My husband and I recently celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. Shouldn’t I be older? Or know lots of important things about how to be happily married for almost a decade? Mostly, we’ve learned a lot over the past seven years: about getting married young, having kids, figuring ourselves out, figuring our careers out, and deciding what the hell we want to do with our lives. In that time, we’ve heard a lot of advice about how to have a happy marriage. And we’ve learned which pieces of marriage advice are best ignored (for us at least):
1. Don’t go to bed angry. I’d like to call bullshit. Know why? Because it depends on the person. If my husband tries to talk to me about something before I’m ready to talk (and it’s enough of a hot button issue that we’re fighting about it), then I go into defense mode, which just leads to even more fights. When I’m upset about something, I need a good amount of time by myself to think things over, calm down, and be honest with myself about why I’m upset. Then I can either see the error of my ways or figure out what’s really bothering me and I can talk to my husband like a semi-normal person and we can work it out. (I don’t like to fight unless we’re getting something out of it. Or if I’m pregnant, then sometimes I just need duke it out.)
2. Your partner should be your best friend. My husband probably is my best friend in that he’s my favorite person to be with, he knows me better than anyone, and we have nicknames and inside jokes (the most important thing in a best friendship), but he’s my husband. That is the role he fills in my life. My best friend has a different role to play; she’s the one I talk to about that weird sex thing that happened, she knows about past boyfriends, periods, childbirth, yeast infections, nipple leaks, being a woman in a room full of men, and goddamnit she’s my girl! My husband doesn’t like drunk karaoke or eighties dancing clubs, but if I don’t have those things in my life I just don’t know if it’s all worth it.
3. Divide the chores equally. This isn’t about equality; this is about me hating doing laundry and my partner hating cleaning toilets. This is about balance. When we keep score, it just builds resentment. I’m not saying I never pull the “I changed the last diaper, can you get this stinker?” but those aren’t often. Sometimes we’ll ask each other to do things: “Your mom is coming, can you get the dishes so she doesn’t think we’re slobs?” And sometimes I nag (my worst nightmare, but really he should know to just put the milk jug in the freakin recycling bin), but it’s not a tit for tat. Except when I say, “If you make dinner, I’ll press my boobs against you”—a little something I learned from that episode of Friends, which has been very beneficial for our marriage.
4.Keep your opinions of his mother to yourself. I kept really quiet in the beginning of our marriage because I’m a middle child and want everyone to love me. Big mistake. My mother-in-law doesn’t always understand boundaries, and my husband (having no idea that she was violating them) would often say and do things that fed into that behavior. And while it’s not like one day I turned to him and said, “Dear husband, your mother is crazy and needs to get out of our lives,” I did have to gently point out that no, she could not drop by uninvited and stay until 11pm. It’s not about venting frustrations; it’s about setting boundaries. (Except for that time she generously gifted us with tickets to a vacation for our first anniversary and then came with us. That, you vent about. Though maybe to a friend.)
5. Don’t stop putting on makeup. I swear someone said that to me during our engagement! First of all my husband had seen me countless times sans makeup before we were married, and second, do I really want to spend my life with someone I can’t show my actual face to? Everyone has different comfort levels and things they will and won’t do in front of their spouse (do you pee with the door open? Once we had kids it became a bathroom free for all) but if I can’t laugh with abandon at fart jokes and ugly yawn in front of my partner, it feels like a huge waste of the single most important lifelong relationship I have. I still like to feel pretty and I like when my partner notices, but life lesson here: if I need outside validation to feel good about myself, I will never feel completely good.
6. Have the same hobbies. I’m all for sharing interests; we both love watching terrible commercials, road trips, and nineties music, but I cherish having my own things. Having time alone and cultivating my own interests nurtures a side of me without forcing my spouse to do the same. I’ll go to a baseball game with him and we’ll have fun because we’re doing something together, but I think watching a game on TV is one of the most boring things I can think of (it’s so slowwww). So he gets to do that on his own or with his friends, and I get to watch Scandal on my own or with mine.
7. Don’t speak badly about your spouse ever. I agree with this almost entirely. When a group of women get together and bash their partners, I’m totally not into that. I don’t think it’s funny or cute to talk badly about our spouses and the “stupid” things they did (and for the record, he doesn’t do any of those things they talk about). But we go through rough patches, and in those times there is the one person I trust enough to talk to about it. Because I need to talk to someone outside of our marriage. It helps to get another perspective and even just to let off steam. She also knows how deeply I love this man and how I think he’s the best husband around, so when I get mad she knows it’s just a moment in the story of our lives. Plus she’s fully aware that I like to speak in extremes when I’m feeling emotional, so I can rant freely without fear that she’ll take me seriously. (I’m not taking the kids and moving to Italy to live off a vineyard. I can’t even drink wine without getting a migraine.)
Each relationship is different, as it should be, but whenever someone gives you advice or, I don’t know, tells you what advice to ignore, you have to do what works for you and your partner. The trick is figuring out what works, not what you think should works but what really does. Sometimes my husband will literally tackle me in a hug because I’m being so grumpy. Then I always smile against my will and nothing is fixed, but the tension has been broken. That won’t work for everyone (tell me if you try it!), but it works for us.
What marriage advice do you ignore? What marriage advice have you heard that was worth listening to?
