Mazel tov! You just got married. This is what you,ve been dreaming of...so why do you feel strangely nostalgic for how things were before this major change? Family First takes an honest look at a little-talked-about phenomenon: adjusting to marriage

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hen Tirtza got married, she left the out-of-town community where she had a job she loved, plenty of friends, and all the comforts of living at home, to embark on her new life with her husband.

“So there I was in this brand-new place… I didn’t know anyone, I had a new job I’d started two days after sheva brachos, and I was trying to figure out how to be a wife. It was very intense,” she says. “We were going to be paying for our groceries and our rent. My husband was still in school, so it was all on me. I had to hustle.”

On top of these serious adult responsibilities, everything was new to her. Managing a house was brand new. Cooking was brand new. Being in a relationship was brand new. It was a lot. “I struggled with housekeeping a lot, which is so funny because I lived in a literal shoebox. It was so tiny, but somehow so hard to keep clean. And we were only two people! But you still have to clean the bathrooms, you still have to do the dishes. It’s never-ending.”

Another challenge was making supper. “That definitely didn’t take off for a while,” Tirtza laughs. “That was probably my biggest struggle, getting the groceries and figuring out what to make, and it actually coming out edible.”

Once, she tried to make meat pizza. “The recipe said to choose your own deli, sauté it with onions or something, pick your two favorite sauces, mix them, and then put it on the dough. I thought, ‘Great, what could go wrong?’ My husband likes barbecue sauce and hot sauce, so I took equal parts of barbecue sauce and hot sauce and put them on a pizza dough. It was so spicy it wasn’t edible!”

One part of her life that was going well was her job as a secretary in a frum business. While it was challenging and the long days could be draining, it was a very social environment and fun place to be, so Tirtza made friends pretty quickly. “That really helped me get out of bed in the morning during that initial difficult time.”

At the same time, her success at work only highlighted her struggles to run her new home. “At work I was the new employee, and they were so excited about me. I was doing what I was good at, and I felt good about that. When I came home, I felt like a failure, and I’d wonder why couldn’t I just get it together in the house.”

It was so hard in those first six months that Tirtza would sometimes feel an urge to just get in her car and drive back to her childhood home. “It was just too much. I didn’t want to leave my husband, but I didn’t feel like I was managing.”

Even though it didn’t feel like she was managing, she kept plugging away, and got support from her mother as well as a therapist from home whom she would check in with via Zoom from time to time. “I did speak to my mother probably a little too much,” Tirtza says. “When I called my mother, she basically just listened to me, which is what I needed. Especially since I was pregnant early on, I just needed emotional support, which she did provide, baruch Hashem.”

I asked Tirtza’s mother, Rochel, about those emotionally laden phone calls. What was it like being on the receiving end of them? “I myself had a hard transition when I got married, so I definitely understood what she was going through,” Rochel says.

When Rochel married and moved near her husband’s yeshivah, her neighborhood was comprised of other newly married couples, plus more-established families. This gave her a robust support system of young women who were on the same page, plus mature neighbors who could give perspective and advice when needed.

“It was such a wonderful experience,” Rochel remembers, but notes that even though there were so many positives about the community with its bungalow colony vibe and built-in camaraderie, at the end of the day, when she closed the door to her apartment, it was just her and her husband.

“It was a little too quiet for me. I missed my family. When it came to Shabbos at my childhood home, everyone had their jobs. Here, I realized that it was all my job. My mother wasn’t there and my sisters weren’t there, so it was all on me. My husband was very helpful, but only to a point.” They went back home to her parents for Shabbos nearly once a month that first year, even though it wasn’t so common in her circles.

Mimi David teaches frum kallahs in St. Louis, Missouri, and around the world. While discussing this topic, she reflects back on her own shanah rishonah experience. “I got married very young and moved to Eretz Yisrael right away. This was in the days before WhatsApp. It was a dollar a minute for a phone call, so you called home once a week and you spoke for ten minutes. That was it.” There was no Zoom, no FaceTime, no posting pics on the family chat. It was a much tougher adjustment in those days.

Mimi is very close with her family, which made the transition harder. “It was really hard and I really was very isolated, and there was nothing to do about it. I remember I used to cry in the airport when we left.” She would say goodbye to her parents and then wait at the gate with her new husband. Aware that she wouldn’t be able to talk to her family for a long time again, Mimi would sit and sob.

“Usually about two weeks after we got home, my husband would turn to me out of the blue and ask why I had been crying so much at the gate, which would trigger a whole new round of crying!” remembers Mimi. “Those were the days.”

It was also challenging to leave her friends behind. “I had a friend who got married shortly after I moved to Eretz Yisrael. I asked another friend of mine to prepare a box full of helium balloons and a long poster that said, ‘I wish I was there with you,’ with my name. At the wedding they brought it out and opened the box, and that’s how I participated in my friend’s simchah.”