When I was young, I viewed my future wedding day as the graduation day of life. Growing up was going to be hard work. I had years of homework to complete before I could graduate from elementary school, then high school, and finally college. Then I would have to find a job that would launch me on my career.
With job in hand, I would be ready for marriage. All I would need to do is find the right girl. Our wedding day would be the capstone day of my life. I had climbed the mountain. I was fully grown up, had become a good man and had married a good woman. My wife and I would then set out on what I thought was the purpose of marriage: cruising through life together.
Then, I got married. Our wedding day was a great day. I fully expected it was only the beginning of the good times we would share — but I also expected us to sail through life together. I had married the right person. We were two good people. What could go wrong?
Should love flow naturally?
In my work as a marriage coach, I have met with many couples who have argued with me that love should flow naturally if you’ve married the right person. If your love is genuine, you shouldn’t have to work at it. Spontaneity is the true measure of love.
On my wedding day, I thought these same things, but the spontaneity in our marriage began to ebb — and the bickering began to flow. Nine months into our marriage, as these trends deepened, I began to worry.
If marrying the right person is the key to a happy marriage, I began to wonder if I had married the right person. To be more precise, I wondered if I was the right person for my wife. I just couldn’t seem to measure up to her expectations in many areas of our life.
Before we were married, my wife told me she thought I was funny, but now she was the one tossing around one-liners — “You’ve got a college degree and you can’t find the hamper?!” — except she wasn’t laughing when she said them.
One night, I realized we were at a crossroads. Our marriage had grown difficult, and I faced three choices: I could stay in our marriage as it was and be miserable for the rest of my life, but I don’t believe in being miserable; I could quit, but I don’t believe in quitting; or, I could somehow find a way to grow, but I didn’t know if I could grow.
Then, the church where my wife and I got married called to ask if I would take over teaching its marriage preparation program. My first thought was: “I am the last person you want near engaged couples right now!” I thought I had ruined my life by getting married. My second thought was more productive: “If you can teach others how to be married, it means you can learn how to be married. I need to learn!”
I threw myself into preparing to be a great teacher in the hopes my wife and I would be the first to benefit. I began to see I hadn’t understood marriage at all.
Becoming the right person
Marriage, it turns out, is one more school you need to graduate from —a school of love — except you will never graduate from marriage. There will always be new lessons to learn, and I have come to believe marriage is designed to be progressively more challenging as you go along.
I tell my engaged couples they are at the easiest time in their relationship. Life is going to get harder, particularly when they become parents. Parenting itself is going to get more challenging over time.
Babies are famous for crying, but toddlers come with their own challenges. They take fewer, if any, naps, and they can be gone in an instant if you are not paying attention. Having a second child didn’t add to our challenges — it multiplied them! We are now in our eighth year of having at least one teenage daughter in our house.
As parenting has become more challenging for us, our careers have become more demanding. And we now have a house — and a dog — to take care of. Stress upon stress has been piled on top of our marriage. We sometimes long for the days it was just the two of us!
But the greatest challenges of our marriage still lay before us. My father heroically loved my mother through four years of Alzheimer’s at the end of her life. The challenge of caring for my mother turned my father into a saint. Sadly, many couples divorce when terminal illness strikes. I wonder what my wife and I will be asked to do at the end of our lives.
So much for us cruising through life together!
Marriage isn’t supposed to be easy
Realizing that married life is full of progressive challenges — some happy, some sad — doesn’t depress me. It excites me. I have come to view marriage in a more realistic, reassuring, and inspiring light. I have come to believe that marriage has a purpose — a purpose that gives life-long marriage great meaning.
Marriage is not about enjoying life together. It is not supposed to be easy. Yes, marry the right person, but marrying the right person is not the key to a happy marriage. I have met with many great engaged couples — “perfect for each other” — who then come back to me for help when times get hard in their marriages.
The purpose of marriage is to challenge you to grow — to grow as individuals and to grow together as a team. I now see marriage as a great adventure. Failure is always an option. No matter how good my wife and I have been, if we don’t embrace our next challenge as an opportunity to grow, we can become disenchanted with each other.
Embracing the challenges that come our way keeps our marriage interesting. I no longer wonder if I can grow as a person. I’ve been growing throughout the 22 years of our marriage. I used to want to enjoy life — and I still do — but I have discovered that becoming a better person gives me a deeper sense of satisfaction.
Growing in marriage — together
In my marriage, I have grown in ways I never thought possible. Here’s a big one: my wife wanted me to be more affectionate. This was a big ask as I come from a good family that was completely lacking in affection.
I often speculated that if I went back a thousand generations, not a single male in my lineage had been affectionate. If I was going to become affectionate, I felt I had to overcome not only myself but the full weight of my family history. There seemed to be little hope for me.
But marriage is a long time to spend with one person. If my wife needs affection from me to be truly happy in our marriage — and I have asked her to spend a lifetime with me — what kind of husband would I be if I refused to work on myself? I looked to the literature on marriage and discovered the power of daily rituals to transform a marriage. I immediately committed myself to several daily rituals, each involving affection. These rituals have given me the daily practice I needed to grow as a person.
I’m grateful our marriage hasn’t been easy. I’m a better person today than I was on our wedding day. Not only am I more affectionate, I am more empathetic. I’m a better listener. I’ve learned to express myself more effectively. I’m a better planner, and I’m more reliable. I’ve even gotten better at doing the dishes! I have grown in all these ways because I want my wife to be happy — and I want us to be happy.
Despite all this great progress, I still have room to grow. What excites me about marriage is knowing I can continue this process of becoming a better person.
What marriage is really about
To me, the theory that the primary purpose of marriage is to challenge you to grow is the only theory that fits all “the facts” of marriage. If marriage is primarily about enjoying life together, how to explain the sorrows and disappointments that are a part of every married life? If marriage is about growing through life together, everything — the good times and bad — makes sense.
Now, what about the time-honored advice you should never marry someone expecting them to change? Yes, never expect someone to change as you want them to change, but you should look for someone who wants to grow through life with you. If you’re already married, it’s not wrong to ask your spouse to change. I’m glad my wife challenged me. Just be sure to ask in the right way. Most importantly, be someone who wants to change for the sake of your spouse.
Who wants to end married life the same person you started out as? What a missed opportunity that would be! Marriage is a school of love. Some of its lessons will be easier to learn than others, but if you embrace your studies, you will “graduate” a better person — having experienced a richer love.
Peter McFadden is a New York-based marriage coach who has worked with more than five thousand couples over the past 20+ years. This post initially appeared on the Institute for Family Studies blog.