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Marriage

The first year of an Orthodox marriage: what changes after the wedding and the habits that last

What to do and expect in the first year of an Orthodox marriage: communion, a home parish, prayer and fasting, money, two families and when to ask for help.

By Orthodate Editorial18 minute read

Orthodox couples spend a great deal of effort preparing for the wedding and very little preparing for the year after it. There is a reason for the imbalance: the wedding has dates, documents and a priest who will tell you what to do, and the first year has none of them. It also happens to be the year in which most of the real decisions are made, quietly and by default, about how the two of you will pray, which parish you will belong to, how you will keep the fasts when you keep them differently, whose family you will spend Pascha with, and what you do on the first evening when you are both tired and one of you is wrong. This guide takes the first year in order. It is concrete rather than inspirational, and it leans on the Church’s own account of what a marriage is, because that account has practical consequences that most couples never hear.

At a glance

Key takeaways

  • The Church fulfils the sacrament of marriage in the couple’s shared communion, so the first thing to plan after the wedding is the first Liturgy you will attend together, wherever you are.
  • Most first-year strain comes from a handful of ordinary decisions made by default: which parish is home, how the household fasts, how money works, and which family hosts which feast, so it is worth deciding them deliberately.
  • A short, scheduled review at three, six and twelve months is more effective than waiting for a crisis, and anything that involves fear, violence or control is a reason to ask for help immediately and not to wait for the next review.

1. What the Church says marriage is, and why it matters in year one

The Orthodox Church in America’s teaching on marriage makes several statements that shape how a couple should think about the months after the service. It says that the sacrament is the baptising and confirming of human love in God by Christ in the Holy Spirit. It says that the marriage is not a juridical contract and contains no vows or oaths. And it says that the couple, having been crowned, fulfil their marriage as all sacraments are fulfilled, by receiving holy communion together.

Taken together, those statements remove two common assumptions. The first is that the wedding is the achievement and what follows is maintenance. In the Church’s account the wedding is an entrance, and what follows is the life that the sacrament was given for. The second is that the marriage rests on what you promised on the day. In the Orthodox service there are no vows to remember or to break, and the covenant is lived rather than recited. That is more demanding than it sounds. Nobody can hold you to a sentence, and so the only evidence that you mean it is how you live in the next ten thousand ordinary hours.

The practical consequence is that the first year is where the marriage is actually made, and it is worth treating it as a project with a plan. The rest of this guide is that plan.

2. The first week: the first Liturgy and the crowns

Before anything else, plan the first Sunday. If you go on a honeymoon, find out where the nearest Orthodox parish is and what time the Liturgy is, and decide in advance that you will go. In the United States and Canada the parish finder on this site lists churches by region, and in most of the world a diocesan website or a quick message to a priest will do. If you cannot reach an Orthodox church, read the day’s Gospel and pray together at home, and plan to receive communion together as soon as you are home. The point is not to display piety. It is to start the marriage in the pattern that the Church says completes it.

The service books provide a short rite for the removal of the crowns on the eighth day after the wedding, a trace of the older practice in which the couple wore their crowns through the week after the wedding, and in many parishes today it is folded into the end of the wedding itself. If your priest has asked you to return on a particular day for any part of the service, plan for it. If not, it is worth asking whether there is anything he would like you to do in the first week, such as a house blessing, a visit or a conversation.

The first week is also the right moment for the unglamorous things: write the thank-you notes, send the photographer’s invoice, and give the priest and the church the offering you intended to give. Doing it now, before it goes onto a list of things you will get round to, is a good habit to start.

3. The paperwork nobody warns you about

The legal side of marriage has a short list of tasks that are easy to postpone and expensive to forget. Order several certified copies of the marriage certificate, since agencies will ask for one each and most will not accept a photocopy. The official guide to obtaining a copy of a US marriage certificate is on usa.gov, and the county or state office that issued your licence is the place to order it.

If either of you is changing a surname, the order matters. The government’s guide to changing your name after marriage sets it out, and the usual sequence begins with the Social Security Administration, then the driver’s licence or state identification, then the passport, the bank, the employer and everything else. Doing them in the wrong order causes mismatched records that can take weeks to fix. Plan to spend a morning on it in the first month and to keep your certified copy with you.

