"Marriage Is Hard"

Two wedding rings. Image source.

Here's a good post from Captain Cassidy's blog: The Unequally Yoked Club: Terrible Christian Marriage Advice, Graded. It's about conservative Christian rules for marriage- things like "don't go to bed angry" and "the husband is the leader"- and why these rules don't actually do any good in the real world. Also, she talks about the teaching that marriage isn't supposed to make you happy, it's supposed to glorify God and all that.

Christian marriage advice-givers often decide that happiness and fulfillment are completely out of reach. Instead, they drill down harder on the idea that marriage isn’t about happiness anyway. I find this attitude suspiciously self-serving.

As we saw last time we met up, many Christians view marriage as an expression of their religion’s ideals rather than a partnership between two people. That viewpoint makes happiness almost a sinful expression of selfishness.

TGC’s writer tells us that if someone wants marriage to make them happy or meet their needs, that’s not even “real love.” Instead, it’s “a respectable form of selfishness.” Couples who seek that kind of fulfillment will destroy not only their own marriage, but society itself. [PN: here is the link to the TGC article]

In another post about Christian teaching on marriage (she is doing a whole series), Captain Cassidy writes this:

It is downright shocking to me now to consider now what I used to think was perfectly normal in marriage relationships. In retrospect, it’s a marvel that my first marriage lasted as long as it did. If I’d realized that healthy relationships don’t involve constant conflict, or that it wasn’t actually healthy to always feel put-upon, taken advantage of, or absolutely beyond enraged, I’d never have married Biff in the first place. I try not to let it bother me.

Wow. Reading this, I think of all the times I heard people in church say "marriage is hard," and I suddenly realize that's an extremely bad thing to teach. Or, I should say, it's extremely bad if that's the primary thing you teach about marriage. Because kids who grow up hearing that will expect that they won't be happy in their marriages- that "happiness and fulfillment are completely out of reach" as Cassidy puts it. And then if they're in a truly bad situation, they will think that's normal, that's just the way marriage is. "Marriage is hard."

They taught us that wives need to "submit", and that's hard. But husbands need to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, so actually that's even harder. They taught us marriage is about "dying to self"- and I remember one of those split-up-the-boys-and-girls talks at the campus Christian group in college, where the married woman role model who came to teach the girls kept saying "dying to self" was the most important thing for a successful marriage- and I am 100% sure it was a euphemism for "you need to have sex with him even when you don't want to." (Note: That's what she meant by it, but typically "dying to self" has a much more broad meaning than that. Could refer to any time you sacrifice your own desires/happiness/needs/etc.)

They said we're all sinners and when you have 2 sinners living so closely together, there's going to be conflict and pain. (TGC says "As stated above, no one’s compatible. Why? Because both spouses are sinners, and sin shreds even the most promising union.") And all of this had me believing that it's not really possible to be happy long-term with one's spouse. I believed marriage would be so hard, all the time, but worth it. Hard but worth it, just like my "personal relationship with God" was back then. When I got up early every morning to pray, worried so much about my "unsaved" friends, constantly looked for opportunities to do evangelism and had no awareness of how it affected my mental health, policed my thoughts and felt bad whenever I "lusted" (spoiler: it wasn't even lust, I'm asexual), forced myself to accept all sorts of horrible theology because it was "what God said." But I believed it was all worth it because I loved God so much and I was doing important work for him. And because the alternative was, supposedly, to be controlled by my sin, to be miserable and helpless.

Yes, my relationship with God was something I definitely would have described as "hard, but so worth it" so I suppose that was my baseline for how I assumed marriage would feel. Yeah probably at the beginning you're so in love and happy all the time, but then that ends and it becomes "hard."

(Note: I am very happy to not be in a "personal relationship with God" anymore.)

Well. I have been married 1 year, and my marriage is not "hard." It's good and fun and I often think about how happy I am that I decided to marry him, and how lucky we are. This isn't what I expected. I thought once our status changed from "engaged" to "married", it would stop being fun and start being hard.

