10 (counter-intuitive) things I've learned in 10 years of (a really good!) marriage
He's not my 'best friend', we don't believe in compromise, and we (mostly) don't fight
Today is our 10th anniversary!
Anyone who knows my story with Jeff knows that our marriage is the miracle of my life. It still seems astonishing that we stumbled into true love.
Honestly, it’s astonishing that I did.
I somehow got to my mid 40s - and through lots of dating, relationships, and one failed marriage - before I realized I didn’t know much about relationships at all. And I knew pretty much nothing about what makes a marriage good.
Ten amazing years later, I’ve learned some things, and lots of them are the opposite of what I hear ‘experts’ saying. Which is why I feel like sharing the (mostly) counter-intuitive things I’ve learned…
Marriage is not work.
It makes me cringe when I hear people say this. If there was one thing that kept me in my failing first marriage for far too long, it was the idea that I was not ‘working’ on it enough. That somehow if I ‘worked’ more, things would get better. But I never really knew what that work was, and it felt like drudgery.
Marriage is not work, it’s practice. Like music or sports or prayer, it’s about showing up, it’s about being present every day. Sometimes it’s hard, that’s true. But it’s also fun. It’s beautiful. It’s joyful.We’re not ‘best friends’.
This is something else I hear people say about marriage that perplexes me: ‘I married my best friend.’
This is just not true for my husband and me. It sounds so … platonic to me.
My husband is my love, my soul mate, my one and only. I have lots of friends, some I consider ‘best’ friends. I cherish them.
My relationship with my husband is unique and romantic and primary. He’s definitely not in the ‘friend zone’!He doesn’t need to change.
My husband is perfect. There, I said it.
He’s perfectly who he is, and I love all of him, every part. He loves me this way in return.
It’s easy to think that if our partner changed this one little (or big!) thing about themselves, things would go so much more smoothly in our relationship.
But people aren’t robots. We can’t just change out the parts of them we don’t like and get more of what we do. We’re all complex bundles of beauty and brilliance and fragility, and any change to the balance changes the whole. I love the whole package that my husband is, and I don’t want that to change!
’I don’t accept you as you are,’ I like to say to Jeff. ‘I adore you as you are. Every last complex, sometimes frustrating thing about you.’
Which leads to…He should not stop doing that thing that drives me crazy.
Jeff likes to keep things out so he can find them. Little piles of receipts, things he’s going to put away eventually, stuff he doesn’t to forget he has to deal with.
This drives me crazy. Clutter makes it hard for me to breathe.
But I don’t want him to stop doing this. See #3 above, and also: we call these ‘landmines’.
When one of us does something relatively neutral that elicits an outsized reaction from the other, we recognize that they’ve stepped on a trigger that doesn’t have anything to do with our relationship.
What drives me crazy about the piles has to do with me (some people would not even notice this at all…) . The solution to the craziness is to explore my own feelings, where they come from, and to share with him that this is a trigger for me.
The big, big learning on this is: it’s not his job to stop triggering me!
It’s my job to understand my feelings, which often leads to lessening their severity. Then I just pick up the piles and put things away (while he’s busy re-loading the dishwasher, because my haphazardness triggers him)!Don’t compromise.
’Marriage is about compromise.’ How often do we hear this? Frankly, it doesn’t sound like much fun - neither party really gets what they want.
We are fully committed to win-win in our marriage. How?
We’re on the same team. We ask what our marriage wants.
It’s not your way or my way, it’s our way. And our way is fully committed to the greatest happiness for all members!Don’t share housework equally.
Every once in awhile I look at Jeff and say, ‘thank God we don’t fight about housework.’
Part of this is we don’t keep track of who does what. We don’t try to make things ‘even’. We are two adults contributing to a shared life, and we’re both devoted to it. Things get done that need to get done, and each of us is grateful for what the other brings.Don’t fight.
Early in our marriage, Jeff and I were bickering about something - of course I can’t remember what.
Jeff stopped suddenly and said: ‘I hate doing this.’
’So do I.’
’So let’s not,’ he said.
And we just stopped.Marriage is about being comfortable and vulnerable enough to be who you really are. If I want my husband to feel comfortable and vulnerable, I need to create a space where he is safe to do this - and vice versa.
There’s this idea that if you don’t fight in a marriage, you are somehow not communicating, or growing apart. But I can’t see anything positive about accepting friction between us.
We talk about everything and anything, but we do it kindly and gently, and don’t take our frustrations out on each other.
Mostly. We’re human, we have our moments. But it’s part of our marriage practice to catch ourselves early when things start to get tense.
”Maybe you should back that down,” one of us will say to the other - which is a joke between us, and usually makes us laugh…Laugh when things get serious.
Jeff is way funnier than I am, and way more likely to cut the tension by joking.
It used to bother me - like he wasn’t taking me or my issue seriously.
Then I learned that taking it less seriously actually helps get at what the issue is (rather than taking it out on each other). We have whole conversations that are jokes back and forth, or said in song lyrics.
Laughing connects when we need it, and it lets get at the deeper things that might otherwise cause division.
Ok, the last two are not counter-intuitive at all. In fact, I think they are the most basic and central practices of our marriage…‘Thank you’ and ‘I love you’.
Every day. Every time we go to sleep and wake up. Every time we walk out the door. Every single text message. ‘I love you.’ We easily say it 20 times a day. It’s never too much.
Also, ‘thank you’. For every little thing, every big thing. Say it out loud, and specifically. I see you, I appreciate you, I am grateful for you. I never forget it.Always pray.
When Jeff and I first started dating, we lived on the opposite sides of the state, so our relationship was mostly texts and phone calls for awhile. From the very beginning, we would pray together at night before we went to bed. We still do.
We’ve never missed a night of prayer, even when Jeff went to Australia and we basically had to pray three times in 24 hours because one of us was always getting ready for bed!
That’s 4,380 consecutive nights of prayer (we’ve been together for 12 years).
Putting God at the center of our marriage is the very, very best thing I’ve learned.
May I suggest an amendment to #9? Thank you is one-half of a mutual blessing. You are welcome respectfully completes the loving circle - as you say, every time.
(Taking nothing for granted as we remember every day that our 57+ years began when our marriage was still illegal in 17 states.)
Congratulations! I was married for 58 years. High school sweethearts for 4 years. Widow for one year. You are absolutely correct on your assessments.