You have changed after marriage
11 May 2013home > blogs
I thought I would never hear these words in my marriage. I feel more loved and love her more passionately than before. It seems inevitable. I heard these words from my love on a couple of occasions. The very first time I heard that I justified her and convinced her that I would try to be the same as before. But, when I heard this the second time, I felt that a serious before/after analysis is required to get this thought out of her mind and make her understand, how to make things work for each other without ignoring the changes. Hmmm… this phase seems inevitable in every marriage.
Did I change after marriage?
Yes. I did. While dating, I was a careless rogue and a romantic poet who cared about only one thing - Love. Nothing else. Never bothered to go to work. Never bothered about my career. Never cared about my finances. Side effects of dopamine and serotonin?
After marriage, I have a home and a whole bunch of expenses to take care of. I had to be very proper with the finances. I need to be regular at work. I cannot be carefree anymore. Suddenly, going out required planning. Going to theaters means reading reviews about the movies and choosing them wisely (?) etc.
Is it a positive change?
Yes. It is. I became more organized and became good at planning. I used to spend a couple of hours in the morning for myself. To make that time for me again, I started waking up at 6 AM every day. I started reading a lot of books again. I started concentrating on diet and exercise. I stopped eating junk food and going to parties. I became a raw vegan. I spent most of the evenings and the weekends with her.
What confused me was that I became a better person, but she felt that we grew apart !!!
The Analysis
I have to find out what is happening to us. But, I don’t know where to start. Simply, I listed down the activities I like to do and asked her to do the same thing. Once we had two lists, I plotted them in a Venn diagram. Here is what our “Relationship Venn Diagram” looks like.
The Findings
- We both have a set of activities that we love to do together.
- We do have a disjointed set of unrelated activities that we love to do with/without the other.
- We cannot simply do the common activities forever, no matter how deep in love we are.
- We must spend time on other activities with/without the better half.
- The success of the marriage depends on how efficiently we allocate time to common & uncommon activities.
I am glad that we did this exercise last night. We will try to add more things to our common interests and give enough time & space for the other person to pursue his/her interests. We will make sure that the other person is actively engaged in some activity while we do our activities. Simply plotting the Venn Diagram provided such insight and initiated a thought process that helped us to look at the same things differently. I wish every couple does this exercise and keeps the list updated every six months.
Please do this if you are in a relationship, it helps you both !..
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