Yes, we fight sometimes, and sometimes I'm angry with him and don't want to look at him or talk to him, but it only lasts 1 day at the most. And then one of us will apologize- usually if we're mad at each other, it's because one of us accidentally did something hurtful because we weren't thinking about how it would affect the other. We haven't really fought about anything where the problem went deeper than that- maybe once or twice? And I feel lucky, like wow we're so much more compatible than I expected. Lucky like we must be in the top 1% of happy marriages or something, because surely it isn't normal to feel so good about our marriage. It was supposed to be hard. Right?

It's still so romantic and sweet. I come home from work every day and I'm just so happy to see his cute little face- I didn't think I would still feel like this after we got married. Isn't this supposed to stop being romantic and start being "hard"?

Some astute readers may point out, I've only been married 1 year so what do I know? And yeah, that's true. But that's exactly the problem- I don't know. I don't know what a normal marriage looks like, what a healthy marriage looks like, what a happy or bad or unhealthy marriage looks like. Just that "marriage is hard but it's worth it." But does that mean "my husband doesn't put a new trash bag in the trash can when he takes out the trash and it's so annoying, marriage is hard" or does it mean "my husband is always spending all our money on useless things and I'm just so stressed out all the time, worrying about how we're going to survive and pay our rent and buy food, but I know I just have to trust him and submit to him and it's worth it because I love him, marriage is hard"?

How are we supposed to know what level of "hard" is "yeah it's normal that when people live together they have little minor disagreements" and what's "no it's not okay that someone is treating you that way, this is a terrible situation and you deserve better"?

Yes, of course in some situations, marriage is hard. And in some situations, it's hard but it's worth it, and in some it's hard and it's not worth it. And sometimes, marriage is not hard- like for me right now. Is it only not hard when we're young and naïve and have only been married 1 year? Is there some kind of cutoff point, like everyone who's been married longer than 5 years or 10 years is in a marriage that's "hard"?

I guess I just kind of assumed that all marriages eventually get to a point where you're like "well I kind of wish I wasn't married to this person, but it's okay, it's not that bad." Isn't that why we make wedding vows? To keep you there when that inevitable time comes when you don't want to be there any more? I thought that's what I was signing up for, with Hendrix, and I chose to do it anyway because I weighed the amount of time and effort it would take to find someone better against the amount of "hard" the marriage would be. (Though actually, in this ideology there's no reason to think there even exists someone "better"- no matter who your spouse is, "marriage is hard." But, ahem, obviously I broke the rule about "you have to marry a Christian" which supposedly makes a big difference in how "hard" marriage is.)

But I'm still in love with him. I wasn't expecting that- not when they literally used metaphors about death to describe married life. Am I the one who's not "normal" because I still feel so happy I married my husband? Or was it the "die to self" idea that's suspect?

I just don't think it's good how much the "hardness" of marriage was emphasized, in the Christianity I was taught. And right along with that was the idea that typically people get divorced because they didn't know marriage was going to be "hard"; they expected to just be happy all the time, and so they divorced at the first sign of trouble. Which is a terrible, heartless lie to tell about divorced people. We don't know someone's reasons for divorce- we can't judge them and say they must not have tried hard enough or they must have been too selfish. They are already going through a really painful situation- they need love and support, not a bunch of church people to tell them what they did wrong.

I actually believe divorce can sometimes be a good thing. I no longer believe a marriage is inherently valuable in and of itself- it's not something you should sacrifice your health and happiness for in order to "save" it. Put people before marriage.

When "marriage is hard" is one of the primary things you're teaching about marriage- as it was in the Christianity I was taught- that's a problem. People will expect that they can't really be happy in marriage; if they're in a really bad, unhealthy marriage they'll have no way of knowing that's not "normal." I'm really happy to be with my husband- and I didn't expect I would still have so many romantic feelings for him after 1 year. I just have no idea what "normal" is.

---

And this update from 2020: An Update on Whether or Not "Marriage is Hard" Now That We Have a Child