What You Should Know, but Don’t

“I wish I’d known what marriage is really like—
instead of swallowing all those myths about marriage.”

      Two Don’t Become One

   When asked what she wished she had known before she got married, Maria answered, “Nothing—I was good to go.” When you’re young and in love, you too may think you’re good to go. You might not be. It depends upon how much you’re going to try to make yourself and your marriage measure up to the mythical ideal.

Renee tried! When she started really looking at why she was so unhappy, she realized that she believed it was her job to give up what she loved and embrace what her husband loved in every area of their lives. She just could not live up to her own ideal of what it meant to be a wife.

If you try to constrict yourself into half of who you are in order to become the wife you think you're supposed to be, you may end up surprising yourself by:

• exploding over something simple
• starting to fight frequently about everything and nothing
• getting depressed
• losing interest in making love
• finding someone else so attractive you wonder if you've married the wrong man

There’s no way to know ahead of time exactly what your marriage is going to be like. You have ideals and fantasies based on the marriages you observed when you were a child and what the media has taught you about marriage. Your real learning will come from experience, from the day-to-day reality of creating your life as a married couple.