing together inside an invisible fence. They share information and behavior with each other inside that fence, and that information and behavior is not meant to be shared with others outside the fence—not with future children and certainly not with parents or parents-in-law” (Poduska, 2000). “Elder Marvin J. Ashton, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, clarified the meaning of this scripture as it relates to newly married couples: Certainly, a now-married man should cleave unto his wife in faithfulness, protection, comfort, and total support, but in leaving father, mother, and other family members, it was never intended that they now be ignored, abandoned, shunned, or deserted. They are still family, a great source of strength …. Wise parents, whose children have left to start their own families, realize their family role continues, not in a realm of domination, control, regulation, supervision, or imposition, but in love, concern, and encouragement.” There are many changes in life and one of those are money. Each stage of life has a different set of financial obligations. Right now, my husband and I are in the retired stage. We have raised all our children and all of them are gone, except for our Downs Syndrome son. Our home and car are all paid for and we are adjusting to a lifestyle of a lower income, but we are having fun visiting with our children and grandchildren.

Poduska, B. (2000). Till Debt do us Part, (Chapter 11) and (accessible PDF) Salt Lake City, Utah: Shadow Mountain.