“All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.” – Raymond Hull

I ran across this quote recently and it jumped out at me.  My own version of this is to say that many couples who come together are focused on a wedding, but rarely do they think about the marriage.

A wedding is an event.  A marriage is a process that is constantly changing, and constantly challenged.  It is a verb, not a noun.  Marriage is an active decision that must be made every day.  It’s a decision in fact that IS made every day.  We make the decision to support it or neglect it.

“We want to have kids.  We agree on how many, therefore we are compatible.”  Seems innocent enough.  But have you, do you talk about why you want to have kids, what role will they play in your life, how will you manage care, discipline, education and religion for those children? 

We want to buy a house and live in ____ area.  Do you know how you will afford the house after the initial purchase?  Do you agree on a budget for household expenses?  Does one of you intend to not work if/when children come along, and if so, how will that impact the house affordability?

Family is important to us.  Does that mean your family or does it include your spouse’s family.  Will you participate in their rituals, make room for them to have a place in your lives going forward as well?

It never ceases to amaze me when a woman comes in complaining of her husband’s drinking problem.  When I ask her when it started she says “college”, but now they have been married for five or ten years and she thought it would have changed by now.  What do you use as the basis to assume that something you found distasteful before marriage will change after marriage? 

Yes there are times when someone we marry becomes very different over the years.  But more frequently we find we are married to someone that is the same that they were 10 years ago, but we have matured and now want them to be something different.

The longer I do this work, the more clearly it becomes that marriage is not about getting what you want, or sacrificing to ensure that your spouse gets what they want.  Its about looking at the union as something in its own right that has to be cultivated, managed, and protected from everything else in the world, including sometimes, our own demands and desires.  It means if I want a fur coat, but it hurts the union, then the fur coat is off the table.  It means if he wants to go on a boys fishing trip, but it hurts the union, then guess who should make other plans.  I don’t mean to suggest that we completely ignore our individuality, but rather we appreciate that our individuality chose this union.  Our individuality should be reflected and included in this union.  That is why it is important to ensure before marriage that we are selecting someone who has similar values, desires and capacity of discipline to work towards those goals.  The marriage should reflect “us” and us should reflect the marriage, which again is not a constant, but rather constantly growing along with us.

So geeze Mary why didn’t you give me this insight before I got married?  Probably because I didn’t know you, or most likely because just like me, you wouldn’t have listened if I had.  Do we have to get divorced now that we know?  You can.  But you don’t have to. However, staying together requires a willingness for both people to work on these things.  Working on them doesn’t mean battling it out to see whose version of the union is the right one, but talking things out to find the common ground.  It means making a decision together to value the union over our individual priorities and seeing that choice as a win, rather than a loss.