Episode 1 - Your First Year Married
What better way to start this podcast than to talk about that first year of marriage?
That exhilarating, overwhelming, impossible, unbelievable first year of marriage.
It's the most amazing time to focus.
Focus on building, focus on connecting, focus on prioritizing.
This is what it's all about, people.
Using the early days of marriage to build a strong foundation so you can ENJOY your marriage for the long-run!
In this episode, I'll be letting you in on why I focus so much on the first year of marriage, what you can do to maximize the potential of this time, the challenges many people face early on in their marriages, and how you can use this material even if you have been married a while!
I hope you enjoy.
This is episode one, Your First Year Married.
Welcome to the First Year Married podcast, where we get real about building the marriage of your dreams. I'm marriage coach, Kayla Levin, and I take newly married and engaged women from anxious and insecure to confident and connected through practical tips, real-life inspiration, and more than a little self-awareness along the way.
Hey there. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to be finally doing this podcast. Those of you who know me know that this has been something that's been in the works for a while. But it was really important to my husband and I, we run this business together, that once a podcast started, that it would be really consistent. The truth is, that's actually more him. I'm very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type of person. I was like, "Podcast? Great. Let's do one right now," and he's like, "Wait. We have to have a plan. We have to know ... We have to have three ready to go so we can release them on a schedule. Are you going to do this every week? Every other week? If people are listening, you can't let them down." So, I think it's good that we're in this together because, otherwise, I probably would have done a podcast a year ago and nothing else would've ever happened. But luckily, I have him to balance me out a little bit.
Why I Launched a Podcast
For this first episode, I thought this might be a good time to talk to you about your first year of marriage. Right? That makes sense. That's the name of the podcast. It's the name of my business. It's the name of my online course. It's even my Instagram handle. So, obviously, I have something about this first year of marriage. Right? The very first thing to say is, whether you are engaged, and the first year of marriage is moving, or you have recently gotten married, maybe you're somewhere in the first year of marriage, or you're still very newly married, I have to say, "Congratulations." Oh my goodness. Getting married is so wonderful and so special. You know, on the one hand, we want to be so sensitive to other people, so we don't want to be rubbing it in everyone's face. But it is just the most amazing thing to find the person that you want to marry. Congratulations. I hope you had a wonderful wedding, and you loved every minute of it. If you didn't, that's fine, too. Definitely can go both ways.
Wow, the first year of marriage, it's amazing, and it's scary, and it's ... Ah, there's all these ... There's a lot going on, and I don't think that a lot of my clients, and I know for myself personally, way back 10 years ago in my first year of marriage ... I don't think I even realized how intense it was until maybe five or six years after, looking back and being like, "Oh, man. That was exhausting. That was just so many emotions, and so many highs and lows." Even though my husband and I had been dating for three years, we knew each other very well, we were very confident that this was the person we wanted to marry and create a home with and raise kids with, it was still a major transition.
And if you mix in all your old beliefs about, let's say you've got some good old negative beliefs about men, or marriage, or divorce, or even some good, juicy resentment of the patriarchy, right, you've got a whole breeding ground of random stuff that can just pop up at the most bizarre times, and anxieties. I have a lot of clients whose own parents were divorced, and that can create all sorts of interesting anxieties and worries for them.
All the while, here's this guy who you were crazy in love with, and so excited to be married to, and whoa, the wedding was awesome, and hey, now I have to start adulting, and so there's just so much going on, and it's amazing. Isn't that amazing how much goes on right when you get married? Wow, it's so much. I think one of the challenges that I can just hopefully help you with right off the bat ... If you are one of those people who really feels like this transition is pretty intense, or maybe you're even having some anxieties, like, whoa, this thing that's happening right now, it's totally not working for me. It's not what I expected. It's not what we agreed on, maybe, or I'm not behaving the way that I thought I would be. I'm not the kind of wife I thought I would be, and maybe I'm not cut out for this, and all that stuff.
Have Worries About Being a Newlywed?
