All the Red Flags I Ignored Before I Got Married
How do you balance compromise against deal-breakers?
Do you know what we should teach kids in school? Do you know what would save them from financial ruin, poor career choices, and heartbreak?
If we taught them to follow their instincts.
The red flags before my marriage weren’t always subtle. Some of them covered my face like a kidnapper abducting me and throwing me in the back of a van. Still, I ignored them.
I’m going to blame my upbringing on my inability to make good judgment calls. Growing up in an ultra-religious, strict household, you’re raised to follow rules and not question them. When you defy the expectations, you’re met with such shock from others that you learn to distrust your own choices.
If only I acknowledged those red flags, I probably would have saved myself from almost two decades of marital heartache.
I was a clean freak and he was a slob
Opposite attract, right? I learned the hard way that doesn’t apply to hygiene and cleanliness.
If there is an extreme imbalance in how two people live with respect to doing and maintaining housework, that translates to the germaphobe of the two doing all the work.
While we eventually hit a point where we could afford a cleaning crew once in a while, that doesn’t erase the earlier decade of stress with me doing all the work. His rationale was that he shouldn’t have to do it just because I wanted him to do it if he didn’t think it was a big deal.
It would have been different if he at least cleaned up after himself if he wasn’t going to help with communal areas. But his bar for “clean” was so low, nothing got done.
I mentioned in a passing comment during marriage counseling 16 years later about how I need help because the dishes pile high in the sink and I can’t get them done after work because I’m busy with our kids. The marriage counselor looked up from her notes and said, “waitttt…what?!”
He replied that he didn’t think he should have to do the dishes on the timeline that I set forth (despite that I said I needed them done so that I could use the kitchen sink easier when preparing dinner after work). She ripped into him that having an empty sink at the end of each day is fairly standard and that he was behaving like a bachelor for his unwillingness to do dishes at the end of the day.
We lived together before we got married. I knew he was a slob. I knew I was stuck doing all the work. And yet, I ignored it.
He’s disorganized and I’m the Martha Stewart of organization
This is similar to the cleaning situation. If one person has their shit together, that’s the person who manages all the financials and general household administrative tasks.
When it was time for us to apply for life insurance, it took me less than a month to fill everything out per the underwriter’s guidelines. It took him two years to fill his out because I refused to do it for him. He didn’t have all of the information he needed because it required documents and historical data, none of which he had readily available since he was so disorganized.
Eventually, I grew resentful because the burden of being “the responsible one” fell on me.
Do you know how glaringly obvious this red flag was? Like fireworks. He was cleaning out his car when we were dating and he opened up the trunk. It looked like the mailman dumped his entire delivery truck into the trunk of this car. Months of bank statements, credit card offers, and who knows what else was in that trunk. He tossed everything into a trash bag until one envelope caught my eye.
It was a payout check for a 401k that closed due to a change of job. He threw out a check for over ten thousand dollars not just because he was disorganized with his mail, but because he wasn’t even organized enough with his finances to notice the account balance dropped to zero.
I should have grabbed that red flag and ran.
I’m a saver and he’s a spender
They say that sex and money are the top two reasons for divorce. I believe it.
During our engagement, I nickel and dimed everything to spend as little as possible since we paid for our wedding ourselves. I firmly believed in the importance of an emergency fund. I admit, I was somewhat of a tightwad but I was also an immigrant from another country; my employment options were limited if I lost my job and I wanted a safety net.
My then-boyfriend on the other hand could blow through money like it didn’t even exist. One weekend trip to Comic-Con and he’d spend as much as if we went on a Disney Cruise. Comic books and collectibles had no price limit.
This mismatch in financial compatibility causes a lot of stress and anxiety for both partners. If it’s not extreme, then both sides benefit. The saver is with someone who shows them how to enjoy life and the spender is with someone who teaches them responsibility.
We were such polar financial opposites that it should have been obvious that our lives when it came to money would be miserable after marriage.
Fighting. So much fighting.
Engagement stress is a real thing. It’s the first and biggest party you’re hosting as husband and wife, it’s a big deal. It’s natural for tensions to be high.
My then-fiance and I fought constantly. We lived in two different cities so we couldn’t offset the fighting with plenty of positive interactions.
My red flag moment was the weekend that I drove to his city with my bridesmaids for dress shopping. They stayed in a hotel while I crashed in the room he was renting in someone’s house. We screamed and fought the entire time. At one point one of us yelled that the wedding was off.
Why we didn’t end things that weekend? Because I had already sent the wedding invitations. The internet wasn’t as prolific back then and texting wasn’t a thing. It would have taken over a hundred letters and a few dozen phone calls to let our guests know it was off.
After all, writing one hundred letters is so much more work than divorcing 17 years later with kids and a house. Considering we had to write Thank You cards anyway for the gifts, my net letter writing score would have been the same.
If the primary reason to have the wedding isn’t that you love your fiance, you should call off your wedding.
My family disowned me
Okay, the above statement is a bit extreme. I was marrying outside of my religion so my parents insisted that I don’t tell any of our relatives and they harped on me daily about marrying someone of a different faith. Naturally, they didn’t attend the wedding. One of my bridesmaids offered to have her mom come and dote on me since every bride should have a doting mother on their wedding day (I declined but recently told her that I wish I had taken her up on that offer). Instead of my dad, I had a friend walk me down the aisle.
I justified in my head that I wouldn’t be waking up next to my family every day, I would be waking up next to my husband and that’s what mattered.
So far, it all makes sense right? You shouldn’t let your family dictate your love life.
The problem is that when I thought about canceling the engagement, I didn’t want to give my parents the satisfaction of being “right”. I didn’t want to hear, “See! You should have listened to us!”
Don’t continue with your engagement if you’re afraid of your family’s snide comments. Granted my mother would still remind me to this day of “that time you were engaged to a non-Muslim” but it would be so, so worth it.
When he proposed, I thought he was dumping me
For real.
When he proposed, I thought it was a breakup. That’s…not a good sign.
All week leading up to the proposal he was a nervous wreck. His anxiety made him snippy and we bickered constantly. The morning of the engagement he acted particularly bizarre.
He didn’t get down on one knee (he was so flustered, he got down on his knee after he popped the question) so I didn’t have a visual cue of the proposal. Instead, he began mumbling about the status of our relationship. A light bulb went off in my head and I incorrectly thought he was dumping me. “Now it makes sense why he was acting like this all week. That asshole!” I thought.
Not what you should think about the moment your boyfriend proposes.
If it seems like breaking up is the next step in your relationship, you definitely shouldn’t walk down the aisle.
I wish at 24 I had taken the time to sit down and process my thoughts on marriage. It felt like the world would end if I canceled our engagement.
I had no idea I still had my whole life ahead of me. Better to have heartbreak and start fresh when you’re just barely an adult. Ending the relationship twenty years later is much, much more difficult.
It’s taken an entire lifetime, but I’m slowly (very slowly) learning to trust my gut instinct. Back then I thought I knew all the answers. Now I’ve learned that I’ll never know all the answers…my instincts are my best guide.
