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When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be liable for any other public duty. He shall be free at home one year to be happy with his wife whom he has taken.

DEUTERONOMY 24:5

For many couples, the honeymoon glow lasts for months after the wedding. For others, it dims quickly—within days, if not hours.

Some couples experience little conflict during their first year of marriage. Others are stunned to learn quickly that their perfect spouse is not always as loving and agreeable as they had thought.

No matter what happens with you, we can make one prediction with absolute conviction: Your first year will be different from what you expect. You’ll find yourself making dozens, even hundreds, of adjustments as you build your life together.

Robert Wolgemuth and Mark DeVries, wrote a book to help new husbands, call the first year of marriage the year of wet cement. “When the cement is still wet,” the authors say, “you can form it, shape it, take the ruts out of it. When it dries, you can still change it, but it’s a noisy, harrowing experience. It takes a jackhammer and all kinds of extra stuff.” In other words, it’s a lot easier to fix problems in your marriage during that first year than it is later on, when the “cement” is dry.

Perhaps that is why, in Deuteronomy 24:5, a man is instructed not to have military or public responsibilities, so he can devote the first year of marriage to making his wife happy or, as the King James Version says, “[cheering] up his wife.” This is not a binding commandment for men today, but it does provide some sage counsel for newlywed couples: Spend your first year cheering up one another, learning how to speak the language of love to your new spouse.

How you start your marriage is a critical component of how you will experience the journey of a lifetime together.

Protect the first year of your marriage so that it can be a time of discovery and of establishing healthy habits in your new life together. Think of it as getting the right proportions of cement, sand, gravel and water in place. Too much of any one component can result in the cement being brittle or weak, cracking under even the slightest pressure. Your first year of marriage should be a time to mix and pour a sturdy foundation and get some very critical habits in place:

• Praying together—when and how you’ll do it
• Determining the roles of husband and wife—the basics of working together, who’s going to lead and who’s going to follow, and how that dance will be worked out in everyday life
• your marriage safe—truly loving and trusting one another
• Establishing how best to communicate and resolve conflict
• Setting up a budget and learning to live within it
• Learning how to love and respect your spouse
• Growing together in relating to your parents and in-laws
• Experiencing God together through the study of the Scriptures and sharing what is being learned with one another

These are a few of the fundamentals that, if established during the first 12 months of marriage, will help you pour the right foundation— and will help you to stand strong in the storms of life.

Bill and Vonette Bright, cofounders of Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru), learned the hard way about what happens when you don’t follow the wisdom of Deuteronomy 24:5. During their honeymoon, Bill told Vonette that “he wanted their marriage to be a true partnership”; but the fact was he was running his own business, attending seminary, and heavily involved in their church. ¹

“I was very selfish,” Bill recalled. “We seldom had an evening home. I just kind of worked her into my schedule and I wasn’t very sensitive about her thoughts. . . . So, she had to fit into my plans. It never occurred to me to fit into hers.”

It all came to a head one Sunday when Bill was called into an emergency counseling meeting after Sunday School. He didn’t tell Vonette, so she attended the church service by herself and ended up having to wait in their car for two hours, when he finally finished his meeting.

The conflict and brokenness that followed led to a conviction in Bill that he needed “to make total, absolute surrender” to God’s direction in his life. He and Vonette each took a sheet of paper and wrote a list of what they had always wanted in life—things like a beautiful home and nice cars. But then “they were convicted by Scriptures such as Mark 8:36: ‘For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?’”

So that afternoon they wrote and signed a contract, turning their lives and their marriage over completely to Jesus Christ. Bill later called that contract “the anchor of our marriage. It’s the greatest decision that we have ever made.”

Your first year of marriage will result in all kinds of adjustments, tweaks, re-calibrations, and lessons learned that will serve you both for a lifetime. Use the year of wet cement as an opportunity to learn how to “cheer up” each other by loving, serving and showing preference to one another—and by growing together in your relationship with Christ.

Discuss

1. Talk about what you are currently committed to for the first 12 months of your marriage. Both of you should list separately your current responsibilities and activities. Then list the commitments that you’ll share together.
2. Do you think you are too busy? What can you cut back on during your first year of marriage?
3. Pray together that you can make each other your primary focus during the year of wet cement. Pray for the strength to say no to some activities, so you can say yes to starting your marriage right.

Note

1. David Boehi, I Still Do: Stories of Lifelong Love and Marriage (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), pp. 141-152