A church paper is also worth keeping. Ask the parish for a church marriage certificate if you were not given one, and keep it with your baptismal certificates. It will be asked for when you baptise a child, when you act as a sponsor, when you transfer to another parish, and in a number of immigration and legal processes in which a religious record is accepted as evidence.

4. Choosing one home parish

Couples often arrive at the wedding belonging to two parishes, sometimes to two jurisdictions. The Church’s teaching does not require them to resolve it, but a household that is divided between two parishes finds, within a year, that it is also divided on Sundays, in friendships and in the question of where to baptise a child. It is much easier to decide on purpose than to let it be decided.

The decision is practical rather than theological. Consider which parish is closer to where you will actually live, which has a priest to whom both of you can speak, which has other couples or families in your stage of life, and which has a liturgical life that both of you can enter. If one of you is a convert, or comes from a very different cultural background, give that person’s needs real weight, since they will be the one adjusting. Some couples choose the larger parish, some the smaller one in which they will be known, and neither is wrong.

Once you have decided, register. Many parishes have a membership or stewardship arrangement, and joining it is how a parish knows it has a new household. It also gives you a priest who is responsible for you, a place where your marriage is recorded, and a community that will notice if you stop coming. If you choose a parish in a different jurisdiction from one of your own, ask the priest what is required for a transfer. The guide on weddings across jurisdictions explains how that works.

5. Confession, spiritual fathers and privacy

Most Orthodox Christians have a priest to whom they go to confess, and when two people marry they sometimes assume that they should share one. Some couples do, and find it a help. Others keep separate spiritual fathers, and that is entirely normal. What matters is that each of you goes to confession regularly and that what is said there stays between the penitent, the priest and God.

The rule that follows for the household is a simple one, and it is easily broken without noticing. Do not ask your spouse what they confessed, do not offer what you confessed as a gift or a weapon, and do not use the priest’s advice to settle an argument. “Father said I should” is rarely true in the form in which it is reported, and it turns a pastoral relationship into an instrument. If you want help with the marriage, go to the priest together. If you want help with yourself, go alone, and be as honest there as you wish the other person to be with you.

6. Prayer and fasting as a household

You probably prayed alone before you were married, and your habits are not the same. One of you says morning prayers from a book, and the other prays the Jesus Prayer on the train. One of you stands before the icons for twenty minutes at night, and the other falls asleep. In the first year, the question is how to bring those habits into one household without making either person feel judged.

The simplest answer is to begin small and shared. Choose one prayer that you will say together every day, even if it takes only two minutes, and decide where. Keep it fixed. A couple who prays the Our Father together every evening for a year has done more than a couple who plans an hour of prayer and manages it twice. Add the rest gradually, and let each person keep their private rule. The guide on icon corners and prayer at home sets out what to put in a shared space and how to arrange it.

Fasting is the harder case, because it involves food, and food involves two people who may have kept the fasts differently all their lives. The first Great Lent as a married couple tests the marriage in a way that the wedding did not. A few principles prevent most of the difficulty. Do not police each other. Each person’s fast is between them and their spiritual father, and a husband or wife who measures the other’s plate is no help. Decide together what the household will cook on fast days, so that one person is not producing two meals, and be willing to adjust. If one of you keeps the fast more strictly, the other can help by not making it harder, and by joining it where possible. And if the difference is large, go to a priest together, who will help each of you find a rule you can keep and may relax one of them for the sake of the other.

The rules themselves are in the guide on fasting seasons. The Orthodox Church in America’s own outline quotes the line from Romans that the rules are not to be interpreted with dour and pedantic legalism, because the Kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, and it is as good a motto for a household as it is for a parish.

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    Holy Week and Pascha as a couple

    The most demanding week of the Orthodox year, explained day by day, plus the practical questions couples run into about families, fasting and where to spend it.

7. Money, work and giving

Money is the area in which couples most often discover, in the first year, that they did not talk about as much as they thought. Whatever you agreed before the wedding, put it on paper now. How are the accounts arranged, who pays which bills, how will you handle debt that came into the marriage with either of you, how much will you each have to spend without consulting the other, and how will you decide on a large purchase? A monthly conversation, held at a fixed time and with the numbers in front of you, is worth many dinners spent avoiding the subject.

