Stages of Marriage

With wedding season upon us my thoughts have turned to love, marriage, and companionship. I've also noticed different styles of marriage and different stages. I'm not going to go in depth here at all keeping it light and simple, I mean I do have a life beyond writing my thoughts down. So I've come up with stages of marriage (or at least how I view them).

1. Newly Wed Bliss
This stage is obvious and very self explanitory. Its usually the newly wedded couple that have this stage. You can see it in their eyes, their body language, their attitude. Very much in love. It begins before the marriage in their engagement days and is tripled in magnaitude after the marriage [especailly if they were not physically active before, you know what I mean :)]. They are in love!

2. Teamwork

This stage usually happens after the first child has appeared and they may have more children or more children are planned to arrive. When the first child arrives it exhaustion and some fearfullness thats apparent, but has they work together and become parents together then has the other children arrive you can see the marriage in full force teamwork mode! Cause it does take a team and sometimes a village to raise a child. This stage is defintally the longestest and the more children they have the longer it goes. I would argue that this stage continues on after their children have left the nest and started to become parents themselves, especially if they are still working and have not retired yet.

3. Companionship
This stage is the most apparent in after the couple has retired. For they are no long having to work 24 hrs a day with keeping the house clean, the laundry done, the kids feed, ect. Nor are they having to go to a job anymore, they are home with their sweetheart after many years of marriage. Sometimes you see a bit of Newly Wed Bliss show back up, but its not like it was when they were newly weds. They are the couple that does stuff together, grocery shop, sit on the porch, go to church, and they aren't having to keep their eyes on little ones running around, they are able to just enjoy each others company. What a wonderful stage, tell you one thing, I'm looking forward to this. This stage can also come before the couple has children if they wait awhile to have children they will fall into this mode or a form of it.

4. Just waiting
This stage happens when one member of the couple has passed on, and the other one is just waiting to move on to be their loved one.

Now I know that marriage IS NOT has easy has it sounds here nowhere near it, but there is defintaly these stages throughout marriage. Just a thought.