Marriage: Top Three Challenges

Crawford and I had the pleasure of attending the Art of Marriage (AOM) Live conference on Valentine's weekend at The Bridge in Goldsboro, NC.  We started the AOM during our wedding counseling but with the busyness of wedding planning and the fact we were not living together before the wedding, it was a bit hard to do separately. I cannot say enough positive things about attending an AOM conference live.  What a difference it made for us as opposed to being by ourselves and watching the videos and studying the lessons.





While our first year of marriage is still fresh on my mind, I want to write about some of the top 3 challenges that we faced as newlyweds.

1.  How to live with a person of the opposite sex.


Girls and boy are different. Plain and simple.  I had never lived with a male (other than my dad) before we got married.  Learning that we both say/do things differently was a real challenge at first.  I would not say that either one of us are neat freaks but we are not sloths either...at least we DID have that going for us.  However, I have my pet peeves and he has his.  For example, Craw has a bad habit of leaving dresser drawers open and not closing them and I. CANT. STAND. IT!!! However, I have a bad habit of leaving my towels on the floor and not hanging them up and HE. CANT. STAND. IT!!!  It's quite comical...


2.  We both handle issues very differently.


I feel like this may be a given for most newlywed couples.  Most relationships have one person that likes to talk things out right then and then the other person needs to be left alone.  This definitely applies to Craw and I .  He is the one that likes to talk and hash it out right as soon as we disagree/argue...and I'm like...DON'T TOUCH ME!  He's definitely a person that likes to touch and thinks that he has to put his hand on mine or on my knee while we work through a disagreement...#nope! I will quickly spazz out on him. Thankfully, we learned this about each other while we were dating and again during marriage counseling but it seems to be a much bigger deal when you're living under one roof.  It took some time but I can happily say he knows he needs to give me about 5 minutes and then we can talk and I guess I learned that he can at least touch my knee...


3. Juggling two very different, yet busy, schedules


This one was tough.  Craw and I are go-go-go people.  Even when we try not to plan anything and stay home, we end up going somewhere and doing something.  We both have jobs with different hours, we are both involved in different church activities, his family lives out of town, he plays softball during the spring/summer, and we both love to travel. One thing our pastor told us during counseling was that we would need to learn to say NO during our first year of marriage.  I don't like saying no but Craw has no issues telling a person no so that really worked well for us.  One thing that really helped us was communicating with each other.  This allowed us to let each other know when one of us was burned out and it also helped us keep our busy schedules straight.  Also, Craw is not good at remembering things so he knows that all plans need to be ran by me, otherwise, there is a chance he is not going to remember.
#imtheplanner


Marriage is definitely not easy but it is so worth it.




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