Marriage advice

A friend who’s getting married asked if I had any advice.

Here’s what came to mind after 13 years of marriage. This isn’t aiming to be comprehensive, but it’s advice that was good for me (or would have been good for me). The advice you need might be different.

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Don’t sweat the small stuff

One of the best pieces of advice I got was from my mother-in-law shortly before the wedding. Jeff and I were walking around the city with his parents, and his father finished drinking from a plastic water bottle and tossed it in a trash can. His mother, an avid recycler, picked it up and put it in her bag to recycle later. “I used to be bothered by that kind of thing,” she said to me. “…and then I stopped worrying about it.”

I tend towards being overly picky about the way things are done, and I’ve spent an undue amount of effort trying to get Jeff to do day-to-day things differently. (I had strong enough opinions about piecrusts early in our relationship that when I was in labor he made quiche with my preferred crust style, but I wasn’t up to eating it.) I’m still working on this many years later.

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Learn each other’s love languages

Jeff is pretty bad at gift-giving. It is not an area that comes naturally to him. This used to upset me more, largely because there was a narrative in my head that someone who doesn’t give you a thoughtful present for your birthday or Christmas doesn’t really care about you. But when I spell it out like that, the narrative is obviously false in this case. Jeff obviously cares a ton, and there are a lot of other ways that’s clear to me. Once I disconnected this specific area from the question of “Does Jeff really care about me?” I felt a lot better.

So now I usually give him a specific suggestion three weeks in advance, he gets that gift for me, and that works for both of us.

Meanwhile, physical touch is more important to Jeff than to me. During times when I was depressed and didn’t feel much inclination toward hugs and such, he felt especially lonely until I realized how important this kind of contact was to him.

I haven’t read The 5 Love Languages, but my understanding is that it’s basically about this. Some ways of showing affection that come more easily to you than others, and there are kinds of affection you particularly want. Maybe that lines up with your partner’s style, but maybe not so much. By making an effort to become proficient in the “love language” that speaks to the other person, you can give them more of what they want.

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Get your needs met somewhere

There are some needs that are just better met by other people. We’ve never been polyamorous, which I understand as one approach to this. But I do see how this principle applies in multiple areas of life.

Jeff is an extrovert who prefers to be around people 24/7, and I need some alone time. The only time we lived by ourselves was in a studio apartment we rented after we got married. He’d come home from his solitary programming job ready for social time, and I’d come back from my customer service job ready for solitude. It took us a while to realize why evenings were so fraught: he had only me for company, and I had nowhere to be alone. Since then, we’ve lived with housemates and/or family. Now we both get what we need: he can be around other people while I spend time on my own.

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Talk about when you would (and wouldn’t) divorce

Jeff and I jumped at marriage pretty fast: he brought up the topic about 5 minutes before we actually decided to date (since I was planning to join the Peace Corps and the only way we could go together was if we were married). I didn’t go to the Peace Corps largely because I didn’t want to leave him. Then I proposed after we’d been dating six months. I was 22 and he was 21.

He wisely took a few weeks to think it over before saying yes. During that time, we both talked to our families and each other about the decision.

One of the things we talked about was under what circumstances we’d get divorced. He doesn’t remember this, so hopefully my memory here is correct:

• The plan is to not get divorced.
• Finding someone else we like better is not an acceptable reason to leave.
• But if one or both of us is really unhappy in the relationship, and we’ve tried for at least a year to seriously work on the problems, divorce would be acceptable.
• Or if one of us became physically or emotionally abusive, divorce would be acceptable. (I had interned in a domestic violence shelter, and this one was important to me.)

Every time the topic has come up even theoretically, Jeff just says “But we’re going to stay married.” I like that repetition of the plan.

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Don’t pick at each other

After I ran this post past Jeff, he suggested this one: it’s easy to drop little hints about the way your partner has screwed up, ways they’ve wronged you, ways you’re better than them, etc. Resist the temptation.

You don’t have to ignore every problem, but choose wisely which ones you bring up. Only bring up things you expect to be actionable.

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Relationships are complicated, and a lot of smart and loving people have tried to make things work and found they couldn’t. And sometimes the best outcome is the end of a relationship rather than the continuation of a bad one. Especially given how young we were, I attribute a lot of our success to luck and good circumstances. 

I wish you good luck, too!