I was talking with my friend who’s been engaged for 8 months or so and when she got engaged I was so happy for her and congratulated her (my intuition told me he was going to propose). However other people didn’t have such a positive response particularly his brother and cousin (who are both married) who said their lives would be “over” and basically just said how hard marriage was and talked about it so miserably. I’m confused what would genuinely make marriage harder unless you haven’t lived together before or discussed/shared finances. I understand that unexpected things can happen like losing a job which can put a strain on your marriage but i don’t understand what about marriage itself would be hard or make it so that your life is over. How is it any different from being committed and living together?
Could any married or ex-married people shed some light?
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If you’re already living together it’s not really any different.
It’s not hard if you marry the right person and talk about wants/needs, expectations and lifestyle beforehand.
Marriage is a challenging yet rewarding endeavor that requires hard work, dedication, and commitment. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provide a framework for understanding the difficulties and benefits of marriage.
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According to The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, successful marriages are built on trust, intimacy, and a willingness to work through conflicts. Couples must be committed to building a strong foundation of friendship, love, and respect in their relationship. The authors emphasize that successful marriages are not built on a lack of conflict but rather on the ability to manage and resolve disagreements in a healthy manner. In short, successful marriages require active effort from both partners. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provides another lens through which to understand the challenges and rewards of marriage. At its core, Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that human beings have a hierarchy of needs, ranging from basic physiological needs like food and shelter to higher-level needs like self-actualization and self-transcendence. Marriage can play a critical role in meeting these needs, particularly the needs for love, belonging, and self-esteem.
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However, the challenges and rewards of marriage are categorically different from those of long-term dating or cohabitation. The Meaning of Marriage emphasizes that marriage is a unique and lifelong commitment that provides a sense of security, stability, and purpose that other relationships may lack. This lifelong commitment requires couples to be intentional about building a strong foundation of love, trust, and respect that can withstand the inevitable challenges of life.
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The commitment of marriage offers a unique level of stability that cohabitation may lack. This stability can help couples persevere through challenges and difficulties, ultimately leading to a stronger, more resilient relationship. This is particularly important for children, as stable and supportive family environments have been linked to positive outcomes across a range of domains. In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, marriage can be an important factor in helping couples and their children progress towards self-actualization and self-transcendence. By providing a stable and supportive family environment, couples may be better able to meet their basic needs for safety, love, and belonging, which are necessary for personal growth and development.
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Moreover, marriage provides a framework for mutual support and partnership, which can facilitate the pursuit of higher-level needs like self-actualization and self-transcendence. Couples who are committed to each other may be more likely to support each other’s goals and aspirations, fostering an environment of growth and progress. In contrast, cohabitation may lack the stability and commitment necessary for couples to persevere through challenges and to support each other in their pursuit of self-actualization and transcendence. Without a clear commitment to each other and to the relationship, couples may be more likely to focus on their individual needs rather than on the needs of the relationship as a whole.
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The commitment of marriage offers a unique level of stability that can help couples and their children progress through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to achieve self-actualization and self-transcendence. This stability is particularly important for children, as it provides a supportive and nurturing environment for their growth and development. While cohabitation may provide some of the benefits of marriage, it may lack the stability and commitment necessary for couples to achieve their full potential together.
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Marriage is a challenging yet rewarding endeavor that requires hard work, dedication, and commitment. Successful marriages are built on trust, intimacy, and a willingness to work through conflicts, and they can play a critical role in meeting our needs for love, belonging, and self-esteem. While the challenges and rewards of marriage are categorically different from those of long-term dating or cohabitation, recognizing the particular lifelong commitment that marriage provides can lead to a deeper and more fulfilling relationship.
Marriage is hard for me because both me and my husband come from abusive homes and we’ve had to learn how to communicate in healthy ways. Both of us are “neurodivergent” and neither of us realized the impact of our mental health issues until we tried to get into a serious long-term relationship.
I didn’t realize how bad my “trailer park trash” upbringing was until I saw people on Reddit talking about how yelling during a fight is an instant dealbreaker. It was bizarre to me because yelling during fights was completely normal when I was growing up. It was expected.
I also saw someone here mention their “yearly vacation” with their family and realized that this wasn’t just something that happened in movies. There are people who can actually afford to do that. There are actually people who grew up in healthy two-parent households who know how to communicate and have nice homes and intact families. They are mature and kind and emotionally intelligent.
Trying to be like those people is the hardest thing me and my husband have ever done. But it’s not a bad thing. It’s good to have role models and to strive to better yourself.