The Church also asks something of the household’s money, and it is worth deciding on it together. Many Orthodox couples decide on a regular offering to the parish, a share for the poor, and a modest rule of giving that rises with income, and the decision is more meaningful when it is made by both of them. A couple who have agreed on what they will give before they are asked have taken one of the commonest sources of tension out of the budget.

If either of you has a demanding or irregular job, the first year is also when you learn how it interacts with the Church’s calendar. Shift workers, medical staff and anyone who is on call will miss services, and the question is how the household handles it, not how to avoid it. Agree in advance who covers what, and ask a priest, if necessary, to help you think about the rule you can keep.

8. Two families, two calendars

When two families are joined, so are their calendars, and in an Orthodox marriage the calendars may literally be thirteen days apart. If one family keeps Christmas on 25 December and the other on 7 January, you have a choice that must be made every year and will be made by default if you do not make it on purpose. The same is true of Pascha when the dates diverge, of name days, of the feast of the family’s patron saint and of the Epiphany blessing of the house.

The most effective approach is to decide in the first year what the household’s pattern will be, tell both families, and then keep to it. You might alternate which family hosts which feast, or choose one family’s calendar for the household and make a point of visiting the other, or divide the major feasts and keep the rest at home. The details matter less than the fact that you decided together and said so before the feast, not during it. And if one family does not like the arrangement, the two of you should present it as yours and not as the other’s fault.

Your sponsors, if you had them, are one of the best resources of all. The guide on wedding sponsors explains that in several Orthodox cultures the sponsor couple is meant to be a mentor to the newly married, and the first year is exactly when that relationship should be used. Ask them how they handled the first Lent, the first argument about family, the first time they were short of money. They have usually been waiting to be asked.

9. The first real argument

Every couple has one, and it is usually about something small: the dishes, the time of arrival, a comment made in front of a parent, the way one person said they were fine when they were not. The argument is rarely about the thing. It is usually about whether one of you felt respected, whether the other felt heard, and whether either of you can trust that the other will still be there after the argument is over.

Researchers who study couples, most prominently John Gottman, have found that four patterns predict trouble more reliably than the amount of conflict: criticism of the person and not the behaviour, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Contempt, the sneer, the eye-roll, the cutting name, is the most damaging. It is worth deciding in the first year that you will never use it, and that you will tell each other kindly when you hear it.

The Church’s own resource in this area is forgiveness, which the tradition practises with unusual explicitness. On the evening of Cheesefare Sunday, at the end of the Meatfast and on the eve of Great Lent, the whole parish asks forgiveness of one another at Forgiveness Vespers. A household can borrow the habit. Many Orthodox couples end the day with a short exchange, “forgive me,” “God forgives, and I forgive,” and find that a few seconds of it prevents a disagreement from settling in overnight. It will feel awkward the first fifty times and natural afterwards.

10. Intimacy, children and the questions other people ask

The first year brings questions about the body and about children that no one has quite prepared you for. The guide on intimacy in marriage covers the Church’s teaching and the practical questions that couples ask, and the guide on family planning covers the very delicate subject of how an Orthodox couple decides about children, with a priest. It is enough here to say that you will be asked about both, by relatives and by people at coffee hour, long before you want to discuss either.

Decide together how you will answer. A simple, kind, closed reply, such as “we will let you know,” serves well. It does not require you to explain anything, it is easy to repeat, and it is a sign that the matter belongs to the two of you and your priest. If you are struggling to conceive, that is a different and more tender situation, and the guide on infertility and childlessness exists because the pressure in an Orthodox community can be intense. You are not required to explain it to anyone.

11. When to ask for help, and from whom

Most first-year difficulties are ordinary, and they are best handled by the habits already described. A few are not. Persistent unhappiness that is not lifting, a sense of dread about going home, a growing silence, serious depression or anxiety in either of you, or a problem with alcohol, gambling or pornography are all situations for which you should seek help promptly, and the help may well include a professional counsellor in addition to a priest. The Church does not ask that spiritual direction replace medicine or therapy, and a good priest will say so himself.

