Five Big Mistakes Married Couples Make! ...and we've made them all!

To state the obvious: when you first get married, you've never been married before.  For the first time in your life, you're joining two lives into one.  Two imperfect people become one family.  Of course you're going to make mistakes!

As a follow up to yesterday's post on six things all newlyweds must do, today's post is on the mistakes that many married couples make.  I compiled this list with my wife based on mistakes we made that I know others have made.  

I'm co-writing this post with my wife.  Sections written by me are in regular text and additions by my wife will be in italics.

Mistake #1 - Don't Pray Together

When you get married, you join two lives into one.  This has both practical and spiritual implications. If you want to grow together as a couple, you must do life together.  If there is a God who wants to have a relationship with us (which I would argue there is, since I'm a pastor), then our spiritual lives are of the utmost importance.  Therefore, as married couple you need to grow together spiritually.

We got married while I was still in Bible College.  So, looking back, it seems silly that we didn't start off the bat praying together, but we didn't.  It came a little bit later, but really it wasn't until we had kids that we started being thoroughly consistent.  

Maybe I'm just making excuses, but it seems we've almost always had conflicting schedules.  When we were newlyweds, I was a college student, and she was in the work force.  I stayed up late doing homework, and she went to bed early so she could get to work on time.  For the last three years, I've gone to bed relatively early so I can get up for work, but she usually goes to bed an hour or two after me.  It has created plenty of excuses to skip prayer on any given day.  It has consistently been something we've talked about how to fix; kids have been a wonderful solution.

Here's the reality: couples who pray together daily drastically reduce the chance of divorce; this shouldn't be surprising.  Praying daily increases communication, and it provides an opportunity to connect on a deeper spiritual level with your spouse and your creator.

While having kids has made it easier to be more consistent with our family prayer, I still wish that we had been more proactive in making daily prayer together a part of our early marriage. Prayer is a vulnerable thing, and it links you, your spouse, and your Creator in a really intimate way. It helps you focus on what is important...and remember that your spouse is a brother/sister in Christ, struggling with their own set of things on their way to be more like Jesus, and in need of His grace (and not just the person who did not replace the toilet paper on the roll AGAIN). 

Ultimately, it's easier now to implement prayer together because we long for our children to have healthy spiritual habits; but they will learn best from what we model, and from what they perceive in our behavior. I would prefer to now be modifying an existing pattern than attempting to establish two new ones at once.

SUGGESTION | Set a time each night that you pray for one another.  Ask each other how you can pray for one another.

Mistake #2 - Buying a House Too Soon or Buying Too Much House

Buying a home is a right of passage in our culture.  If you own a home, you are a full blown adult and there's no going back.  So, once you're married and in a stable location, buying a home seems like the obvious next step.  But doing so too soon can be very unwise.

Of the mistakes we've made, this is the most frustrating for me.  While mistake #1 was almost certainly more important than #2, since you can objectively quantify the cost of buying the wrong house, this one frustrates me constantly.

A year and a half after we were married, we moved back to Texas and found ourselves with the house buying bug.  We had the money to do so responsibly.  We knew the Austin area was where we were going to settle, but I didn't have a job lined up yet.  Still, we wanted a house.  

So, we picked a central location and arbitrarily set a budget for how much we wanted to spend.  After looking at a couple of dozen houses in a neighborhood we liked, we found the perfect home. It was just 20 minutes too far from where I would end up eventually.  Soon after I became a pastor at our church, it became clear that we needed to move closer to the community where we were ministering.  

If I could do it again:

• I would have rented for a year after moving to Texas
• I would have asked someone else for advice on how much we should spend in light of our finances
• I would have purchased a significantly cheaper home (our 2nd home was significantly cheaper than our first)

I agree with all of what My Love said. I am grateful for the time we had in that first house, and for the life we had because of where we were...I just wish we had been renting instead ;) It's odd...in the moment, we did feel so grown up, and so informed...but we weren't. We had people giving us advice on which house to buy, as compared to others we looked at, but we didn't give them access to all the information of our circumstances. If we had, I'm fairly positive that someone would have said, "Um, you don't know where Sean will be working yet? Shouldn't you wait?" or, "You're getting a job specifically so that you can be qualified for your mortgage, but you're not certain that's the best area for you to settle in?" Because of being robbed at our first apartment, we were largely focused on finding somewhere we felt safe; upon doing that, we neglected to consider all other factors, and let the house-buying-bug get the better of us.

