Defining Your Ideal Marriage
You probably know a couple where the husband either works at home or is the stay-at-home parent while the wife goes to work elsewhere five days a week. You may know more than one couple where the woman earns more than her spouse. You may be a new mother who is on paid or unpaid maternity leave from a demanding job and plan to go back in a set period of time. All of these options are now common but would have been unheard of or simply unusual even forty years ago. That doesn't make them any easier to sort out for many modern couples, but sort them out you must.
Housework and lawn care if you have one.
Budgeting: Saving, investing, and spending. Even just dealing with communal expenses, there's the challenge of defining and differentiating necessities and frills. Food, of course, is a basic need, but what about eating out? Cable TV, probably, but what about the football season package from your satellite TV service?
Will you have an equal right to spend? What if one partner earns a disproportionate amount of the family income? In other words, what is joint and what is individual money?
Will you have children? How many? Plus, there are all the related decisions about who stays home, if anyone, childcare, private versus public school, and many, many more.
Sex: How often? What kind? Is your relationship sexually monogamous? If not, is your ground rule don't ask and don't tell? Or is it tell all?
How much time is it okay to spend alone or with other friends and activities outside the marriage?
Each of these areas is dealt with in more depth in one or more subsequent chapters. The questions are raised here to highlight the many issues, which, unlike most other relationships in your life, must be addressed and resolved satisfactorily for another person with equal say over most of the decisions that affect you both. When people marry later in life, with developed careers and children from former marriages, things get even more complex. However, all of these issues are solvable ones. It's often a good idea to involve one or more third parties to help you. Depending on the area in question you may visit a marriage therapist, minister, lawyer, or accountant to take advantage of their knowledge of tried and true solutions to common issues.