Violence, threats, intimidation, controlling behaviour, isolation from friends and family, or any pattern in which one person is afraid of the other, are in a different category altogether. They are not marital difficulties to be prayed through. If this describes your situation, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org or on 1-800-799-7233, which is free, confidential and open at all hours, and tell someone you trust. No priest should ask you to remain in a place where you are in danger, and if one does, you should seek another. The guide on leaving an abusive relationship safely sets out how to prepare.

Isolation is the quieter risk of the first year, particularly if you have moved. A new city, a new parish and a new household leave a couple with few friends beyond one another. Make a point of finding another couple who are a year or two ahead of you, and invite them to dinner. The guide on moving to a new city covers how to build that ring of friendships, and for a married couple it is as important as it is for a single person.

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A scheduled review at three, six and twelve months

Put three dates in the calendar now, an hour each, away from home if you can. The aim is not to audit the marriage. It is to say, kindly and on a fixed day, the things that otherwise come out sideways.

  1. Step 1

    Begin with thanks, each in turn

    Each of you names three specific things the other did in the past months that you were grateful for, with an example. Doing this first changes the tone of everything after it, and it is the quickest way to remember why you chose each other.

  2. Step 2

    Check the four areas that drift

    Take them one at a time: prayer and church, money, the two families, and the household’s time. For each, ask what is working, what is not and what you would change. Do not try to solve everything in the meeting. Choose one change per area and write it on a single page.

  3. Step 3

    Ask the hard question in the gentlest form

    Each of you finishes the sentence, “Something I have wanted to say and have not is...” The other listens without answering, then says only “thank you.” Take what you hear away and think about it for a day before replying. It will be uncomfortable, and it is what prevents a small resentment from becoming a large one.

  4. Step 4

    Decide what to bring to a priest

    Choose one question, a practical or pastoral one, that you will put to your priest together before the next review. It might be about fasting, about a decision regarding children or about a difficulty in the family. A marriage that is brought into the Church’s life in this way remains inside it.

  5. Step 5

    Mark the date, and pray together

    Before leaving, put the next review in the calendar and say a short prayer together. It may be the Our Father, the Jesus Prayer or a few words of your own. Closing the review in prayer makes it a part of your life in the Church and not an exercise in couples therapy.

Common questions

What should an Orthodox couple do right after the wedding?

Plan to receive communion together as soon as possible, since the Church says that a couple fulfil their marriage in their shared communion. If you are on honeymoon, find a parish for the first Sunday. Beyond that, write your thank-you notes, give your offering to the church, order certified copies of your marriage certificate, and ask your priest if there is anything he would like you to do in the first week.

Do we need to choose a single parish after we marry?

The Church does not require it, but it is wise. A household that is split between two parishes ends up divided on Sundays, in friendships and on questions like where to baptise a child. Choose on practical grounds: location, a priest you can both talk to, and a community at your stage of life. Then register as members so that the parish and its priest know you.

How do we keep the fasts when we keep them differently?

Do not police one another; each person’s fast is between them and their spiritual father. Decide together what the household cooks on fast days, so that nobody has to make two meals. If one of you keeps a stricter rule, the other can help by not making it harder. If the difference causes real strain, go to a priest together and let him help each of you find a rule you can keep.

Should we share a confessor?

Either arrangement is fine. Some couples share a spiritual father and find it helpful, while others have separate ones. What matters is that each of you goes regularly and that neither asks the other what they confessed. Do not use a priest’s advice to settle an argument. If you need help with the marriage, go to the priest together.

How do we handle two different calendars for Christmas and Pascha?

Decide on purpose, in the first year. Many couples alternate which family hosts which feast, or choose one family’s calendar for the household and visit the other, or divide the major feasts. Tell both families before the feast, present the arrangement as your own decision, and keep to it. Your sponsors, if you had them, can often advise because they have usually done it themselves.

When should we see a counsellor or a priest about a problem?

Seek help promptly for persistent unhappiness, dread about going home, serious depression or anxiety, or a problem with alcohol, gambling or pornography. A priest and a professional counsellor are not alternatives and can work together. If there is violence, threats, control or isolation, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline on 1-800-799-7233 or visit thehotline.org, and do not wait for a scheduled review.

Sources and further reading

Pastoral practice can vary by diocese and jurisdiction. For questions about your circumstances, speak with the priest responsible for your pastoral care.