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Ah, newlywed life. I’ve been married for almost eight years now, and that seems absolutely insane to me. Granted, eight years isn’t very long compared to a lot of people. I met my husband when I was 18, got engaged when I was 19, and got married when I was 20. I was fairly mature and felt old enough. I was young. I’ve been writing blog posts full of mistakes I’ve made, so I decided to reflect on those first years of marriage.
Now, I do believe we all have to make mistakes to learn, and some of my “mistakes” are small or not a big deal or things that wouldn’t even be on someone else’s radar. But this has been a fun little exercise for me, and maybe someone can learn something… or get a few laughs.
Mistake #1: Baking too much
This may seem ridiculous, but it’s true. I was so excited to have a kitchen I didn’t have to share with roommates and couldn’t wait to try out a bunch of new recipes I found on my new Pinterest account. I made sugar cookies, lemon bars, brownies from scratch, and gingerbread bars, to name a few. They weren’t all successes, but I have a major sweet tooth and didn’t care. My husband, on the other hand, was happy to eat one or two cookies and maybe take a few for lunch the next day. Needless to say, baking (and not sharing enough) contributed to my 30-pound weight gain that first year.
Mistake #2: Not exploring birth control options
On a more serious note, birth control is rough. I got on the pill when I was engaged because that is what I always heard about. It seemed simple enough, and from what I could tell, it was popular. It seriously messed with me. I became super emotional. Like, cry on the front room floor for an hour because friends invited us somewhere at the last minute. Yeah, not pretty. I’m pretty sure the pill contributed to my weight gain as well. Then there’s the worst part. I began to experience symptoms of seasonal depression for the first time. Eight years later and I’ve now dealt with postpartum depression and have ongoing depression. I got off the pill after eight months and will never use hormonal birth control again.
Mistake #3: Not getting a job soon enough
Looking back I think it would have done me good to get a job that first year. I was finishing up my Bachelor’s Degree and traveling an hour each way to school several days a week. As an English major and editing minor, I had a lot of reading and writing homework that took hours every day. I decided to focus on school and get a job when I graduated. Not only could we have used the money, but I could have used something to get me off my butt. Plus, when I graduated, I spent over three months applying for jobs before working in a warehouse for 9 months. It took more than a year for me to actually get a job in my field.
Mistake #4: Being carefree about money
That leads us to the mistake of being too carefree about money. Now, as college student newlyweds, we spent a lot of time at home. I did homework. We watched television. We would go to the park and play card games. In a lot of ways we were frugal. However, looking back I can’t help but wonder what we could have been smarter about and what ways we could have hustled to get ahead financially. We could have eaten out less. We could have not put so much money into cars. I could have worked part time sooner. We could have taken a chance with my husband’s job before we had a house or kids to worry about.
Mistake #5: Isolating ourselves
This is a tricky one just because of course we wanted to be alone a lot. But from the perspective of someone with a house and two little kids, I wish we’d spent more time making and hanging out with friends before life got more complicated. We lived in an apartment complex for the first 2.5 years of marriage. We even had three or four couple friends in our building, and none of us had kids. We had get-togethers a few times and went camping with a few couples once, but I didn’t realize how much more freedom we had back then when we didn’t have to worry about entertaining kids or getting home by bedtime.
Mistake #6: Not being spontaneous
Again, we had so much less responsibility back then. How fun would it have been to have just randomly gone an hour away for the weekend? Saved up and gone to Europe? Went on a road trip just us? Or with a few friends? Yeah, money would have been an issue, but everything doesn’t have to be super expensive.
Our newlywed life wasn’t bad. We had a lot of fun and made a lot of memories. These “mistakes” are simply things that I would have maybe tweaked if I had known then what I know now.