SUGGESTION | Seek the advice of someone much older and wiser than yourself.  Give them permission to tell you when you're ready to purchase a home.  Find someone that you trust enough that you can tell them all of your financial information (and who understands and shares your financial goals), and then take their advice on what your budget should be

Mistake #3 - Don't Create a Monthly Budget or Talk About Finances

50% of marriages end in divorce, and money is the number one most cited cause of divorce.  Not talking about money and being on the same page is an ENORMOUS mistake.  You must talk about money, and you need to have a plan.

We're not big spenders.  We're both a little bit on the cheap side, actually.  For reasons I don't want to discuss, we had some financial benefits.  Therefore, we were able to be sloppy with our spending without getting ourselves into any trouble.  We didn't make any big stupid mistakes (other than not having renter's insurance), but we didn't do anything smart either. We lived within our means, but we didn't save intentionally for our future.  

Budgeting | Telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went - John Maxwell

After two years of marriage, we went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University.  The program was eye opening, and helped us to have some great conversations about finances.  However, the real catalyst for us to get on the same page financially was when Jennifer stopped working and we went from two incomes to one.  Obviously, this required re-working our budget.

When we first got married, I was the more financially responsible/organized of the two of us. I used highlighters, my check registry, and a folding technique to keep my checkbook balanced and my money (if I had any, haha) under control. Upon seeing my system as I wrote a check one day, Sean appeared to be impressed, and I landed myself as in charge of the finances. That wasn't a bad decision, per se, but because we didn't talk about it in detail, a budget, or "telling your money where to go," we ended up wondering where it went. 

Like he said, we could have made a lot smarter choices than we did, had we known what we know now. Now that I think about it, I don't recall having any discussion of expectations of my role as "financial manager," or our financial plans in general, other than, "Debt is bad. We don't want it." Seriously. I can only imagine what our present selves would say to our past selves -- it would be a rough conversation! And, even though we know more now than we knew then, because we didn't start implementing a budget system or technique then, I'm still struggling to get the process down.

SUGGESTION | Before the first of each month, schedule a meeting where you talk through that month's budget.  One person can create the first draft.  However, both people get a say in the budget, and both people need to agree on the budget.   

Mistake #4 - Don't Evaluate Your Relationship and Future Plans (at least) Annually

Unlike the previous three mistakes, this is the only one where I think we've gotten worse as time has passed.  With the first three, we were ignorant newlyweds who learned how to be better spouses as time passed.  The longer we're married, the more complicated it gets to get away and talk about our relationship. Between responsibilities with the kids and the church, it's really hard to get away.

Here's the reality:

• You need to know what each person is struggling with in the relationship
• You need to talk about the issues which keep coming up
• You need to voice all the wonderful things that happened the previous year
• You need to voice and discuss your personal struggles
• You need to discuss your desires for the next year
• You need to know how you can serve your spouse in the coming months
• You need to discuss events you know are coming up
• You need to discuss where each of you want the family to be in five years

Just stop and consider any one of those eight points.  Consider how obviously unhealthy it would be (or at best non-ideal) if you DIDN'T know what your spouse was thinking in one of those areas.

• How do you do life with a person when you don't even know what they're struggling with?  
• How do you help and serve your spouse when you don't know what they want out of life? 
• How do you head move in the same direction when you're headed towards different destinations?

You need to talk about the past, the present, and the future regularly.  Some of these conversations are exciting. Others may be boring.  At times, these conversations will be extremely painful.

If you want to live life together, you have to actually talk about your life together.

