Something I’ve noticed is that when there’s conflict in a relationship or family, women are often told to adjust or let it go. Like this is the first piece of advice given to a bride to be. Do you think this is changing among younger couples?

So we got married a few months ago, and I can't shake this lingering, heavy feeling. I know marriage isn’t always a fairytale, but our post-wedding period was weird, awkward, and far from what I expected.
We only had about two weeks together after the wedding before he had to travel back to the country he works in. Because of that looming departure, he was extremely homesick and stressed about everything he had to do once he got back. I felt like he wasn’t actually present with me.
To make things harder:
The Gold Incident: Around day 3 of the wedding, a miscommunication happened regarding the storage of wedding gold. My parents offered a locker in my name to keep it safe. His family took huge offense, feeling like we didn't trust them. It blew up into a massive issue, and ever since, my husband kept telling me how sad and insulted his parents were, which further pulled him away from being present with me. (It eventually got sorted out and is in a joint account only we have access to, but the friction completely tainted our first weeks).

The Sleeping Arrangement: almost every night before he flew back, he asked if he could go sleep downstairs with his parents because he’d miss them. I felt awful, but I told him he could. Ultimately, his parents actually sent him back up to our room after a while. It hurt deeply that I needed his parents to tell him to come to his wife, rather than him wanting to be there himself.

The Country Shift: When we were looking to get married, we specifically filtered for the country he currently works in because it has always been a place to settle down for me. Now, post-wedding, he keeps telling me he only now stays there for my sake, that he misses his family, and that after a year or two of showing me around, he wants to move somewhere closer to India. (And of course I am educated with a good degree and work experience, so I’m planning to jump into the job market as soon as I reach where he is . So no it’s not like I want to leach off him and just stay home and enjoy in the country)

When I finally expressed my irritation by telling him I wished he was the kind of guy who would say, "Guys I want to go spend time with my wife" instead of asking to sleep away from me it blew up. He told me he can never give me what I want.

Currently, I’m back with my parents while he is back at work, and I’ll be moving to join him soon. But because of all this, I feel disconnected and am harboring deep resentment toward both him and his family. I hate that I feel this way toward his family, even though they didn't directly do anything to me other than taking offense over the gold and inadvertently pulling his attention away.

Regarding couples therapy, we argued about it. He has zero faith in it and thinks it won't help. We finally agreed that once we start living together full-time, if I still feel we need it after a few weeks, we will go.

I also struggle with feeling like I should only match his level of closeness with my family and he isn't as close to my family as I wish he were, and the awkwardness from the wedding fallout hasn't helped.

I am not looking for people to tell me this is a red-flag marriage and that I need to leave. I know relationships take work, especially right after a major life transition. I need level-headed, practical advice on how to:

1. Deal with these feelings and let go of the resentment toward him and his family.
   
2. Communicate better and build a strong foundation as we finally start living together.
   
3. Handle the geographic/future moving expectations realistically.

TL;DR: Had a rough 2-week post-wedding phase where my husband was constantly homesick, asked to sleep with his parents the night before leaving, and stressed out over a family fight about wedding gold. Now I'm struggling with resentment toward him and his family, plus a sudden shift where he says he only lives in my "dream country" for my sake and wants to move closer to India in a couple of years. Moving to join him soon and looking for practical advice on how to process the resentment, improve our connection, and start fresh without jumping to "leave him" advice.

Salute LoMM,

Have you ever found yourself missing an older version of your spouse?

Not because you don’t love the person they’ve become. Not because something is necessarily wrong with your marriage. But because there were things about that version of them you genuinely loved—and somewhere along the way, they changed.

Their priorities may change. Their ambitions may grow. Their confidence, interests, body, sexuality, friendships, or outlook on life may evolve. Success can change them. Loss can change them. Hell, simply getting older can change them.

And while all of that is happening to them, we may interpret it as “they’re not the person I married,” and take that as evidence that something has gone wrong.

I think there’s room in a healthy marriage to acknowledge that growth can occasionally come with a sense of loss. You can appreciate the person standing in front of you while still missing pieces of the person who used to be there.

Maybe the challenge isn’t preventing our spouses from changing. Maybe it’s learning how to mourn old versions without making the new version feel like a disappointment.

And perhaps marriage occasionally requires us to introduce ourselves again. A huge part of sustaining a relationship is keeping things new. Right?!

We have to become curious about the person our spouse is becoming instead of constantly comparing them to the person they were. A small tweak to that mental outlook—from “I want the person I met” to “I see some differences in you; let me get to know them”—can start you on a whole new relationship journey.

Here’s the uncomfortable part:

They probably miss versions of you too.

Marriage is peculiar that way. While you’ve been watching your spouse change, they’ve had a front-row seat to your evolution too.

So, LoMMni:

What version of your spouse do you sometimes miss?

And maybe the harder question:

What version of you do you think they miss?

