Marriage Retreat Part 2

The first session of the Retreat was about expectations engaged and early-married couples have about marriage and the future. To begin the session, all the men went to another room while the women stayed in the conference room. While in the separate rooms, everyone had to draw a picture of what they thought life would look like in ten years.

I really didn't know what my life would be like in ten years, so I didn't know what to draw. I didn't know where I would live, what job I would have or what my house would like. I ended up drawing a family, a plain house, two cars, two computers and a few house decorations.After I had drawn everything I could think of, I heard a few other guys talking about how our wives and fiancee's would have to identify our pictures.

When I started drawing the picture, I didn't know my fiancee would have to pick my picture out of everyone else's picture, so I then decided to add a police car to the picture; I knew that she would be able to pick my picture out if there was a police car in it.After we drew the pictures, we had a little break. When the break was over, we went to the conference room and saw that everyone's pictures were taped to the wall. Then, the professors told the guys to stand up and find the picture that our wives and fiancee drew. I then looked at all the pictures and tried looking for clues that would help me pick out my fiancee's drawing. I looked for computers, at height of the people in the pictures, at the hair color, and at the hairstyles. After looking for all these clues, I still wasn't able to find my fiancee's picture. By this time, all the other guys had picked a picture. I then just picked one of the pictures no one else had picked and that had some details in it that I thought my fiancee would have thought of. One of the professors then asked the women to raise their hand if their fiancee or husband had picked the right picture. My fiancee did not raise her hand. It turned out that I wasn't able to pick the correct picture until I was given two clues. After I found the picture, the women had to go up and pick out the pictures the men had drawn. My fiancee laughed a little when she saw my picture; she had seen the police car and knew it was mine. However, she decided to look at the other pictures just to make sure. She saw another picture she thought might have been drawn by me, but then decided the one she had seen earlier was mine. When it was our turn to raise our hands, I excitedly raised mine because she was able to pick my picture out.After everyone sat down, I found out from my fiancee that she didn't know that I was going to have to find her picture. Therefore, she didn't have many details on her picture; she drew the picture more for herself and wasn't expecting someone else to know what the picture was about; at least that's my excuse!

After everyone was given a chance to talk about the pictures, one of the professors told us that in ten years, there's a good chance that our expectations won't happen. He also told us how expectations we have for each other can cause conflicts. For example, if a person is raised by their parents to clean the house every weekend, then that person my expect their spouse to help clean the house every weekend without being told and the person may get mad when the spouse doesn't help. I agree that expectations can lead to a lot of problems. I think that couples should try to find out what expectations they have from each other. Once they identify as many expectations as they can, they should talk about them with each other. After talking about it, they should realize that having different expectations can be okay and that the important thing is that they realize that their spouse was raised differently than they were and that their spouse can't read minds, so their spouse doesn't always know what they want unless their spouse is told.