your marriage should make you happy

most of the time, anyway.

As a young teenager in the evangelical church in the early aughts, I often heard a recurring message about marriage: “Marriage was designed for our holiness and refinement.” Happiness might be a byproduct at times, but the main goal was to sharpen each other, reveal our flaws, and make us less selfish. Marriage, we were told, was incredibly difficult, but worth it, because nothing worthwhile comes easily, right? Sure, marriage can be miserable! The hardest thing you’ll ever do! You’ll hate your spouse sometimes! You’ll wonder why the hell you ever married them! But it’s a small price to pay for lifelong companionship.
We see this message echoed in pop culture too. Men refer to their wives as the “ball and chain,” portray their partners as nagging killjoys, or lean into the trope of the “idiot husband” who doesn’t know his kids’ middle names and has the emotional range of a teaspoon. Marriage is often portrayed as the point when spontaneity dies, responsibility kicks in, and a steady dose of tolerable unhappiness becomes the norm.
Why don’t we talk about marriage as a joy, an endless sleepover with your favorite person, the refuge that you find comfort in when life gets hard? Probably because for a lot of people, this is simply not the case. If you grew up in a culture where marriage was expected by a certain age—whether you're Silent Gen, Boomer, Gen X, or like me, raised in a highly religious context—you may have married before your frontal lobe had fully developed, before you truly understood compatibility. And if that’s the case, the odds of your marriage being very challenging seem almost guaranteed… unless you got very lucky. When you marry at 22, you are marrying potential. This person barely meets the qualifications for adult, and the kind of adult they will become is still unknown. The kind of adult you will become is unknown! You can make an educated guess, but it’s ultimately a prediction. People think, “well my grandparents didn’t think about compatibility, they just knew they loved each other and got married and it worked out!” never mind that no-fault divorce may have not even been legal for your grandparents and even if it was, the shame would have made it unbearable. And are we sure your grandparents liked each other, or did it just not matter, because survival was more important?

So now we have a generation of people who have been married for decades to someone they may not even like—and they need to cope. The other day I saw that Scary Mommy had made an instagram post about “normal marital hatred,” a term coined by Terry Real, who is nationally recognized as one of the best couple’s counselors in America. Real says, “There are going to be moments when you look at your partner, and at that moment, there is a part of you that just hates their guts, you're trapped with this horrible human being. You hate the flaws that you did not see for so long, and it’s the only thing you can see right now.” Normal marital hatred is the moment when you take the rose colored glasses off and you see your partner as they really are, not the idealized version of them.
But my question is….why would we normalize this as okay? I don’t want to ever think to myself, “I’m trapped with this horrible human being” about my partner. Is this common? Almost certainly. Real says whenever he speaks about this phenomenon at marriage conferences, no one ever comes to him backstage confused about what he meant. People nod along and resonate with feeling hatred for their spouse. And I know that he says “moments,” and we all have bad moments, but for a lot of folks this seems to come up far more regularly than they would like. Matt Chandler, pastor of a massive megachurch in Dallas (where I briefly attended in my early 20s) would often talk about how the first seven years of his marriage were dark and awful and that he would say cruel things to his wife, intending to hurt her. He goes on to say, “In fact, the person you’re married to will likely be responsible for your deepest hurts.” Now, he and his wife have apparently worked things out and are happy now(?), but this is a terrible blueprint to be touted as typical. If someone has been in a relationship for nearly a decade with someone who regularly hurts them, the message that if they simply endure for long enough their partner will change is destructive. In the culture of my people (the evangelicals), this was a common story, and it usually centered around the man finally discovering that he was immature and selfish. Which, to be fair, is better than a lot of the men in that culture who choose to never discover it, but why should women be expected to simply endure years of emotional neglect and to give disproportionate grace with little accountability?
Obviously, the person you have chosen to spend the majority of your time with for the rest of your life is going to frustrate you, annoy you, upset you, say the wrong thing, and miss the mark. But that should not be the theme. It is both true that a romantic partner cannot be your sole source of happiness and that the person you have chosen to spend your life with should be one of your consistent sources of happiness. The theme should be that they pull the car in the driveway and you feel joy instead of dread. Now, lest people say that I am saying that someone else is responsible for your happiness, we are of course all responsible for ourselves. But your spouse’s presence in your life should be a consistent source of joy, you should like being with them, and marriage should feel good far more often than it feels bad. I don’t want to give my life to someone who will be responsible for my greatest hurts, I want to be with someone who I can trust will be there for me during life’s greatest hurts. I don’t want to have to endure a bad relationship, or for a partner to feel like they are constantly enduring being with me. I want my relationship to help me endure life’s brutality.
Don’t get me wrong, marriage will not make an unhappy person happy, but if the person you chose doesn’t add real joy, it can make a previously happy person miserable. And none of us need it for survival anymore. Perhaps we should only be doing it if we set our expectations higher than “normal marital hatred.”