Transition Into Marriage

Dating is such a fun time of life and is filled with brand new adventures! There are many different opportunities that come up through beginning a new relationship with someone. Relationships all vary on the couple, some relationships move fast and some move slow. There is no set limit to how long you should date before asking the big question. Once the question has been asked, the engagement is over and you are now married, there are a lot of new transitions that have never been experienced up to this point of life. I personally am not married so I have not experienced these transitions but for most people they can take a lot of time and adjusting.
A few of the transitions that you go through after becoming married are sharing a bed, sharing your money, sharing a bathroom, sharing your living space, sharing chores and house duties, and sharing your food. For being a college or university student and living in your own apartment, you get the opportunity to experience living with a roommate and this can introduce you to what this transition will be like, for example, in sharing a bathroom, living space, and chores. You learn how to live with a person whom you may not know very well and learn how they function and you in return adjust how you would normally function so that you work well in the apartment together. Now there are different things that you just don't experience until marriage such as sharing money and in most cases sharing a bed.
How can you make that transition into marriage smoothly if you have never experienced these? One way that can help is to have a conversation with your significant other. Talking about these experiences during engagement can help you both feel equally transitioned. Another conversation that should be discussed during engagement is these 3 things, Roles--Rules--Expectations. By discussing these it can help set your sturdy foundation before continuing your relationship further into marriage. Discussing each other's expectations for one another is a huge benefit to the relationship. You each have grown up in different types of family situations and so discussing what His mom did for his dad and what Her dad did for her mom and then deciding how you both can work to help fill each other's expectations.
Marital Satisfaction is something that easily gets overlooked in early marriage. According to studies, marital satisfaction is very high at the beginning stages of marriage (you can obviously guess why) and then a little ways into the relationship it takes a pretty big degrade. This degrade comes with the birth of the 1st child and then continually through life with every birth the satisfaction goes down. Marital satisfaction actually doesn't increase again until children start to leave the house and the parents are left with the time alone that they had at the beginning of their relationship.
Roles change during this time with becoming new parents. Mother's workload increases 60% as she is now taking care of an innocent baby. Instead of just being Husband/Wife the roles have changed to being Husband/Father+Wife/Mother which can cause stress between their relationship. Since there is quite a bit of pressure with becoming new parents one thing that should be done to help give relief is to involve each other in special moments that maybe only one parent would get to experience. There are many other things that can help with this transition into marriage and getting adjusted but if you as a couple can look back and remember why you fell in love with that person and why you choose to be committed to each other will bring back those feelings of love and enjoyment.