Polly Marwick, married Dominik Szablowski, on 20^th May 2023 at Tythe. The couple met in 2018 bought a house together in January 2023, married and then, two months before her due date, Polly gave birth to twin girls, Marah and Poppy, in January 2024. Their journey to becoming a family of four has been swift. Here, Polly pauses and offers her best how-to-be-married advice to anyone about to say, ‘I do’.

Interview by Jade Beer.

First comes the fantasy – then the reality!

Have things to look forward to in the year following the wedding. Otherwise, it’s all wedding, wedding, wedding, honeymoon and then you crash back to earth.

Dom and I lived together for five years before the wedding so, honestly, nothing really changed. Post wedding there was a bit of a reality check after spending so much time planning our dream wedding. I felt like I was back to normal life very quickly. Buying the house together and the financial commitments almost seemed like a bigger deal because we’d already shared our lives together for so long. I’d got pregnant on the honeymoon, just two weeks after our wedding day. We had planned to stop trying not to get pregnant. But we hadn’t planned for the babies to arrive quite so quickly. Or for it to be twins, we were very shocked.

Have the money chat

Before the wedding we had separate finances and our own bank accounts. From January when we bought the house, I had to be honest about my credit card debt and my spending habits. We didn’t lay down any rules around our blended finances to start with, but I would get messages from Dom asking why I had spent £80 on a Diptyque hand soap. There might be a bit of mild bickering about ‘I can’t believe you’ve spent that, don’t be ridiculous, send it back.’

When we had children, financial planning became much more important. There was less money coming in when I was on maternity leave, so we had to start being careful. We had to be more mature about it. That has been a challenge for me. Suddenly I wasn’t happy to spend on the kind of luxuries I’d loved. Before, if we were going to a wedding, I’d immediately buy a new Rixo dress. Now I’d wear something already in the wardrobe, I’m less frivolous.

It was a difficult mental shift. Dom is the kind of person who always kept a finances spreadsheet whereas I was always someone who thought, I know my finances in my head, so that’s good enough. But now if I was having a bad day, I couldn’t go shopping. If the car needed repairs, we had to sit down and re-evaluate the budget for the month. It can be very dull. If there were two of me in this marriage, we’d be in so much debt. Two of Dom and they’d live a very boring life.

Take marriage lessons

We did a marriage preparation course over two evenings, two hours per session. It was like a mini therapy session. They asked us lots of questions and got us talking about things we may otherwise not have discussed – like our roles in the household and what our different expectations of each other might be.

Dom’s family are Catholic, and I always knew that. We had a Catholic ceremony after our wedding at Tythe. But one thing I hadn’t really appreciated was how much he lived by those religious values. I really saw in those lessons how his moral compass has been defined by his religious upbringing. It was a bigger thing than perhaps he had let on before.

Avoid future arguments

Taking marriage lessons eliminated a lot of future arguments because expectations were very clearly set in a structured environment, before we got married. It makes it harder to get frustrated with each other afterwards. I can say, well we did agree that it’s your job to take the bins out. We’ve pretty much stuck to it, although since having the girls I have refused to do laundry because it was taking over my life. It’s about communicating and saying, I’m at my capacity, you need to do more.

During the lessons Dom would say things like ‘I like playing football every Saturday’ and that was something we agreed couldn’t happen every weekend because we need to make time for us to do things together.

Advice to ignore

People will say things like ‘never go to bed angry, always make sure you sleep in the same room’. But sometimes you do need to go to bed angry and then come back together the next day ready to have a rational conversation. Sometimes you need space and that doesn’t mean there is something negative going on in your relationship. Feel free also to ignore anyone who says things like ‘happy wife, happy life’, ‘put your husband first’, or ‘always have his dinner on the table when he gets home’ – it’s nonsense.

Remember who you are

Make sure you prioritise yourself and your relationship – keep your hobbies, have a date night. We’re so guilty of working too much or spending all our time with the girls or sitting on the sofa on our phones and not talking to each other. Dom might watch the football, and I might go upstairs and do something else, everyone’s knackered but it is so important to take the time to talk to each other. Some nights don’t put the TV on. That was the most valuable advice we were given.

It’s OK to be selfish with your time

Like most young couples, we overbook ourselves. Every weekend Dom’s parents are down, there’s a child’s birthday party, my parents are here, all these different things. But it’s ok sometimes to say, we are keeping this weekend free. Make sure you have quality time together.

Help isn’t always helpful

When you have very young children like we do it can be hard because people come to help but they don’t actually help, do they? They help to the best of their ability, but you still need to explain how to do things. It ends up being, you play with the girls, and I’ll run round and do all the jobs. We host family a lot and sometimes that can add a lot to the mental load. I have learned to be more assertive about what I need, and Dom is exceptionally supportive of that. The last thing I would want to do is fall out with my in-laws over the grandchildren.

Enjoy the love bubble!

And have fun with each other. Just because you’re married it doesn’t mean you can’t. Don’t put pressure on yourselves. Enjoy being married and enjoy each other in your new love bubble for as long as you possibly can because life will soon get in the way. We got pregnant so quickly, which I wouldn’t change, but it means we missed out on the newly wed phase. We were straight into planning mode.