1. “I never learned how to communicate effectively and neither did she (both children of divorce ourselves) and that was absolutely the cause of what went wrong.”
–Jason, 32
2. “We only talked about the fun stuff – what kind of careers we saw ourselves in down the line, where we wanted to live, what we wanted our house to look like. We barely spent anytime discussing the uncomfortable stuff because it was exactly that: uncomfortable. Barely talked about finances and how we would handle merging them, barely talked about how we’d want to raise our children or when we’d even want to have them, never discussed if we wanted religion to be a part of our marriage. We never talked about the important things. It seems crazy, but when you’re so in love with being in love, the important stuff slips through your fingers.”
–Heather, 31
3. “I married someone who loved the idea of having a wife and having that perfect family, but he didn’t love the idea of having a partner through the ugly side of things too. That’s what you really need to make it last, though. A partner through the ugly stuff.”
–Clare, 28
4. “I wish I had done more research, as weird as that sounds. Read more books and more articles, did some premarital counseling, gotten advice from older couples. You don’t realize how hard it is until you walk into it and you’re completely unprepared.”
–Steven, 29
5. “We are that typical horror story. Obsessed over the wedding day in and day out for over a year. Only talked about that and thought about that and nothing else. By the time we were married and it was all over, we had nothing propelling us forward and nothing to talk about and we were not at all prepared for what this was going to be.”
–Christina, 32
6. “You need to go into this understanding that it’s going to be really, really, really, really, really, really hard. People will tell you this a lot but you’ll brush it off and think you’ll be different. You won’t, no matter how in love you are. Be prepared for it to be really hard.”
–Vic, 35
7. “We weren’t comfortable with fighting. We never researched or learned that there’s an okay and even HEALTHY way to do it. So we thought it was more responsible to just sweep stuff under the rug and not talk about it. Eventually that turned into passive aggression which turned into us just barely being able to stand each other.”
–Martin, 30
8. “He was terrible at apologizing and owning up to his mistakes. I was terrible at compromising. Those are fixable things (if you put some work into it.) But if you don’t work on it, it WILL be detrimental to your marriage.
–Lillian, 27
9. “I treated ‘getting married’ like something on a checklist. That sounds bizarre from the outside, but when you’re 29 and everyone is already married, you just feel a panic and as soon as you meet someone that you think you could maybe be happy with, it’s hard to not just jump totally in before you’re ready. And that’s what I did, I jumped in before I was ready, because I just wanted to be married so badly.”
–Tina, 34
10. “I hadn’t fully sat down and processed that it will only be that one person, for the rest of your life. In every aspect of your life. Seems like an obvious thing, but that’s the problem; because it’s so obvious, most people don’t sit down and truly think about it and get their minds and their hearts and everything else ready for it.”
–Mathew, 32
11. “I let my family get way too involved in our marriage. And that ruined us. There is such thing as too much family involvement.”
–Bryant, 29
12. “We had kids before we were ready. I understand that there is never going to be a perfect moment, but we never had any time to ourselves as just us, as just a couple. And we didn’t learn how to work through things and how to argue, and then all the sudden there were two kids in the family, one after another. They are truly gifts. But it’s hard to become a parent less than a year into your marriage. And then again so suddenly.”
–Patrick, 32
13. “We both held every single little thing against each other, like it was a competition. My pride blocked me from realizing this then, but I see it now. The only problem is it’s just too late now.”
–Jaquie, 33
14. “The pressure of the wedding really stressed us both out. And our lack of communicating during it became our lack of communicating with any stressful issue in our marriage. We never fully came back from it.”
–Lynn, 31
15. “We both held control issues and that’s something we should have worked on individually, and as a couple, long before we even got engaged.”
Perry, 37 
