The 6 Month Marriage Fog
I’ve heard, and read, of the notorious 6 month marriage fog - the stretch of 6 months after a couple gets married when they seem to fall off the face of the earth - and I was determined not to let it happen to me. I care about my friendships, I care about my identity and hobbies outside of my relationship with my spouse, and I had every intention of being different, of maintaining the same level of relationship I had with friends and family even as I entered marriage. Yet here I am, 6 months into marriage, emerging from the fog, ready to rejoin the world, and you know what? I get it now.
Of course, those first few weeks back from the honeymoon are filled with logistics - thank you notes to be written, bank accounts to combine, a lengthy name change process to begin, and new titles to wrap our mouths around. Add the holiday season that followed our wedding, and it’s understandable that our first month of marriage led to social radio silence. But even after the chaos of the first month cleared, we stayed in the fog. We saw little of our friends and family and spent most of our nights in and our weekends together. Why? For one, my husband underwent a debilitating knee surgery, but mostly it was because everything had changed. Every relationship was now qualitatively different because we were married. We had spent years as each other’s best friends, but now we were partners, we were our own family. That sounds obvious, but it has been the biggest transition of my life so far.
One day on our honeymoon while walking through town, it finally sank in that my husband was my primary family, and I started crying. In the middle of the street in Costa Rica, on my honeymoon, I started crying because I missed my mom. Some of you may be concerned for my judgement, but I assure you that I love the man I married very much. And of course I didn’t lose my family when I married my husband, but walking through town that day, it hit me that I was now someone new, someone I had no idea how to be. I had no idea how to join my life smoothly and seamlessly with another person’s. I had no idea how to turn “mine” (my money, my stuff, my decisions, my home) into “ours”. Our unit of two was going to break off from our families and begin functioning independently. I suddenly felt like I was on a first date, meeting this man for the first time, but really, I was meeting us: Mike and Katie, husband and wife, for the first time. We have spent the last 6 months (needed the last 6 months) to begin learning how to love, and lean on, each other in this new way. So yeah, the 6 month fog? I get it now.
