Phase 2: We’re Committed!

Phase 2 of a partnership marriage begins when the two of you commit to creating a future together. You take the plunge together, get engaged and commit to getting married. Phase 2 often extends into the first few years of marriage.

As you look forward to your wedding day, you must learn to balance your individual needs and your relationship needs with those of your family members. This is often a new frontier and a wonderful, yet challenging, testing ground for your commitment to each other. Not only are you planning the ceremony and celebration of your public commitment to each other, but you are also learning to navigate through the expectations of your extended family members who plan to be in your lives for many years.

Once you are married and living together, you must learn to work out your marital roles and your household responsibilities. You must learn to communicate, problem solve, negotiate and plan together. In short, you are learning how to be an effective team.

This second phase of marriage is a time when you get to know what living with your loved one is really like, day in and day out. Each of you is now a witness to your partner’s behavioral patterns and habits that you may or may not have seen or known before.

Personal differences begin to emerge, expectations are challenged and disappointments burst those ideal images of how you each thought it would be. You find out that you each do the laundry, wash the dishes or organize your dresser drawers in different ways. What your partner likes to eat, how they like to spend their free time or what they like to watch on television may be in sharp contrast to what you had expected going into marriage.

Early in our marriage, Martha and I had no clear system of agreements around our roles and responsibilities. In our first attempt to clarify who was going to do what, we struggled but we managed to come up with a system of negotiating our household responsibilities. We were committed to equality and fairness to which we added the essential ingredient of choice. Without the experience of having choice in the matter, nothing was going to work to sustain a sense of teamwork.

Our conversations around daily chores eventually led to workability and effectiveness in managing our household activities. Over the years, when the circumstances of our lives have changed, we have returned to the task of negotiating household activities many times over.

Many couples go into marriage with a vision of starting a family, buying a house and having successful careers. Phase 2 is a time when teamwork is critically required and you must learn how to have many important life conversations that promote workability and happiness in your relationship.

Here are conversations that are important in Phase 2 of a partnership marriage:

• Explore your ideas and notions of marriage. If you can, talk about the kind of marriage you want to have together prior to getting married. If you are like many young married couples, you won’t discuss your beliefs or ideas about marriage until after your wedding day. Once you’re married, you may find out you have very different ideas about how you want to design your marriage.
• Share what you are committed to in your relationship. Create who you are for each other and for your relationship. When you do this, you share a stake in the quality of your relationship and the kind of marriage you want to create. Examples of commitments you can make to each other are “I hold you as an equal in our relationship,” “I promise to honor you and be faithful to you,” and “I love, trust and respect you.” Another possible commitment might be, “The quality of our relationship is a top priority for us.”
• Establish boundaries that support your relationship. Have conversations to set boundaries with each other regarding privacy and personal space. Important boundaries for you to consider are around reading each other’s mail, text messages or email and being on each other’s computer (if you both have one). Also, establish healthy boundaries with your family and their friends that build trust and confidence in the integrity of your marriage.
• Create time for “us.” Find times to connect throughout the day to support the health and well-being of your committed relationship and/or your marriage. Find times to be intimate, to play, to be together, to relax, to date, to get away for a weekend and to enjoy a fabulous vacation just for the two of you!
• Pay attention to the quality of your interactions. Maintain a healthy balance of positive and negative interactions towards each other. Stable marriages exhibit a 5 to 1 ratio of positive to negative interactions.
• Create teamwork around household and other responsibilities. It could be said that to have a successful marriage in today’s society, you have to learn to negotiate everything! Given that most men and women today are pursuing careers and working full time, both of you need to be involved in discussing your roles and household responsibilities. The effectiveness of your conversations and the workability of your arrangements around completing household tasks, managing money, parenting, keeping community commitments, etc. are critical to the quality of your life together and to having a clear pathway to creating the future you both want.

By engaging in these kinds of conversations, you each can step boldly into your future, trusting in each other, having confidence in your new marriage and knowing that you can take on any challenge so long as you tackle it together.

Reference

Miser, A. (2014) The partnership marriage: Creating the life you love…together. Charleston, South Carolina: Create Space Publishing.

Posted in Partnership Marriage