Five Things to Know Before Saying “I Do”

#1: Be Clear About Your Priorities
Know thyself is one of those hokey but oh-so-true adages that is especially useful when it comes to marriage. If you don’t know your own priorities quite well, then chances are you’ll bend to someone else’s (even to the nicest person’s in the world) and wake up one day feeling resentful. If your priorities are already well defined, realize that marriage will shift them. Suddenly, your money, where you live, who you’re friends with, and even what you do for a living become entangled with someone else’s needs and desires.

While you need to remain flexible and open to the other person’s needs (and your children’s, if and when they arrive), you also need to stay true to yourself. As my friend Hayden once told me, “You come first. The marriage is second. And the kids are third.” It’s a backward order from what many women are accustomed to and reeks of selfishness. But actually, it’s a recipe for keeping the parts of the whole happy. Remember it as you try to build a flourishing marriage and family from healthy, satisfied individuals.

#2: Kids Do Change Everything
If you’re expecting or considering children, you’ll hear this again and again. It drove me nuts when I was pregnant, to the point where I started believing that after the baby arrived, we’d all wake up in a yurt in Mongolia. The changes aren’t that exotic, of course. In fact, they’re subtle and mundane, relating to things like sleep, housework, and money. The effects on a marriage, however, can be profound. My neighbor Sarah told me that before having children, she and her husband shared household duties fifty-fifty and made similar salaries. “But after the first, and especially after the second child came, we morphed into a fairly traditional relationship,” she says, still sounding a bit dazed and confused. “I woke up one morning and realized I was home taking care of the babies and doing laundry and he was out making the money. It was a jolt and a bit disappointing.”