This one really speaks to me. It seems like such a healthy and easy thing to do, doing it would bring so much peace and clarity, and yet it is the first thing to be pushed back...at least, for us it is. It's not uncommon to have random conversations with family members, throw around ideas for holidays and special occasions, write things on the calendar and, before you know it, another year is over. One of the things I've heard a lot in youth group with my husband over the years is, "Your direction, not your intention, determines your destination." 

It is so easy to intend to make such and such a priority...to plan on doing that thing you've been putting off...to do whatever. But, if you don't make a plan and follow it, you'll end up going wherever you're headed, instead of where you had hoped. It's terrifying, actually. Having kids has made it even more disturbing to me -- like everyone says, they grow up so fast. If we're not intentional about our direction, we very likely won't end up where we had planned...and likely won't notice we're headed there until we've already arrived. Eep!  Same as with finances and prayer...same as with everything, I suppose...the sooner you start implementing this habit, the sooner it will become a habit, and the more you can utilize it to your advantage.

SUGGESTION | Every year, take a weekend vacation where you discuss where your relationship is at, what you want for the next year, and your future hopes and dreams. Before you have kids, this is pretty easy to do. If the budget is tight, you can go camping and talk while walking trails in the woods.  However, this becomes far more difficult when kids enter the picture for the obvious reasons; but once kids enter the picture, it's absolutely CRUCIAL that you do this.  It's so easy for your role of parent to completely trample over your role as spouse.  Even if you can't do an entire weekend, at least find a night where someone can watch the kids, and you and your spouse can discuss where you're at.

Mistake #5 - Don't Communicate Love To Your Spouse Using Their Love Language

The idea of love languages comes from a book called "The Five Love Languages" by Gary D. Chapman.  The premise of the book is that each of us express and receive love using one of the five love languages:

1. Words of affirmation
2. Acts of service
3. Receiving gifts
4. Quality time
5. Physical touch

While we may appreciate when someone communicates love to us using any of the love languages, each of us best feels loved when someone communicates love to us with our personal love language.  Usually, we attempt to express love the same way we like to receive love, but not necessarily always.  My wife seems to feel most loved when she receives words of affirmation, but she defaults most of the time to acts of service.

My love language is quality time.
My love language is words of affirmation. Or, at least, we're pretty sure that it is ;)*edit* Since I was unsure, I took the quiz here, and it actually said my love language is acts of service

I feel loved just by sitting next to her watching a movie.  It's likewise really frustrating for me when I'm trying to share something with her and she doesn't give it her full attention.  On the flip side, I'm very bad at naturally being affirming with my words.

Here's a regular criss-cross of love languages in our home:  I come home from work wanting to relax with my wife and spend quality time with her.  She, however wants to serve me by getting a bunch of stuff done.  I become frustrated that she isn't spending time with me, and I voice my frustration that she won't join me.  She then becomes frustrated that I used my words not to affirm her for her hard work, but criticize her for not spending time with me.

• I was trying to communicate love through quality time, but she didn't feel loved because I did not use my words to affirm her.
• She was trying to communicate love through service, but I did not feel loved because she did not spend time with me.
• The end result is frustration (and possibly an argument), and all of this occurred because we weren't expressing language the way the other person receives love.

You must know how each of you express and receive love.  Not doing so will lead to frustration and possibly one or both of you feeling unloved.

Ugh, this one drives me crazy! It's so incredibly difficult! It's super tricky because both of you are naturally inclined to express love one way, and also interpret or receive love in a certain way. Altering this is, in my experience, an on-going process...as well as a sacrificial act. The example of a criss-cross of love languages in our household that Sean gave was extremely accurate. It's a huge challenge for us to not assess how we feel the other is loving us, instead of first seeking to find what we can do to support and encourage by communicating love to them the way they receive it...I'm striving to learn to love my husband in the way he best receives love, regardless of his method of expression of love toward me.

SUGGESTION | Discover and discuss each of your love languages. Knowing how each of you show love and feel loved can be a major breakthrough for your relationship.  

Those are our five big marriage mistakes!  What are some mistakes which you've made?