I just want to tell you you are so not alone. When I first created my First Year Married course, I kind of had this nagging feeling like maybe it was really just me and everyone else has a really smooth transition into marriage, and I'm the bad unicorn. I'm the one who had a really hard time. I'm the one who had all these hangups and this baggage and had to work it out, and it was so crazy and overwhelming. I kind of wondered, am I wrong about this, that this is something that other women also struggle with?
I don't have that question anymore. After running my first course this last year and coaching several women in this area and speaking to many, many people, it's amazing how common this is. So, the thing I want to tell you is that if you are experiencing any stress or anxiety or fear or frustration, or even resentment in your first year of marriage, I want you to know you are so not alone. It does not make for a good Instagram post, so you will not be seeing all of your friends saying that right after they get married. Right? They're posting pictures of their honeymoon, and of the great date they're going on, and the puppy they adopted, and all this stuff. And you know what? If other people are having those same difficulties early on in their marriage, they're not posting about it, and they're probably not talking about it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do want to make sure that you get the message that you are so not alone. It is so, so common.
There's a ton of hype about the wedding? Right? And that makes sense. It's a whole industry. You want to make sure that you love your dress. You want to make sure that you love the flowers. How many people are coming? Where are they sitting? What kind of music are you going to have? Who's the photographer? There is so much energy poured into the wedding day, so I'm here to be your marriage hype. Okay? I'm here to try and get you the same level of excitement and focus about the marriage that comes once you get married.
I have to admit, I was not good at the wedding hype part. Maybe that's the reason I got so excited about the marriage hype. I was literally living abroad when we got married, and I was having such a good time. Like I said in the beginning, I'm not necessarily a planner, so I just decided that I would be able to figure out all the details if I stayed abroad and came back two weeks before the wedding day. Luckily, I had a really unbelievably phenomenal caterer who basically took me under her wing and made lots of choices for me and my husband who was in the States, made a lot of choices for me. I literally did not have shoes that fit on the wedding day. I just took the first pair that I could make it down the aisle in and changed for dancing. You know, that's kind of my personality. So, maybe I wasn't so into the whole marriage hype part, but I am definitely into the wedding hype because, really, that's the good stuff.
There's this idea, which was the inspiration for my whole program and my whole business. There's a Jewish idea called Shana Rishona. Now, it's an idea that's very common and observed in Jewish circles, but this is extremely relevant to anybody who gets married. It's not necessarily a very religious idea, so don't be concerned if you're not Jewish if you don't know if this applies to you. It for sure does. Shana Rishona is Hebrew, and it translates into "the first year". The idea is that when a new couple is "created", when a man and woman are married, the first year that they're married, they spend really strictly prioritizing the marriage.
There's actually specific rules about ... Let's say if he wants to take an extended business trip, or if he wants to go and be in the army, there are actually laws in Jewish law about what he can and cannot do when he's in his first year of marriage. He's exempt from a lot of things, especially in army service. The reason is, and this is a huge paradigm shift from where a lot of my clients are coming from. The reason is that a new marriage is like a newborn baby. A new marriage is excitement and potential and love, but it's also little. It needs to grow, and it needs to get stronger. It needs to get heartier, and you kind of try and keep people with germs away.
A lot of us have kind of gotten the impression, and I don't know if it's a Hollywood thing or if it's a whatever thing. Who cares? A lot of us have gotten the impression that a perfect marriage is something that you discover. But really, the idea of Shana Rishona, of the first year married, is that a perfect marriage is something you create. It's something that you build. That's why I'm so into investing in your first year of marriage, whether it's with a marriage program like I have, or with reading books, or even just saying, "You know what? It's really hard for us to spend the money to go out on a date once a week, but I'm going to cut back on something else to make sure that we are spending that time connecting. Because we're both really busy, and this is our best time to connect when we go out to eat together."
