Marriage sometimes seems like a clash of two opposing forces. It can be very difficult sometimes to convey your ideas without pointing fingers or offending the other person. If you stick with your marriage, hopefully, you can slowly reconcile some of the differences. Alas, there are two things you can learn now that will assist you in the first years of your marriage.
Before you get married you need to understand these 2 things. “How to love” and “How to finance”.
How to Love: This is the trickier of the two. Most of us don’t have picture-perfect parents. A lot of what we know of love comes from our parents. My parents loved each other, they just didn’t show affection to each other. Funny, that just happens to be my wife’s most important aspect of love, showing affection. It has been hard for me to overcome this in our marriage. But I work on it daily. To me, just being in the general vicinity of my wife is comforting. To her, she wants hugs, touches, and kisses. So I continue to work on it. I don’t give up. I want to stay married. And that is what love is, making a determination to stay married and meet in the middle. Remember, the way you love isn’t important. It is the way your significant other wants to be loved that is important. You want to make this person feel loved all the time. That’s why you decided to get married.
How to finance: This should be a fairly straight forward evolution. You get married, you formulate a budget, a create a savings plan. But as you will soon find out, LIFE HAPPENS. It becomes a balancing act. You know you need a new couch but you have a trip to Disneyland scheduled. Your parents want to come in but you will have to put the charge on the credit card. These are typical decisions that need to be constantly updated and revised. The best thing you can do before you get married is to understand money. Understand earned income, business income, and investment income. Learn how to generate different income streams. Make more money and spend less money. The money left over is for saving and investing. But, most importantly, HAVE FUN. Your experiences together are what will keep you married throughout hard times. Don’t cancel a trip if you can reduce some costs. Maybe stay at a less expensive hotel and eat from Walmart instead of a restaurant. It is vitally important to continue to have fun together.
Communication: The constant that brings these two ideas together is communication. I always hated when people say, “You need to communicate better”. What does that mean? I will give an example of a way my wife and I have been communicating. Let’s say we need a new couch for $800. It needs to be replaced in two months. We have a trip scheduled for 1 month away and it costs $800. The couch is obviously important to my wife and the trip is important to me. So we communicate. I decide to cut the trip down from 4 days into 2 days saving us $400. we then decide to cancel $400 off our investments for 2 months from now. In the end, we go on the trip, we invest (a little less), and we get the couch. We talked it through and everyone is happy. We have fun, we invest, and we make the house look pretty. My wife and I have made so many of these transactions over 14 years. I love it. It just takes compromise and having a plan.
Learn how to love, learn how to finance, and use your communication skills to bridge the gap. This is how marriages survive rough patches. It is also how marriages become an awesome union between two like-minded human beings.
Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor or money manager, and any knowledge is given as guidance and not direct actionable investment advice. Please research any investment vehicles that are being considered. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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