Stages of Marriage

Krista Vanden Heuvel, 25 church financial & administrative secretary, and Jame Vanden Heuvel, 25, Youth Pastor in the Tri-City Area have been married two years. 

Krista:
At this stage for me, the biggest aspect is learning. By learning, what I mean is all the habits, mannerisms, needs, gifts, dreams, emotions. It's learning all those and how they connect and went together to form this whole other person. You learn a lot about a person when you're dating and engaged-enough to learn you want to spend your life with this person-but you don't learn it all. It's just that God has created us as such complex human beings that it takes years to get to really know one another. While I can predict the ways he's going to react or respond to an extent, more of  that comes on the basis of experience. After two years, we've acquired some experience, but I have a lifetime to learn about who he is. 

Beside learning about who he is, we're trying to learn how we function building our home together. Right now, that's where our focus is. Hand in hand with learning, is loving. It's accepting one another as we're learning who one another is and accepting each of us for who we are. 

Jame:
The four words that help me describe marriage now are "TC squared"-Teamwork, Time Management, Communication, Compromise.  All these are new because we've never been married before. 

Those four capture where we are in our marriage. This has been a time of adjustment. Many of those words relate directly to what it was like being single compared to what it's like being married. I remember very clearly what it was like being single, since it was just a couple of years ago. There are big differences. 

Teamwork: When I was single, I was the only one who made life decisions. They really only impacted me. Now those decisions have to be made together, so that's quite a difference. Now I need to think about my wife. At first, I made some decisions on my own, which was a mistake, and then I realized I needed to check with her. 

Time Management: When I was single, how I wanted to spend my time was something I just decided. I did what I wanted to do whenever I wanted to. Now I need to check with my wife on those kinds of things. Spending time is like spending money when you're married. It should be a shared decision. 

Communication: When I was in my parents house, I communicated like any adolescent-not a whole lot. Now I need to dig deep and share my dreams, thoughts, feelings, and ideas with another person, and I'm not used to that. Communication is really important in this stage because we need to define our dreams and together share how we want to see our lives in five, ten, fifteen years. 

Compromise: I sense how important that is when you're involved in an intensive relationship. I imagine as we get older, it gets easier to solve problems. Maybe there are fewer issues to work out. Being a newlywed-compromise, seems like we're doing it all the time.