Whatever it is, to just really invest your time and your energy and even your money to make sure that you are prioritizing your marriage in that first year. For some people, that can be really in a way like a relief, first of all, because they're feeling like, "Oh my gosh. I just got married. How could we already be having problems?" Right? But it's backwards. You just go married. How could you have solutions yet? Right? You're still figuring each other out even ... Again, even if you've been dating for a long time, there's some magical juju that happens when you get married that all sorts of things start bubbling to the surface. Right? Like all of a sudden, that nice lady is now a mother-in-law. Right?
I happen to have an amazing mother-in-law. I will never say anything negative about her on this podcast, but I know it's a reality for many people. Okay? So, all of a sudden, that's a thing. Right? Now, all of a sudden, there is dynamics, and there's money, and there's work. These things come up in a way that somehow they just didn't before the wedding. So, on the one hand, it can be a relief to realize it is totally normal to spend the beginning of your marriage building that foundation, taking the time, finding the solutions, finding the mentors, finding what you need to create an amazing marriage.
On the other hand, it can be really nice to realize that if you really put in the energy for a year ... Your marriage will always need to be a priority, but it won't necessarily need to be a priority that you sacrifice so many other things for. Right? Maybe you're someone who has a really active social life, and you love to go out with your girlfriends. Right? But your husband really wants to spend more time with you. You might say to yourself, "You know what? This is my first year married. This year, I'm going to push myself to spend a little extra time with him. This is still a new marriage. I'm still helping it grow. I'm still nurturing it. Let me just really focus. I still definitely need the self-care. I need to spend my time with my girlfriends, but instead of three times a week, maybe it'll be two times a week, and I'll find something really fun that I love to do with my husband just as much as I love spending time with those girls." Right?
Some people are relieved by the idea of you do it for a year, and then the dividends are there for the rest of your life. Now, again, I'm not saying that then you can just forget about the marriage, and it'll be on autopilot. Absolutely not. You always need to be growing in this area. You always need to be learning. I have people who've taken my course who've been married for as long as I have and are still learning and growing. I am so inspired by those people because you just can never ... The value of working on your marriage cannot be quantified. It is just amazing how a good marriage just feeds into every other part of your life. Taking care of your physical health, your work, everything, because you don't have that extra stress. Right? So, spending that year ...
And I just really want to suggest to everyone and even push all of you to really consider taking that first year of marriage and making this a huge priority, figuring out what things are going to feed this marriage and feed this relationship. I'm hoping that this podcast is going to give you a lot of really clear, practical tools for doing that. So, if nothing else, please subscribe so that you can hear more great tips along the way.
In my course, we do a deep dive, and we kind of structurally figure out how we want to design that year. Right? We design the year for what things do we need to make sure aren't in it, and what things do we need to make sure are, and all of these things. But the most important point is what I'm giving you right here on the podcast, which is just this mentality shift, right, this mental shift from marriage should be perfect right off the bat, and if it's not, then it's fundamentally wrong, to a brand-new marriage is something that is still little and needs to grow, and it's totally normal for you to still be working out the kinks and to be figuring each other out and to getting the communication down and all that stuff.
It's totally normal. It's natural. It's healthy. It's exactly where you're supposed to be right now. If nothing else, I hope that this podcast just gives you a big sigh of relief. You're doing fine. You're doing great. It can be really hard, and I really hope that this podcast will really help you as we go on with the parts that are really hard. I really sometimes just imagine myself talking to that me 10 years ago, who was just really kind of trying so hard, but trying in the wrong direction. Right? I'll talk about that more I'm sure as the podcast goes on.
Thank you so much for tuning into the first episode of the First Year Married podcast. I would love to have you join me on this podcasting journey. Please subscribe to this podcast. It makes a huge difference, especially in the very beginning of a new podcast when people subscribe. If you do want to take this work farther, I have a free class on my website teaching the number one tool that I use with all my clients that creates a massive transformation in their lives and their marriages. Even people who have great marriages already have reported back to me that they cannot believe how useful and how transformative this tool has been for them. It's a totally free class, and you can get it at my site at firstyearmarried.com. I look forward to speaking to you on the next podcast. Thank you so much for listening in. Bye-bye.