Marriage: Married Women In Search Of Balance

Any marriage will suffer if you spend all your attention on any one thing — including your children. There are two tricks to marriage:

1. balance

2. expectations

Balance is important because as you and your spouse grow individually and as a couple, you will have different interests. Some interests you will drop along the way, or let them become less important. Other interests will take center stage or be added on. It’s healthy to have a dynamic life — and normal, so the trick is to balance your health, your marriage, your extended family, your parenting, your work, etc .

Expectations and compatible expectations are as important as balance. Sometimes, it’s impossible to know what your expectations will be or how they will change — no matter how much counseling, talking, and preparing for your marriage you do before hand. People aren’t machines and they change their minds about things. They also realize things they didn’t, later rather than sooner. This makes plans and expectations variable.

That said, maturity and empathy helps, too, and is often hard to find in first marriages. Women often go through more than they ever imagined when they have children — not so much the childbirth, but the life change and the lifestyle change. This can have a domino effect on their husbands, who may have expected their wives to get their bodies back — at all or in a shorter time than it happens, IF it happens, or on husbands who expected the children to sleep through the night, not take up so much of the mother’s time, or who expected wives to have less passionate feelings about being a mother.