Fundie/Christian marriage: why is it so hard?

I got married young at 22. This seems young to me now but I experienced a number of things that forced me to grow up more quickly and led me to be beyond my years. It was completely the right decision for me.

My husband and I did not live together before we got married because we didn’t want to. We have no regrets about that.

We got married a couple of years after we started dating and that felt like the right amount of time for us.

The first year included a lot of external stress that put a lot of pressure on us. This had nothing to do with living together for the first time but things outside our marriage that we had no control over. Because of that, we look back at our first year of marriage and laugh at how rough it was. As we got better at dealing with those stressors together, we grew.

We’ve been married several years and it’s exceeded my expectations of marriage. I am happy in my marriage every day. We have an incredible rhythm that took a little bit of time to establish but is unbreakable. That’s not to say we don’t have the occasional disagreement but we both know how to communicate healthily and bounce back very quickly.

Things that worked in our favor: - we are both highly educated, have the ability to think critically, and pursue our own successful careers - we went into our marriage with a defined set of shared values and are very invested in being good communicators - we come from families of successful, long, thriving marriages - we did not rush into having children

For us, we knew we wanted to make a meaningful commitment to each other. We didn’t want to move into together to ‘see how it goes’ with the option in the back of our minds that we could always just leave. If we were going to get serious enough to live together, we wanted to make a life commitment.

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