3 Experiences You Need To Have Before You Marry Your Partner, By A Psychologist
Before you make the largest declaration of commitment possible, it’s important to make the smaller ones first. Here are three signs you’re ready to marry your partner.
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People often speak of how marriage “tests” couples. But, usually, spouses who feel tested by their marriage are the ones who didn’t enter it as prepared as they could’ve been. Unfortunately, very few people ready themselves for the ups and downs that marriages inevitably present. They assume, instead, that they can simply take them in stride when the moment comes.
Most people wouldn’t dare run a marathon without training first. Yet, so many people commit to marriage without having “trained” for the kinds of obstacles that they could eventually face. Smaller trials are great measures of the relationship maintenance skills you’ll both need to rely on later.
However, if you have successfully worked through the following three relationship scenarios — and made it to the other side, stronger than you were both before — then that’s a positive sign that you’re likely already more prepared for marriage than most.
1. A Real Disagreement
For a marriage to succeed, partners have to be able to confidently put their differences aside for a greater cause. And since conflicting values, ideas, perspectives and opinions are almost guaranteed to arise in a marriage, your ability to work through these issues together, and not against one another, is paramount.
Classic research from The Journal of Psychology suggests that relationship satisfaction and conflict styles are inextricably linked. Should couples struggle to reconcile their differences in arguments, they will likely experience much lower relationship satisfaction than those who can.
According to the study, there are four primary conflict styles that individuals tend to rely on in their attempts to tackle relational issues:
- Positive problem solving. Active discussions and negotiations, which end most often with a compromise of some kind.
- Conflict engagement. Using hostility or anger to air out frustrations.
- Withdrawal. Struggling or outright refusing to engage with one another, or avoiding conflict altogether.
- Compliance. One partner relents to the other’s wishes, without presenting their own needs and wants.
As expected, the author of the study found that the latter three negative conflict styles were highly correlated with lower relationship satisfaction. This remained to be the case even in situations where couples were able to resolve the conflict, albeit worse so when left unresolved. Positive problem solving, on the other hand, was strongly associated with higher relationship satisfaction.
The tricky aspect of conflict in marriage is that, sometimes, neither spouses will necessarily be in the wrong. Say, for instance, you want to spend Christmas with your family. Your partner, on the other hand, feels just as strongly about spending it with theirs.
Both of you may have good points to make and valid concerns to bring up. Neither of you are “wrong” in the slightest, but the tension can still remain. In these cases, where each of you have a strong leg to stand on, conflict resolution requires the utmost dedication to helping each other understand, while also prioritizing what’s best for the relationship as a whole. How you choose to tackle these issues together will speak volumes about your future.
In this sense, if you and your partner have already proved to one another that you can make it through a conflict without attacking one another, completely shutting down or simply giving up, then you already have one of the most important skills that a marriage will inevitably require of you.
2. A Dry Spell In Your Sex Life
Sexual difficulties can arise in any kind of relationship, for various reasons. And, often, these reasons will be outside of your locus of control. If a medical or psychological factor is preventing you from maintaining your sex life, there might be little you can do about it unless the root cause is addressed first — which may well be a time-consuming, inconsistent process.
It’s also worth noting that dry spells aren’t at all uncommon; a vast majority of couples experience them at one point or another in their relationship. That said, for many couples, sex is nevertheless a very important aspect of a loving relationship in terms of both physical and emotional intimacy. For couples who view sex as valuable in these domains of their relationship, a dry spell in the bedroom can be decidedly hard to work around.
According to a 2011 study from The Journal of Sex Research, what matters most when managing sexual difficulties is how exactly partners approach the difficulties themselves. The study notes that should medical treatment fail, couples have to rely on their own coping strategies.
For the participants in the study, these ranged from redefining their expectations in the bedroom to normalizing their discomfort. However, the couples who managed to adjust successfully to these rough patches were usually the ones who adopted flexible, accommodative approaches to the problem.
Specifically, the authors note that revising their definition of “good-enough” sex, along with reducing how much importance they placed on sexual performance, were great ways to weather these dry spells.
This is why it’s so crucial for partners to prepare themselves for imperfection before entering a marriage, rather than solely expecting the ideal. So, if you have experienced a rough patch in your sex life, yet managed the setback without feeling the need to blame or withdraw from one another, you’re already well prepared for marriage.
In some cases, being prepared for rough patches in a marriage entails recognizing that there is, in fact, little you can do to prepare. All you can do is remain kind to one another, and commit to staying flexible for the sake of helping one another find the happiness and satisfaction you both deserve.
3. A Stressful Life Event
Outside of the bedroom, various kinds of wrenches can be thrown into your well-established routines and rituals, with little to no warning. At the drop of a hat, life as you know it can change completely for good; there’s often no way to predict when you’ll lose a job, when a loved one may pass away, when a disaster may strike or when you’ll face a serious injury or illness.
Major life events like these often give us the greatest demonstrations of how couples operate under pressure. You’ll witness firsthand how well they can regulate their emotions and communicate with one another when there isn’t any way to fix or escape the problem itself.
As 2018 research from the Journal of Family Psychology shows, the ways in which partners behave during highly stressful life situations can have a significant impact on their well-being and relationship satisfaction in the aftermath. However, the authors of the study note that, consistently, negative behaviors tended to outweigh positive gestures.
As the study demonstrates, couples’ effective coping with large or tragic changes doesn’t necessarily hinge on how sweet or supportive they are to one another. Instead, it depends on how well they can avoid making things worse when everything already seems to be falling apart. Poor responses (for instance, becoming critical, withdrawn, overly pragmatic or dismissive) will only add fuel to the already raging flames.
In this sense, partners who have already faced something incredibly stressful together, without desperately flailing to “solve” it or emotionally disappear, are evidently prepared for weathering storms together in a marriage. This is a great sign that you can tolerate ambiguity, without needing to come out the other side as the hero.
Resilience in a marriage isn’t always a matter of fixing things. In most cases, it’s simply a test of whether you can endure it together.
If a couple has done that once, there’s a good chance they’ll do it again. Marriage won’t magically make you better at handling stress, but knowing you can trust your partner when the stakes are high will certainly help. Although you can’t vow a marriage free of conflict or struggle, you can still face it all together with all the patience and resilience you can muster.
Have myths about marriage left you unprepared for the reality of it? Take this science-backed test to find out: Belief in Marital Myths Scale