What I wish I'd known before I got married.....

By the time Josh and I got married, I felt like I knew him pretty well. We had been dating, seriously dating, for a good long time. We spend nearly every day together for months. We knew each other’s families (and liked them!). We’d had our moments and worked through our differences. I wasn’t really nervous about marrying him at all.

He had graduated from the Institute of Healing Arts where he learned all kinds of emotional release work stuff and sometimes it felt like we were already in marriage counseling (in a good way). We both went through a kind of therapy together working on our own stuff and working together to make our relationship stronger. We went to a lot of classes, seminars, and lectures.

Every time we attended a seminar about emotions, the older women in the room would look at us and say “if only I had the opportunity to do something like this when we were just starting out, we could’ve saved ourselves so much heartache! You two are so much better off than we were.” Before people started saying that to us, we already considered our relationship to be strong. We felt very comfortable with each other and we felt good about where we were going as a couple. When people said things like this to us, our heads grew bigger and bigger. We knew we were the greatest couple ever, and that we could handle anything that came our way. We also knew we were WAY better off than 99% of the couples in the world.

We took a Marriage Prep class at Institute together. That means we talked about all the stuff they tell you to talk about. Expectations, gender roles, child rearing, family planning, how to spend Sundays and Holidays, which way you put on the toilet paper, whether or not General Conference was a vacation weekend. You know, the important stuff.

Immediately after getting married, every time we went over to Josh’s parents his dad would ask about the things we were learning about each other. I think he just liked to laugh at us. I quickly learned these conversations were more fun if we avoided talking about the serious differences and talked about things that really were funny. “Josh uses my hand towel to wipe off his toothpastey mouth when he brushes his teeth!” “He wants to be asleep by 10:00 Every. Single. Night.” We laughed over these trivial things, knowing that if that was the worst of it, we’d be just fine.

However, yesterday I learned how serious our differences could get. I had no idea what I was in for, and I don’t know how we’ve been married for 2 ½ years without knowing about this. I’m a little nervous for what this means to our relationship….a little uncomfortable with the things I’ve just learned about my husband.

He doesn’t like no-bake cookies.

What’s a girl to do? Why wasn’t this question on the Marriage Prep checklist? How has this not come up? Can we really spend eternity together, no-bake-cookie-less?