What follows are fifteen things I learned as a young married man. Polly and I married in July, 1978. We recently celebrated our forty-fifth wedding anniversary. What were some of the lessons you learned as a young married person? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
- Love doesn’t pay the bills.
- If you put gas in your car, it won’t run out.
- The balder the tire, the more you will need to use your car jack.
- A spare tire is of no use if it’s flat.
- You will have to teach your wife to drive a stick shift, check the oil, start the car with a screwdriver, and change a flat tire.
- Children change everything.
- If you pay the light bill, you will always have electricity.
- Living across the street from your in-laws is not a good idea.
- It is not a good idea to quit your job before you have found a new one.
- Having sex in a car is not as much fun as the movies say it is.
- Driving too fast is a sure way to get speeding tickets — lots of them.
- If you write a check with no money in the bank, it’s going to cost you.
- Guinea pigs, hamsters, and gerbils die.
- It’s a miracle any couple stays married.
- Giving substantial sums of money to the church is not a good idea when you can’t pay your bills. Contrary to what preachers say, Jesus will not provide.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Hard to argue with any of those…
These all sound like good common sense!
All things we should teach the young.
“The Notebooks of Butch Long” (It’s a parodical Heinlein reference of “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long”)
The baby blue suit you wore on your wedding day was just fab-u-lous! 😉
I’m struck by the photo. You and Polly have “WTF did we just do?” expressions. Your mom’s expression suggests she’s proud of you and happy for you. Your dad seems unhappy. Isn’t it amazing what these kinds of photos can suggest?
As an aside, I spent my wedding day being certain that the sky would somehow fall. 10 AM wedding, which precluded any sort of post-ceremony gathering where my parents would be offended if alcohol was not served, and his parents would be offended if it was. We had a grand total of 17 people, including the priest and the harpsichordist (a university instructor of my husband’s who gladly played Bach while we entered and exited the chapel). Neighborhood cat wandered into the open door of the chapel in the middle of the ceremony to bless us. Cake and punch/coffee “reception” on the church lawn. Festivities were over by noon, we all went home, and Husband and I, who had separate apartments in the same complex, bade goodbyes to our parents and headed off on a multi-week drive across the US to visit extended family, since we doubted we’d have enough vacation time to do that for a while and our living grandparents were getting quite old. Good plan, it was the last time we saw them.
(Though I do not recommend driving cross-country in the summer without A/C, but this was nearly back in the Pleistocene, well, 1980. Neither of our old jalopies had it. We took mine because it had better fuel economy by the standards of the time. Try being two young adults attempting to check into a motel in West Texas at 3 PM, because we were exhausted by the heat, falling asleep at the wheel, and planned to leave at 4 AM. Oh, and our last names on our out-of-state driver’s licenses didn’t match yet. They might not have believed us except for the California licenses and plate.)
Everything went fine, but until my new husband and I were firmly established in the first motel of our trip (my parents made up for us costing them very little in a minimalist wedding by giving us our honeymoon trip) I was still waiting for the sky to fall. Something major MUST go wrong…except that it didn’t.
We celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary last June. And while there have been rough spots, there has been lots of mutual support and cheerleading. Would I do it all over again? With some logistical changes, but in the main, heck, yeah.
Husband and I, while still dating in college, were lab partners in one class together. That was nearly the end of our relationship. We have very different approaches to solving technical problems (it was an engineering lab) and very different communication styles.
A few years later, after we were married, we contemplated replacing the most ancient of our jalopies with a small pickup. Dodge made reasonable ones at the time, think early 80s. Husband insisted on a stick, and that he would teach me to drive it. I remembered that college lab, and had my doubts, but finally agreed.
Our marriage only just survived, but I did learn to drive a stick, and loved them until my arthritic left knee could no longer tolerate the clutch throw. I finally threw in the towel in 2013 and bought an automatic. Husband and Housemate are still trading off driving my last stick around town, a 1999 Mazda Protégé, the sweetest vehicle any of us has ever owned.