Personal Qu re TTC and Marriage

Great thread girls

DH really wanted to be married before we had kids - i think it really came down to his up bringing (not a good one)...

I love being married and i knew DH and i always would get married.. 9 years together, 1 engaged and married 2 weeks after being together for 10 years..

I know alot of friends with kids not married and alot that are married.. Does not change what kind of parents they are etc.. No problems at all on this side...

I think like everyones said it's different for everyone, and in diff relationships. I grew up in a small town where it was unheard of for your parents not to be married which was my situation so I always thought I'd like to get married. And when I met now DH I just knew that no matter what I wanted to be with him, and being his 'wife' was important to me. Where as he never thought he'd get married he'd been with his ex for almost 10 years and never entertained the thought  yet we got married in under 2 years :) so I personally think it depends on your r/ship too 

For us, we wanted to get married before having kids, just seemed like the right order for us and i was a youngish bride at 21.
Im glad we got married before getting pregnant as it was time for just us together but if it happened the other way round i wouldnt mind cos bubba would be there to share your special day.

My brother and his partner arent married, they were only 2gether a few months when she got pregnant with their first child. Now they have 2 2gether and his partner would really really like to get married but my brother doesnt really see the need just yet with the cost of babies and house etc and feels he has already made the commitment to her anyway.

I have to say I am very very old fashioned about this, although I certainly didn't do it the way I would have preferred.

I never ever wanted to have children, so getting together with my husband was perfect as we is 12 yers older than I and already had a son, and didn't want to have any more children. he also didn't want to get married again either, which didn't realy bother me too much, especially since we weren't going to have any children.

I got accidently pregnant with Jacob, and we did consider termination, but in the end a threatened miscarrige (the day I found out) changed our minds (although by then DH was wanting to have babies, but I was still saying hell no). He still dodn't want to get married,a nd I was a little dissapointed to be honest and hugely embarrassed about beign pregnant and no ring or anything.

When Jake was 9 months old, DH decided that yes, he wanted to get married, so proposed. A the time he was trying to convince me to have another baby, and I suspect he thought a ring would seal the deal, and sure enough I got pregnant soon after, and Charlotte was 8 months old when we got married. I dIdn't give an ultimatum, its just the way nature happened.

I was still dissapointed to get pregnant out of marriage, tho, like i said, I am a bit old fashioned about that.

Sheza wrote: For me and DH, we didnt need rings on our fingers, we were in love wanted to start trying right away and knew we would get married one day and we did Now that we are married though, we feel complete and I love having the last name as my so,n and my daughter when she arrives. But if we had never got married, it wouldnt matter because we love each other no matter what our material status, and our kids would be just as loved and cared for.

I feel exactly the same

I am glad you got married Kelly and you too Sheza

DP and I aren't married, we have been together for 8yrs this May, and are expecting our first in July.

I secretly wanted to have the wedding before the baby but ahh who cares at the end of the day. I think both DP and I wanted kids secretly and didn't say anything to eachother.

Mum decided to give DP a bit of a hard time last year and ask when he was going to make an honest woman out of her daughter. And one night when we were talking about our best friends wedding plans (the trouble they are having with the families etc) he decided to set a date for ours right then and there. Since DP is actually the son of a pastor (I know living with his pregnant girlfriend not what they would have intended for him).

Then a couple of months later we found out we were expecting unplanned, COMPLETELY unplanned, right down to the extent that I literally stopped taking birthcontrol one week before we fell pregnant not intentionally it was more because I was busy and a little stressed as DPs grandfather had passed away and we were trying to make sure he could fly to the islands and return etc...

And now we are both happy and in love completely, and talking about planning for baby, and what we want for them. And also what we want for our wedding plans, although its mostly my opinion haha. And our honeymoon (so looking forward to the honey moon) and whats best is that we are going to have our little one able to walk down the aisle with us and it will be so special.

Its our life and how we live it is up to us. So we're not too worried about what our families think and what order it came in

DJ wrote: I think having children (and buying property) together is a far greater committment than marriage. There is no getting out of this relationship now that there are children involved.

I completely agree. I got married first (because he asked me and it was romantic and I loved him and there was no reason not to), and I'm pleased I did, because at the time it cemented our relationship to proclaim our commitment in front of our friends and family. But, for me, the decision to have children was much bigger, in terms of our relationship, it really spelt FOREVER to me. I think it's because my parents went through a really messy divorce when I was between the ages of 10 & 13, and if I can help it there's no way Clara's parents are going to break up.

So, I can totally understand if people have children and then don't really see a huge need to get married. To me, it was like a step on the commitment ladder - dating, marriage, children - hopefully with a house in there too. If you jump two steps, therefore missing an earlier step - eg, marriage, I think that marriage becomes a nice to have, rather than a have to have.

My sister became engaged when she was pregnant with her now 6-year-old son, but has never felt much desire to make it official. They are finally planning to do it next year, but they look on it more as a chance to have a big celebration than it really changing anything about their lives. Ie, it's about the wedding, not the marriage. It'll be interesting to ask her afterwards if anything does change in their relationship.

This is an interesting thread isn't it?!

For us, it was kinda.. hhhm I don't know really.

I beleive in marriage, and in Baptising our children, Mike is from a background where really he beleives in neither as it wasn't really the done thing in his family. His parents have been together for nearly 30 years now and were going to be married on their 20 year anniversary but decided heck they'd been together this long who needed the wedding.

Instead of forcing my beliefs on him, I said to him that I would settle for one or the other. and he put some thought into it and chose marriage, much to my surprise.

We had been engaged for about 2 years when i fell preggers with Paris - it was a bit of an ooopsie really. The plan had been to wait until after i finished my nursing studies to have the wedding as then we'd both be working and be able to pay for it easier - so the wedding was planned just not concrete. and because of having Paris in the middle of my studies it meant that my studies got "elongated" due to having to be part time for some of that, which meant the wedding got nudged - had been planned for March of 2005.

of course by that March 2005, I was not finished my nursing and was about 32 weeks preg with Ayja!, so again, wedding was on the back-burner.

I finally finished and graduated and we set a date for the wedding and of course up cropped the possibility of baby number #3 which ended in us postponing, moving the date of the wedding (we had already booked the venue) and of course when i miscarried, some other person had already snapped up our original date ..   

So we just finally went ahead and thought who cares about the other venue - we're doing this, it had been a long time coming.

For us, the wedding had always been coming, it wasn't a matter of that and truthfully if we had been married all those years ago when we were first engaged, i am not sure that it would have lasted being so young and so different, all the stuff we went through after having the kids really brought us together and for me, I felt that it was important to be married after the fact.. before it was just the idea of being married and the big white wedding, and after the fact, it was now about being together, acknowledging all the hard times we'd been through and showing the commitment we had already proved for each other by sealing it with marriage. I love that our girls were able to be part of our big day and they really thought it was "OUR" wedding, making us a true family that shared names.

As i said before, when we were young it really was just the shallow idea of that's what came next, and the idea of a pretty white dress. Now that we are older and wiser, it has taken on so much more meaning and even mike is surprised at how much significance it has for him and how much it means, he never takes his ring off, even when i told him to while working with powertools etc as it was hurting him, he still wouldn't take it off.

It's funny how different things work for different people.

pepsi wrote: sarahbetha wrote: We are christian so the ring came first but i was desperate for the baby so he came shortly after. Oh man I have such a dirty mind...I read that totally out of context

That's naughty.



Edited by sarahbetha