{"id":5514,"date":"2026-02-16T17:15:32","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T23:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/?p=5514"},"modified":"2026-02-15T14:18:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T20:18:06","slug":"marriage-advice-again-because-its-been-a-while","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/?p=5514","title":{"rendered":"Marriage Advice Again.   Because it&#8217;s Been a While."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Valentine&#8217;s Day was last weekend, which means lots of engagements happened.\u00a0 Which is wonderful!\u00a0 I love love and I love marriage.<\/p>\n<p>What I don&#8217;t love are weddings.\u00a0 \u00a0People are going thousands of dollars into debt for one day.\u00a0 Not a great way to start out your life together.<\/p>\n<p>Because I have addressed the MANY times before I&#8217;m going to keep it short and sweet this year.<\/p>\n<p>#1 Don&#8217;t get married until you are at least 25 years old.\u00a0 Many studies have shown that the frontal lobe of your brain doesn&#8217;t fully mature until you are 25.\u00a0 \u00a0Multiple studies have also shown that getting married in your early 20s (of even younger) quadruples your chances of getting divorced.<\/p>\n<p>Sure your grandparents got married at 18 and 19 and it worked out.\u00a0 But did it?\u00a0 The world was VERY different back then in many ways- including it being exceptionally difficult to leave a bad marriage.\u00a0 \u00a0Spousal abuse &#8211; including marital rape- was not only legal but encouraged in some circles.\u00a0 Many churches, family and friends would shun people who managed to get divorced even for infidelity or a &#8220;good&#8221; reason.\u00a0 \u00a0So people stayed.<\/p>\n<p>#2\u00a0 Make sure you have had ALL the scary conversations before you get married.\u00a0 \u00a02 weeks before the wedding is NOT the time to find out that your soon to be spouse isn&#8217;t sure they want to have kids when you&#8217;ve known you&#8217;ve wanted them since you were 4 years old (this is a true story that a former coworker went through).\u00a0 Your honeymoon isn&#8217;t the time to discover your new spouse is $75K in debt.\u00a0 Wedding planning isn&#8217;t the time to find out that you have wildly different religious views.\u00a0 \u00a0If you don&#8217;t feel comfortable discussing these things, you have no business getting married.\u00a0 Full stop.<\/p>\n<p>#3 Go to bed angry.\u00a0 NOTHING good comes of staying up until the wee hours of the morning yelling at each other.\u00a0 My husband once said &#8220;I never have to apologize for the things I didn&#8217;t say&#8221;.\u00a0 There is so much truth in this.\u00a0 9 times out of 10 whatever you were arguing about won&#8217;t even be a question then next day.\u00a0 And if it is, you will be in a much better place to calmly come to the correct plan of action.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of other things I could say but I&#8217;ve said them all before.\u00a0 Just use the search tool to find them all.\u00a0 \u00a0 In case you don&#8217;t know this, I was 22 the first time I got married and he was 21.\u00a0 We were stupid kids who had no business making that kind of decision.\u00a0 We are great friends now but understand we are better as friends than as lovers.\u00a0 I was 34 the second time I got married.\u00a0 I was a mature adult (mostly- ha).\u00a0 I cannot begin to explain how much better it&#8217;s been from day one.<\/p>\n<p>So yes, I love love and I love marriage.\u00a0 And congrats to all the newly engaged folks out there!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Valentine&#8217;s Day was last weekend, which means lots of engagements happened.\u00a0 Which is wonderful!\u00a0 I love love and I love marriage. What I don&#8217;t love are weddings.\u00a0 \u00a0People are going thousands of dollars into debt for one day.\u00a0 Not a great way to start out your life together. Because I have addressed the MANY times before I&#8217;m going to keep&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/?p=5514\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[24,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advice","category-its-all-love"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/hopeful-heart-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}