Your situation sounds similar to mine 5 years ago, so I'll do my best to respond. It sounds like you guys are off to a pretty normal start, I have to say. I think all the wedding magazines and so on don't focus enough on the fact that people need to adjust to their new roles as husband and wife. Adjustment takes time, and sometimes involves conflict. I'm glad you've found this site -- it absolutely worked wonders for helping my husband and me adjust to marriage! Here are my responses to your questions:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> 1. How much time should be spent working on the marriage vs just spending time together. I don't want to wear my husband out working on things, but it's hard to have a good time together right now because we always end up getting into fights or I get upset by something. Should we set aside a certain amount of time each week to talk about these things and then let it go for the rest of th week?
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This might be a good opportunity to use the Policy of Joint Agreement. I think that people have different capacities for this sort of stuff -- mine is definitely higher than my husband's. On the other hand, your anxiety might be higher than your husband's. So the challenge is to balance these factors. Perhaps you could agree to, for example, fill out the questionnaires separately and then meet for an hour or two to talk about them. Or you might agree that, for every hour spent on this sort of discussion, you spend two hours having fun. I think the main point, though, is not that there is a 'correct' amount of time to spend on it, but that you both enthusiastically agree to do so, and that you agree on the frequency as well.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> 2. How do I get him to be interested in working on things using questionaires and such? I think he might be receptive, but I am nervous about him thinking that it's a stupid idea.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This is always a risk, isn't it? I think you need to show him the questionnaires, let him know you find them interesting and intend to fill them out, and tell him that you would be really interested in learning more about his responses too. It was important for my husband to know that I wasn't going to judge his answers -- that this wasn't a graded examination, and he couldn't 'pass or fail'. I sincerely wanted to learn more about how to be his wife, and wanted him to learn about how to be my husband. Actually, we first filled them out as if we were the other person -- I told him that this was how I thought he might feel, and asked him how close to the mark I came. He did the same. There were a few surprises, but we were pretty accurate -- and it was fun!
As far as his thinking it's a stupid idea, does he normally think this way about your ideas? This would be considered a 'disrespectful judgment' in Harley-speak -- a lovebuster. He may not agree with doing this work, but this doesn't necessitate putting your ideas down. I think you need to be clear in your own mind that it's definitely NOT stupid to want to build a strong marriage right from the start. These principles may not be the best way to go about it, but perhaps your husband would be willing to give them a shot and see how it goes?
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> 3. Does anyone have any success stories for me using these methods, especially the emotional needs questionnaire and the love buster questionnaire? I am a bit doubtful about how men feel about the love busters questionnaire, since it often seems that women have most of the things that they want the man to change, not vice versa. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Huge success for us. I can't begin to tell you how much it helped, and my husband agrees. And he's a quiet, engineering type! Whenever I ask him, he says, 'I don't have any complaints, I don't want you to change a thing, blah, blah, blah'. But when we did the emotional needs questionnaire, and he got to quantify stuff, he did say that he would love more of this or that. And we talked about the lovebusters a lot, but I presented the material to him after I highlighted the stuff that I thought I was doing wrong. I think that made it easier for him, to know that he wasn't being blamed for stuff.
I hope this helps!