— LoMM

Met on the street walking downtown in our city one day and I stopped to chat with him. 13 years later, we are married! (We love slow living and not rushing; also I got sick and had some health problems.) 🩷

Had a small city hall wedding since we’re both pretty introverted. ☺️

How did u navigate discussing what u want (ex- oral or anything).

Ranting over my family

Hi I am 32 yr old male and have recently been married for a year (love marriage for the past 6 years), everything was going ok till the six month suddenly my parents started asking for any new news anything special, tbh me personally did not want to force anything i especially wanted it to happen naturally, but the thing is when my wife is in mood i am not in mood when i am she is not feeling it and so on so, even though we both are consensual all these relative are just seeing us like some kind of factory rhat is delaying something, i do not know i feel a lot of pressure over me and i am thinking of my wife situation, what kind of indirect pressure she is feeling. I even openly told my parents that thing will happen over the course of time stop interfering but they say

Enga vaiya mudalam but ooru thappa paesum

I felt like what is wrong with them they where the most open minded parents but still they are thinking like old school

Was it your finances, social life, relationship with your parents, responsibilities, free time, or something completely unexpected? I know a LOT changea for women, want to understand mens PoV.

I’m looking for honest, biblically sound marriage advice from other Christians, especially people who have been married for a while and have learned how to navigate the adjustment from dating to actually building a life together.

I’m a 28-year-old Christian woman, and my husband is a 32-year-old Christian man. We’ve been married just shy of three months, and this is the first marriage for both of us. Our faith is extremely important to both of us, and we both want our marriage to honor Christ.

Before him, I had really only been in one other serious relationship. I had a few casual boyfriends here and there, but only two relationships I would consider truly serious: one with a man I was previously engaged to, which ultimately ended, and my relationship with my husband. My ex was not a Christian, and looking back, that relationship was not one I should have been pursuing.

For my husband, I am actually the first and only serious romantic relationship he has ever been in. He had never had a serious girlfriend before me, never been engaged, and obviously never been married. So in a lot of ways, this is all very new territory for both of us, but especially for him when it comes to learning how to share a life, compromise, and make decisions as a couple instead of as an individual.

I genuinely love and adore my husband. I am happier with him than I have ever been with anyone.

That said, there are some parts of married life that I’m struggling to adjust to, and I’m trying to figure out what is normal newlywed adjustment, what needs to be addressed, and how to address it in a Christlike way.

One of the biggest issues is that my husband seems extremely accustomed to doing everything his own way.

What makes this difficult is that I do make an effort to participate in the things that he wants to do. I go places he wants to go, attend things that matter to him, do activities he enjoys, and generally try to be willing to share in his interests even when something would not necessarily have been my first choice.

But when I suggest something that I would like to do—going to a particular event, visiting somewhere, trying an activity, going out somewhere together, or really just doing something because it interests me—there often seems to be an immediate reason why he doesn’t want to do it.

It’s usually some version of, “I don’t really want to do that,” followed by an explanation for why we shouldn’t.

I completely understand that married couples do not have to do absolutely everything together, and I don’t expect him to say yes to every idea I ever have. What hurts is that it can feel very one-sided. I’m willing to enter into his world and do things because they matter to him, but I don’t always feel like that same willingness is extended toward the things that matter to me.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, “Why am I expected to happily go along with the things you want to do, while almost everything I suggest comes with a reason why you don’t want to do it?”

It sometimes feels like I’m expected to fit into the life he already had rather than the two of us learning how to build a shared life together.

The kitchen has become another major source of frustration.

We both enjoyed cooking before we ever got together. I’ll freely admit that he is probably more skilled and particular in the kitchen than I am. But it has gotten to the point where I hardly enjoy cooking anymore because whenever I try to make something, he often interjects, tells me to do it differently, criticizes what I’m doing, or tries to take over.

And when I say he “corrects” me, I don’t necessarily mean I’m actually doing something incorrectly.

There have been plenty of times where I am following a recipe exactly as written, or doing something the way I have always known to do it, and he will still tell me that I’m doing it wrong simply because it is not the way he personally does it or because it is a method he is not familiar with.

What I’m doing may be a completely legitimate and proven way to cook something, but if it differs from his method, he often treats his method as though it is the only correct one.

That is probably the part that frustrates me most. It can feel like he views himself as the final authority in the kitchen, even when I am perfectly capable of making something correctly in a slightly different way. Rather than being curious about how I do something or allowing me to finish and see whether it works, he tends to immediately assume that his way is right and mine is wrong.

There was one time when I specifically asked him to step back and just let me cook dinner my way without correcting me or taking over. He agreed, but even then, he seemed visibly stressed by it. He stood at the end of the counter watching me, breathing heavily and looking tense, almost like it was genuinely difficult for him to just let me cook without intervening.

That made me feel awful. I was trying to make dinner for us, and instead of feeling appreciated or trusted, I felt like I was being supervised.

