A wedding is exciting! Giving birth to a baby brings an exhilarating feeling! But it gives us mixed feelings when our children enter a new stage: our baby’s first day in preschool, our little boy going to high school, and our once dependent child leaving for college.
Family life entails change. Through each change, we have to manage the transition. For my master’s thesis, I made case studies of young married couples to delve into the dynamics of their relationships. I traced their paths from being boyfriends and girlfriends to becoming married couples. What was highlighted in it is the transition experience.
In married life, we rarely look into the transition phase as a rich one. We tend to rush from point A to point B that we fail to mindfully experience what is happening during the period of change. We often look at these matters as problems, whereas the situation itself is mostly normal in the stages of family life.
Indeed, my favorite family therapist said that in families, “Problems are not the problems! Coping is the problem.”
We forget to look at problems as opportunities to grow and hone our internal resources as individuals and as families. In the phases of change, we need to recognize the experience itself, the reasons that motivate us, and our ways of coping.
Here are factors important for couples to make successful transitions in family life.
RELATIONSHIP-DRIVEN REASONS VS EVENT-DRIVEN REASONS
If you are single or engaged, your motivation to marry is internal to the relationship. If you long to have children, the reason should be the result of a mature decision. Whether it is love or maturity, your sense of readiness to take the relationship to the next level or your desire to start a family should be an internal drive. This will help you work on the marriage and family relationship.
An unplanned pregnancy, living abroad, or leaving an unpleasant family life — these are event-driven reasons or external reasons for marrying or moving into married life. These are usually the couples who had a rough time transitioning. It took them some time to achieve a smooth marital relationship. As they say, marry when you are ready, not because you are needy! This is the same as love your family because you are ready, not when you are needy.
REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS ABOUT MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
I once taught Family Psychology to college students. In one of our activities, I asked my students to pretend they are about to get married and answer a marriage expectation test. Among all batches, their insights were mostly consistent: “Miss, we have not thought of this yet!” “It is more difficult than what we thought!” “We did not expect these issues!”
We have to be grounded in reality when we enter marriage and family life. We have to work at having a common purpose as a couple on how we want to make the marriage and our family life grow.
Many couples get into marriage thinking it will all be about romance, sex, and dates. They think it is mostly about happiness. While this may be true, there are other things that this stage brings – the life realities.
Many parents are excited to have children but are not intentional in becoming parents. They fail to talk about resolving conflicts, dealing with sex, managing finances and bills, parenting and disciplining children, family planning, practicing religion, and so on. There are more matters beyond the wedding day and giving birth, and these matters are the realities. Unfortunately, we don’t talk much about them.
What are the things you expect might happen in married life? Are your expectations realistic or based on romantic fantasies? How would you go about fulfilling those expectations in married life? If you are stuck in some issues now that you are married, check your expectations again. Your expectations might be the reason for your frustrations.
RELATIONAL FACTORS AS COPING RESOURCES
There are matters that are important to help the relationship thrive. During engagement and as couples and families go through their family life, it is crucial for the couple, then the family, to be aligned on matters that they should be working on in the relationship.
Similar interests. Experts have noted that there should be something that couples share and enjoy doing when together. How do you know and keep that something? Go back to the time you were dating and getting to know each other. Take note of the things that gave you both a high. What is this something that you can keep doing consistently, despite the changes that may happen in your married life? It may be coffee dates, a shared sport, or love for music or movies. Share these interests too or find new ones with your children. Work on that ‘something’ to be your point of alignment.
Similar values. You may not see eye to eye on all things, but you have to be aligned on the non-negotiable matters in your life. Many decisions and actions in life are fueled by what we value. My spouse and I have different ways of doing things and are so different in many ways. Yet, we both put prime importance on our family life, finances, our spiritual life and community service, and our value for communication. It might be different for you, but if you have the same perspective in the more important things, the rest are readily negotiable. When we are deadlock on deciding on matters, such values are the ones we go back to.
Communication and conflict resolution. Many things have been said about the art of communication, but it is the one thing that can smooth out friction, tie up the bond, and make the relationship work for life. Conflicts happen in relationships, between the couple, the parents and teens, and even with other family members. If we know how to effectively communicate and discuss with each other the small and big concerns we have, then the relationship can thrive.
When we communicate, we do so not because we want to put down our stand on something, to assert our rights and to point out who is right. In family life, managing conflicts and effective communication are coping resources that will help families stand the storms and floods of life. Our common goal is to work on what is best for our families so that each member can cope and grow from the transitions and challenges of life.
Family life is not easy. Transitions are actually challenges. It can bring out the best or the worse in us. What we need to do is to be mindful of each experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and turn them into internal resources to strengthen our families.
This article first appeared in Family Reborn, April 2016, but has since been updated.