Marriage is half emotion, half business. The business is – how do you handle your finances, how do you sleep, what hours do you keep, what do you do with your time, where do you want to live, how many kids do you want, what are your life priorities, and a hundred other things where two people with (potentially) different ideas and plans come together to make plans as a team. Sometimes people are very well aligned and it’s just a breeze – marriage is easy peasy. When people are less aligned, it gets hard and deeper compromises have to be found. That can take a great deal of effort, depending on the details. The emotional part helps power the business part – if you are truly in love then you’ll make the hard choices and the difficult compromises and find a way to serve the marriage, and you’ll be happy you did because of the emotional attachment. If that part is weak, then you’ll be less likely to bend for your partner, and hard things get harder. Marriage CAN be hard, but not all of them ARE hard. Open and honest communication is the key to working through conflicts.
The hardest thing in marriage for me was the cohabitating piece. I had to learn a lot of habits to be a reasonable spouse. The rest has been just beautiful and wonderful and elevating and growth.
It’s hard at times, but so, so worth it. It takes effort from both spouses to make the marriage work. I think most people don’t realize that and just throw in the towel when they realize that it takes work. Its all about marrying the right person. My husband makes me so happy and marriage is so fun!
The people giving that advice are miserable in their marriages.
Whenever I hear that “marriage is hard,” my thoughts are that’s because one or both are making it hard on the other.
*Life* can be hard. Marriage done right is family. And family supports you when life is hard. You want it to be the two of you vs. the world, instead of vs. against each other. So marriage done right is the opposite of hard. It’s an easier, more comfortable path.
And yet I see so many heartbreaking tales of troubles in this sub, and they come from things like infidelity, cruelty, lack of empathy, narcissism, addiction of all kinds, laziness, slobbishness, lying, excessive gaming, screen addiction, poor hygiene, wild spending, indifference, dishonesty, intimacy refusals and plain old immaturity. The inflictor does their deed and doesn’t care about the impact on their partner or the family. They often lack wisdom to understand that you choose your attitude in life. And that life is a journey to be savored and shared, not dictated and refused.
One caveat to this is mental health disorders which would be a dissertation in itself, and my heart goes out to those being challenged by this.
Marriage is hard. You’re taking two different people from two different backgrounds, each with their own life experiences, trauma, family, etc., and now slamming them together under one roof. There is plenty of work that needs to be done on both sides in order to grow together as one entity, and thus it hard work because of the obstacles each have to work through in order to do so.
That being said, the best things in life are often times the ones we’ve worked hardest for. Marriage is one of those things: working hard on your marriage and working hard to come together as one is one of the most rewarding things you can do. People who talk about how being married is like wearing a ball-and-chain or how marriage is miserable have either 1) not had good examples of healthy marriages in their lives to which they can compare and/or 2) are projecting based on their own insecurities and/or failures in marriage.
That rhetoric is best taken with a grain of sand.
I mean, all human relationships are hard. People are imperfect, apologies are necessary, pride has to be laid down, vulnerability has to be there, all of this is hard and requires inner work. When married, many find that they didn’t actually have any genuine intimate relationships, so they’ve never done this kind of work before, and marriage is therefore a huge adjustment and gut check.
I had pride and she had insecurity that would flare up in our early marriage, but overall the day we got married was the best day of my life at the time, and every day since has just been better. There are hard days, but only because we love each other and want to feel loved by each other, and sometimes something makes those things less obvious.
Marriage has made my life infinitely better, easier, more fun, more beautiful. Life is hard, even when married, but marriage has made life much easier.
Marriage is hard. Doesn’t mean I don’t love being married
My observation is different people have different view points on what it means to be married.
And yet, rather than discussing these viewpoints ahead of time, they get married assuming their partner shares their viewpoints on what it means to be married.
And then once married, disagreements come up because person A thought one thing, and person B thought something different, and yet they both assumed the other thought as if they did.
I’ve been married almost 20 years. My wife and I had long discussions on how we wanted our marriage to be BEFORE we got married. And I sort of assumed this was common. Yet, every day, I read on this sub people having issues because they didn’t discuss this ahead of time.
Marriage isn’t suppose to be hard when you marry the right person. Most people marry the wrong person.
I think marriage is challenging and difficult if you go in with a lot of expectations about who your partner will be, how they will behave, and how they think about relationships. If you’re pretty laid back and open to other perspectives, and open to you and your partners both changing over time, then it’s no big deal.