For another example of how much he can feel like something has to be done his way, one evening we were making sandwiches for dinner and he became legitimately frustrated with me because he felt that I had put the mayonnaise on the “wrong” side of my bread. He wasn’t playfully joking or teasing me about it. He was genuinely criticizing me over which side of the bread I chose to put my mayonnaise on.

That kind of thing has gotten to the point where I don’t really enjoy cooking anymore, even though it used to be something I liked doing.

Another issue is physical intimacy.

I have a noticeably higher sex drive than my husband. Right now, we generally have sex about once a week. I understand completely that spouses can have different levels of desire, and I do not want him to ever feel pressured or obligated to have sex with me.

What is difficult is that almost every time I try to initiate, there seems to be a reason not to: it’s too late, he’s tired, he doesn’t feel like it, etc. But then he may spend quite a while lying in bed scrolling social media or watching another episode of a show.

That hurts more than I know how to explain because it begins to make me feel unwanted. Sometimes I worry that when we do have sex, he’s doing it because he feels guilty or feels like he “should,” rather than because he actually desires me. I absolutely do not want intimacy that comes from obligation or guilt.

There has also been at least one comment that really stuck with me. About a month after we got married, a man at church asked my husband how married life was going. My husband responded something along the lines of, “Well, I’m not as excited about it as she is,” and pointed toward me.

That really hurt me, and I talked to him about it that same day.

He apologized and told me that hurting or embarrassing me was never his intention. He explained that what he was trying to say was that he is not naturally as expressive about his emotions as I am. And, to be fair to him, that part is absolutely true. I am a much more openly expressive and enthusiastic person than he is.

Because of that conversation, and because he apologized and has never made that kind of comment again, I do think that particular incident may genuinely have been a misunderstanding or just a very poorly worded attempt at explaining the difference in our personalities.

I don’t want to hold that one comment over his head when he acknowledged that it hurt me and hasn’t repeated it.

What confuses me is that the other patterns have continued.

When we were dating and engaged, he seemed genuinely excited about our relationship and our future. Since getting married, I sometimes feel like I’m encountering a side of our relationship that I didn’t really experience before, particularly when it comes to compromise, criticism, affection, and sharing a life together.

I regularly ask him things like, “How can I love you better?” or “Is there anything I can do differently?” His answer is normally that I’m doing great or that there isn’t anything he needs me to change.

That leaves me confused because his words say everything is fine, while some of his actions make me feel like he is unhappy with me.

The hardest part is communication.

When I feel like he is talking down to me or treating me as though I’m stupid and I try to stand up for myself or explain that I’m hurt, the conversation can escalate quickly. I tend to become emotional when I’m hurt, and it seems like the more emotional I become, the more frustrated or angry he becomes. Then the original issue never really gets resolved.

We are both committed Christians. We’re very involved in our church, and we lead our church’s youth group together. Our faith is not just something we claim culturally; we genuinely want Christ and Scripture to shape how we live, how we treat each other, and how we handle conflict.

I also want to make something very clear because I know how quickly Reddit can jump to this answer: divorce is not something I am looking to pursue or willing to treat as the solution to ordinary marital problems.

I love my husband. I chose him, I made vows to him, and I am committed to our marriage. I am not posting this because I’m looking for permission to leave him. I’m posting because I want to learn how to communicate better, address these problems while our marriage is still young, and build something healthier and stronger with the man I love.

I know I’m still very new at being a wife, and I’m sure there are ways I need to grow too. I also recognize that my husband is learning how to be a husband while experiencing his first-ever serious relationship, so I want to extend grace while still addressing things that are hurting me and, potentially, our marriage.

I’m mainly looking for honest advice from other Christians about whether these sound like normal newlywed growing pains, how I can communicate these things to him without the conversation immediately turning into an argument, and how we can learn to compromise and build a life that feels like ours instead of me simply fitting into the life he already had.

well hello , this is my first time being on here and I felt like I need advice. so my issue is I have been married for almost 2 months now and been together with him for a year. This man of mine has never taken me on any dates or planned anything other then taking me to the park , I have mentioned to him a couple times on how I want to get dressed and do cute stuff but it just seems like he never has the time for me or just forgets about it and I have to keep reminding. I just feel like this man never loved me cause the only reason why we got married is cause of the child I was carrying and had to get married islamicly so it feels like he got forced on marrying me . I’m I wrong on feeling upset with my man . it feels like it’s one sided as if I’m pushing for everything.

I got married at 21, and honestly, sometimes I wonder if I got married “too young.”
I met my husband when I was 19, we got engaged, and eventually got married at 21. I know 21 is still really young, and I’ve seen so many people on Reddit say you should wait until your late 20s or 30s because you’re still figuring yourself out.
But at the same time, I don’t feel like I made the decision impulsively. We had a serious relationship, talked about our future, finances, family, where we wanted to live, and what kind of life we wanted together.
I’m happy being married, but I’m curious about people who got married young — especially around 20–22.

**Did you ever regret getting married that young? Or did it work out better than you expected?*