This weekend, my wife and I are celebrating two years of marriage. If you know me well, you know that I like to express myself through writing. I wanted to write something about marriage on this occasion, and after much thought I decided to talk about how difficult it is to sustain a good marriage. Maybe you think I'm not qualified to talk about it, since two years isn't that long, but I wanted to at least share my thoughts.
It took me until I was 28 to find someone to marry, so I always assumed that finding someone was the hard part and that everything else would easily fall into place. But it turns out that finding someone was only the beginning. I've learned that maintaining a good marriage, though it is incredibly rewarding, is also a much bigger challenge.
Unfortunately, there are many marriages that end in divorce. But it's not something that anyone means to happen. No one gets married wanting it to end badly. No one goes into a marriage saying, "I'll do this for a while, then I'll leave." Everyone gets married expecting it to last for the rest of their lives. Virtually everyone, at least at the beginning of their marriage, has every intention of making it work and tries their best.
One reason why marriage is so difficult is because when you get married, you completely open yourself up to someone, and while it can be a great feeling to let your guard down for someone and just be yourself, it also leaves you vulnerable. Someone from a different background is now around you constantly, and they get to know you almost as well as you know yourself. You get a new perspective on all your strengths and weaknesses that you may have never seen. Someone evaluates you and picks you apart like no one ever has, not even your parents.
This can be difficult to handle, especially for someone like me who is an introvert and also had little relationship experience before getting married. I don't like being watched and evaluated. I don't like someone telling me that the way I have been doing something my whole life is wrong. I'd like to think I've gotten better at that, however, and I need to since it is something everyone who gets married will have to go through. In fact, it's something that two people who are married should do for each other. I don't believe my wife and I are doing our jobs if we don't challenge each other to become a better person. But it's not human nature to do this, so it requires making the choice to have a positive attitude and understand my wife is trying to help me.
No matter how kind of a heart we have, no matter how much we truly care about other people and try to get along, whenever two or more people come together for any purpose, there will be conflict. This is especially true for marriage, which is supposed to be the strongest and deepest connection that one human being will ever make with another. Married couples deal every day with some of life's biggest issues: paying bills, children, maintaining a household, and dealing with stressful family situations. It's naive to think there won't be difficulties.
Long before I got married, I heard a lot about how difficult marriage is. And I was expecting to mess up plenty of times. But I thought it would mostly be things like, I didn't clean the dishes well enough or that I burned dinner. I've done stuff like that, but I've done worse things too. I thought all those stories about huge arguments or guys doing selfish things would never happen to me. I thought having good intentions and a good heart, like I always try to do, would be enough. But I was wrong.
I never once have tried to do something to genuinely hurt my wife. But I have done it, quite a few times. When my wife gets upset with me, often I get confused and defensive because I don't understand why. I was honestly not trying to be selfish or neglectful, but it happened anyway. And I imagine my wife feels the same way when she upsets me.
That's a big reason why marriage is so difficult. Men and women communicate differently. They have different needs. They handle conflict in different ways. I understand why a man acts the way he does because I am one, but it's hard for me to understand why a woman does what she does. I'm not saying that one is "smarter" or "better" than the other. We're just different and need to understand that.
I know that some marriages face problems that are irreconcilable and make divorce a necessity. Yet God intended for man and woman to be together in marriage even though he made them so different. There must be a way to make it work. Again, it's not something that comes instinctively. We have to make the choice to make it work. Love, and with it marriage, is a choice. No one forces us to get married; it's something we do of our own free will. So, if I choose to get married, shouldn't I also choose to try to make it last?
That often requires leaving my pride at the door. It's knowing that the way something sounds in my head before I say it may not be the same way my wife hears it. It's realizing that my actions could negatively impact others, even when I have the best of intentions and really do think about the rest of my family. And sometimes, there will be disagreements that we cannot solve and have to agree to disagree and move on.
That might be the most difficult part for me. One of my biggest worries, in marriage, my job, or anywhere else, is that someone thinks I was intentionally trying to be difficult or didn't think before I acted. I try to think logically and have a reason why I take every action that I do, and when someone else doesn't see it that way, I get upset. I often feel like I have to "win" every argument, but sometimes it's better not to think about who wins and loses or who was right and who was wrong. Even when what the other person does makes no sense, we still need to make a choice to love our spouse anyway. That's very hard. But it has to be done for any marriage to work.
The most important thing to remember is that I love my wife no matter what. When we say "for better or worse" at weddings, we have no idea what that will entail over the course of our marriage. But they are not just empty words. They are perhaps the most important words that anyone who gets married will say. No matter how difficult things get, or how bad any disagreement gets, choosing to love my wife is not always easy, but it's critical. And whenever we make it through a tough time, I like to think that it makes our bond stronger and helps us to enjoy the good times and the milestones, like this one, even more.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope to learn a lot more about marriage in the future. Thankfully, after two years, we are just getting started!
