The Marriage Habit

The Marriage Habit

“Why Does This Feel So Hard?”

One Saturday early in our marriage, we were at Target running errands—­a typical weekend activity. We’d gone there to grab a few essentials like toilet paper and dish soap, but of course Meygan was hoping for a little time to peruse. It was a Saturday morning, after all. We had the day off and didn’t have kids yet, so the scenario was primed for browsing through books or bath towels or tchotchkes. That dream died as soon as we walked inside. The store was packed. Kids were running through the aisles, and carts with squeaky wheels swerved all over the place. It was absolute pandemonium. Our blood pressures rose as we navigated the madhouse. All we wanted was to get what we’d come for and leave quickly, without any drama.

In fairness, we were already on edge that morning. It was one of those days where you look at each other and wonder, Are you just here to ruin my day? Every little comment was biting, and the tension was thick. Then the throngs of people bumping us took it to the next level. Meygan, being a problem solver, suggested a solution. “Hey, I’ll grab the car, and you check out, and I’ll meet you outside.” It was a perfect plan, except for the part where Casey didn’t hear her. He had a classic ADHD moment and was immersed in his decision about which alarm clock he should pick. When he came out of his trance, Meygan was nowhere to be found. He looked around, panicked. Where in the world did she go? Did she hate it so much in here that she just bailed without saying anything?

After racing up and down aisles, Casey was so nervous—­heart pounding—­that he abandoned the cart and ran outside to look for Meygan. That’s when he saw her pulling up the car to the entrance, smiling. He stormed over, slammed his hand on the window, and screamed, “You LEFT me!” He literally yelled it. A lady nearby gasped in horror and pulled her son closer. (When you’re scaring casual Target-­goers, you know you’ve crossed the line.)

Meygan stared at him, shocked and confused. She thought she was being wife of the year, pulling up the car to rescue him from the suburban chaos. Casey huffed inside the car and sat in silence, glaring out the window. Meygan tried to explain that she’d told him what she was going to do, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was fuming.

We’d already been having a rough morning. Now the rest of the day would be ruined. We both knew we’d stew on that incident for hours, incapable of having a healthy conversation about it. There might be a snide remark here or there. If we really worked ourselves up, maybe we’d have a screaming match at dinner, and that would be that.

As we drove the car home—­Casey staring out the passenger-­side window and Meygan in the driver’s seat, confused and on the verge of tears—­we both had the same thought: I didn’t expect marriage to be like this. Dating had felt largely fun and carefree, even easy. Whatever this was, it wasn’t that. What changed?

A Tale as Old as Time

How many times have you heard this in books, conversations, and society at large: Marriage is hard. Countless times, right? But why does this cliché ring true for so many couples? And why would so many people sign up for an experience that’s mainly known for being hard? I mean, married people love each other, right? Isn’t love supposed to be enough? What’s the point of being married if it makes us feel miserable and if there’s a good chance we’ll end up divorced anyway?

These are all good questions. As far as institutions go, marriage is one of the oldest. It’s been around for just about as long as we’ve had recorded history—­more than five thousand years—­and it’s taken many different forms since then. Here’s a lightning-­round version of that history. Back in ancient Greece, marriage was more like a business transaction than a love story. For centuries, its purpose remained largely the same. People married to climb political and social ladders. Women were essentially property, and the whole point was to secure land, heirs, and political alliances. Love had nothing to do with it. Fast-­forward a few thousand years, and marriage became a way to manage households, raise children, and keep society running smoothly with gender-­divided roles. The romance piece was still very optional.

It wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that love entered the picture. As society advanced and more rights and options became available (mostly to women), people started marrying for companionship, affection, and attraction. Obviously, on the whole, this was great. You could choose who you married and make sure you actually liked the person! Women had more of a say in their future! But with that shift came a whole new set of expectations. Now, not only were we supposed to manage finances, raise kids, and keep the house clean, but we were also supposed to be madly in love and sexually compatible the entire time.

As the purpose of marriage shifted, rom-­coms and romance novels further advanced the notion that a relationship should look and feel a certain way all the time (a certain hearts-­and-chocolates, bubble-baths-filled kind of way). And the rest of modern life hasn’t made marriage any easier. Couples used to live with entire communities around them to help. When you had a baby, your family and neighbors would swoop in, cooking meals, holding the baby, and giving you a chance to sleep. Now, with the shift toward individualistic nuclear families, most of us are out here doing it alone, thinking we’re failing because we can’t do it all by ourselves. It puts enormous pressure on marriages to be everything: companionship, emotional support, co-parenting, financial partnership, and sometimes even the only opportunity for adult conversation we have all week.

In short: Don’t be hard on yourself. These days, so much about society sets us up to fail when it comes to our relationships. It’s no wonder we’re struggling.

The Myths

In our work with thousands of couples, we’ve found that these social advancements and messages from popular culture—­many of them positive—­have contributed to a set of myths people believe about their marriages. The first thing we do in coaching is dismantle these lies. Because yes, marriage can be hard, but it’s made exponentially harder if you have one of these three falsehoods rolling around in your brain.

Myth 1: “If it were true love, it wouldn’t be this hard.”

We fell for this one hook, line, and sinker. It is a real heartbreaker. We believed that if our love was real, it would be easy. That any struggles or challenges must mean there was something wrong with our relationship. When things got tough, we didn’t ask ourselves, How can we work through this? Instead, we asked, Is this even real love?

[Quick caveat here: When we say “hard,” we are not talking about the four A’s—­abuse, affairs, addiction, and abandonment. Those are severe physical and mental health issues that are beyond the scope of this book. We are not talking about that kind of hard. If you’ve experienced any of these, we recommend you get somewhere safe and seek professional help.]

This is the kind of thinking that leads you to question everything after your first big fight, which in our case was over the proper way to load the dishwasher. We wish we were kidding. In the early years of our marriage, we fought about the dishwasher like it was the key to our relationship’s survival. There was yelling, there were tears, and once, for a moment, we were pretty sure this was it. This was the end of our love story, all because Casey didn’t align the spoons in the cutlery tray the “right way.”

How many times have you wondered if you were truly in love simply because your relationship didn’t feel easy? The reality is, love is not a feeling. Or rather, it’s not just a feeling. Feelings are fickle—­they come and go depending on how much sleep you’ve had or whether your spouse accidentally (or “accidentally”) ate the last piece of cake. Real love is a choice. It’s a habit. It’s deciding every day, even when you’re angry or tired or feeling unappreciated, to be kind, to communicate, and to keep showing up.

Research backs this up. Psychologist Dr. Gary Lewandow­ski, Jr., has found that successful marriages aren’t the ones where the couple never fights (spoiler: They don’t exist). Successful marriages are the ones where both people are committed to working through the tough stuff together. It turns out that fighting is normal; how you fight and how you repair afterward makes all the difference. We had to learn that the hard way, after many fights and many failed attempts at repair.

Of course, you can still be very much in love and walk through seriously hard times in your marriage. It doesn’t mean you’ve married the wrong person or that your relationship is doomed when the going gets tough. Which leads us to myth number two . . .