I [29f] have read posts and have always heard that marriage is hard and I don’t doubt that it is! But as someone who is engaged to my best friend [32m], I really can’t forsee what will be so hard about being married in less than a year that we don’t go through as an engaged couple living together now. Of course, kids complicate things, tying finances together like buying a house and those types of struggles make relationships harder to navigate. But those are all things you can do if you’re not married. I’ve read posts from people who were fine and so happy dating, but the first few months or years of being married were so hard even if they were already living together and all that changed was a piece of paper and a last name.
My question is not, why is it so hard to stay with someone for an extended period of time as life gets more complicated, but what is it about marriage specifically that makes it difficult? Or does it stay the same in your opinion, and it’s the struggles of life that make it harder—not the fact of being married? I’d like to know what my partner and I should consider as we enter the next chapter of our lives together. We are so excited to be married and call each other husband and wife! Thanks in advance!
Edit: I think maybe everyone didn’t understand that I was asking about the piece of paper seemingly making things difficult from other posts I’ve read. People who have been together for 5 years will post here about how they lived together before and somehow marriage is what broke them. It seems the consensus in the comments is that there were obviously problems before that were amplified by marriage and that deep commitment which truly makes sense—or that someone is wonderful leading up to marriage and the effort suddenly stops because they don’t feel the need to carry on with the act.
Seems everyone agrees that it’s not the marriage that makes things hard; life makes things hard! Thank you! It’s what I was hoping to find and what I truly thought inside!
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It’s pretty much the same, except separating would be much more complicated. If I weren’t married and we separated, all the money that I’ve worked OT to put into savings would go with me. But being married, half would go to him if we separated.
But living together, putting up with each other, and working through life together is the same.
I think that most of what happens is that, over time, things happen in life that the two people react differently to and the increased responsibilities of children, sometimes jobs, and perhaps other things make it harder to spend as much time together doing things that you enjoy and you start to feel less connected. That’s not specific to marriage, but just what happens in life as you get older and spend more time together.
For some people though, I think there also seems to be something about getting married that makes them complacent and they don’t try as hard to please their partner. Perhaps that’s a feeling that they’re bound for life now so they don’t have to keep impressing their partner like they did while dating? Whatever the reason, I’ve heard quite a few people comment that their partner seemed to have changed almost as soon as the wedding was over. Sometimes it’s no longer doing little things to show their partner that they care, sometimes it’s being less respectful during disagreements, sometimes it’s not taking care of themselves physically and damaging the physical attraction, and sometimes it’s a significant drop in sex frequency leaving the higher libido person frustrated.
Head-Drag-1440 is right. It’s not the marriage itself, expecially if you already live together/finances, ect. It’s when the children come and you have to start compromising. Who takes care of what? Who will work, who won’t, both? I want to go out with my friends, no I want to! Who will take care of the kids? Our sex life stopped, why? Should we divorce? Who gets the money, custody? House? There is so much involved if this route is taken.
I pray for you that it doesn’t. I wish you the BEST in your marriage. But this is what you’re reading about. Why marriage is hard.
Try and stay away from these subs. Focus on you and you marriage and that it’s going to be the best! The best of luck to both of you! ❤️
I feel like I know exactly where you are coming from with this question. I’ve seen people mention being together for 5+ years then getting married and it going downhill quickly after. I wonder if during the dating, living as a married couple stage makes us work to keep the chemistry going because either one could just walk away… but once married causes some to feel as if they no longer have to do the work it takes to keep a relationship alive. I have been married twice, both times at very young ages (19 & 22) having one child with each husband very quickly into the relationship. For reference I was married for 2 years with the first and 15 with the second. It was so dumb of me! But, I do love my kids!! I do feel like both of those relationships dwindled quickly after marriage and I was just holding on for dear life. Now I’ve been divorced for several years from my last husband and I (41F) have been in a relationship for over 4 years with my current guy (37). This has never happened for me, a LTR relationship outside of marriage or children. Part of me thinks he’s it, the man I always wanted and never thought existed… we will never have children, our finances are semi separate, it’s pretty perfect. There would be literally nothing keeping us together other than we want to be. I would love to share his last name but I do pause at the idea sometimes.
I think it’s a couple of things. First, the flip side of commitment is taking each other for granted. Second, nearly all of fiction sets marriage as the goal followed by happily ever after. Some couples really have no clue what they want happily ever after to look like
There really wasn’t much change for us. But we made sure we had a lot of “hard” conversations before marriage about our long term plans, values, financial mixing, household chore distribution, child rearing theories, etc. There are lists you can find online of questions you should ask before marriage. We went through them. We met with a pastor a few times for pre-marital counseling.
The first year of marriage was rough because life got rough – not because we were married. That first year I got pregnant, had an extraordinarily difficult pregnancy, a housing crisis, a home move, super crazy restructuring at work, and then a premature delivery with our baby landing in the NICU. So in my perspective there isn’t a difference between marriage and long term committed couples. That year would have been insanity regardless.
Continue to choose each other every day. Don’t take each other for granted. Listen to your partner and be willing to admit when you are wrong. Be compassionate and forgiving with yourself and your spouse. Meditate on the “or worse” part of those marriage vows. You and your partner will need to stand together and lean on each other when life gets rough. Make sex a priority – I don’t mean do it all the time, but be considerate of your partner’s changing sexual needs over time. Be willing to have open discussions about it. Be aware that child rearing is a wild ride and your perspectives and beliefs about parenthood can and will change once you actually are parents. But none of this advice is unique to marriage vs committed partners.
Living together has far lesser risks and accordingly lesser rights. It’s easier to terminate the relationship. And that works for lots of people.
Marriage is a sticky entanglement of legal, religious, social, and romantic values. There are a lot of expectations buried within our brains–both practical and idealistic and it’s challenging to navigate. We are imprinted by fairy tales, religious practice and rituals, media, advertising, and luck that help convey the significance of weddings and marriages.
Add to the mix the reality that people change over time–for better or worse. When you are married you are incorporating another whole person into your life and decision making set and that includes changes in health, psychology, sexuality, occupation, economics, and more.
Then include children. Wowie zowie.
It ain’t easy.
In my experience, and my wife and I get asked this more and more often, one key to a satisfying marriage is to maintain the strong sense of *goodwill* towards the relationship and each other. This helps give confidence that all problems can be solved with time and the bonds within the family will remain. The key is honest and tactful communication which is standard advice.
Another aspect that seems to dominate Reddit is the issue of living with integrity. Your vows are public and one should remember what the words mean and live by them. Relatively few people seem to have self-discipline which means saying “no” to what seems like fun, risks be damned. That’s never been very difficult for either of us, but we have plenty of friends and former friends who struggle. I can think of plenty of rationales and blame for this, but I hold myself responsible for my actions and expect the same of all others.
So the challenge is being accountable 7/24 to another person.
Hope this helps and congrats on you upcoming wedding.
Honestly I think what happens is people change and some people take that for granted and assume they know their partner and don’t continue to get to know them as these changes happen. Life gets complicated and you put the actual building of your relationship on the back burner.
I’m of the age now where kids are moving out and the couples are looking at each other and realizing they no longer know the person next to them. They have been focusing on careers and kids and not spending time building the relationship. I don’t think it’s marriage itself but long term relationships.
It’s not.
*If* you are fully committed and have a truly marriage-like relationship already, then getting married makes no difference. The difficulties and challenges one goes through in marriage are the same they’d have gone through in a lifelong relationship with the same person.
Don’t presume that this was the case for these other couples or that the issues that led to their divorce weren’t already present before the wedding. Some unstable couples use marriage or kids to fix their issues. It usually doesn’t work.
That damn piece of paper. It almost like people think because of the document they own the other person. My wife immediately changed. I mean changed like the next day. Life went from fun to miserable in about 6 months.
It’s not that marriage is harder than other long term relationships. The hard part of marriage is that it’s a legal partnership on top of a romantic relationship. Spouses are in a legal sense business partners, and it can be a lucrative as well as risky endeavor. People might get used to a certain lifestyle, or take on debt, dependants or investments that require them to continue the partnership to limit risk or achieve longer term gains. Sometimes one or both spouses stop making efforts for the romantic side of the relationship, but the business must go on. Unmarried folks can have similar issues, but more often people who set up complicated financial arrangements are married.
Providing you aren’t married to someone else’s spouse, there are spiritual forces at work that seek to attack your marriage to break it up. You don’t have this problem when you are only shacking. Only when you are trying to do the right thing by marrying will evil forces attack you. But you can get through it.
There’s nothing specifically about marriage that makes it more difficult than a long term relationship that doesn’t involve marriage. It’s just that the majority of posters come from extremely marriage-centric cultures (USA, India, Pakistan, the Middle East) where marriage is seen as the default “natural next step” on the relationship escalator, and few alternative relationship arrangements exist. This skews the commentary significantly.
The whole “marriage is difficult” / “the first year of marriage is the hardest” / etc. discourse doesn’t exist at all where I live (one of the Nordic countries), as most people will have lived together for years and often also have children before they bother to get married.
In all honesty….it isn’t. I’ve done both, and apart from the problems of life getting bigger as you get older (which they would, whether or not you were married), I can’t say I notice a difference. But we never have put all that much spiritual/psychological significance onto the state of matrimony 🙂
Edit: Sometimes I wonder if people who say that marriage is by definition harder than being together long term but unmarried are those who had kids a few years after taking the plunge. Because yes, THAT can make things harder if rumors are to be believed. We haven’t gotten there yet, but I hope all the time we have spent together *sans* kids will work in our favor.
It’s not. I think if you’re really well matched and if you’re good friends being married is no different than being together not married (apart from the legal protections).
Moving in together, I think, is most difficult because it takes getting used to another person in your space and all their quirks and idiosyncrasies and habits and learning how to set boundaries and give ground. I think for folks who don’t truly live together before marriage, that tacks onto their “marriage is work” mindset.
I think for people who follow the Life Script, marriage may be difficult. For people who settle for partners in order to have children at a younger age, marriage may be difficult. For people who aren’t sure if they’re ready to settle down but do it because their partner is, marriage may be difficult. Etc.
There are two main things I see that make marriage harder than just being together.
One is that sometimes the relationship is already floundering and they try to fix it by getting married. But it doesn’t work, and then they get divorced. It’s not really the marriage that caused the split; if anything, it probably postponed it a bit. But from the outside it looks like marriage did it in.
Another thing that sometimes happens is that people have these really entrenched ideas of what A Husband(tm) does or A Wife(tm) does, when they don’t care about those same traits in a bf/gf. Like someone might subconsciously expect their partner to conform more to gender roles, or dress differently, or give up their hobbies, or do more or different chores, because they’re A Husband/Wife now.
53 years old (my husband is 55) and we’ve been happily married for 31 years.
Neither one of us finds marriage hard. What we’ve found is that *life* can be hard. Finances, health issues, career ups and downs, parents aging/dying, and on and on. But those things are gonna happen to most of us, whether we’re married or not. Having a solid, steady partnership makes those ups and downs a little easier to handle.