Marital Advice

"It doesn't change anything, it's just a bit of paper." Those were the words so many people said to me in the lead-up to our wedding. And I had every reason to believe them. I'd been with my partner for eight years and together we'd gone through university, lived together, moved to new places, coped with loss and grief, bought a house, renovated, got a dog. We'd spent a third of our lives together, so I had little reason to believe anything would change. "It's just a bit of paper," I agreed. Only in my experience, it's not.


Forever and ever
It sounds ridiculous to say that realisation #1 is marriage is forever but, while I grasped this intellectually before the wedding, I didn't really truly get it until afterwards. That's not to say I didn't appreciate the magnitude of promising to stay with the same person until death do us part, it's just I thought that we'd already come to that agreement years ago. I thought this was a formality. Except that during the ceremony and in the days that followed, the realisation sunk into me: this is forever. And ever. While I had always felt sure of our relationship, I was surprised by just how secure I felt after we'd got married.

Dream team
Because of this, I feel like we're more of a team than ever before. This surprised me as over the years we've done our fair share of activities that would surely qualify as 'team building', from renovating a 100-year-old cottage to training for and running a half marathon together. I'd never felt that he wasn't on my team before, yet that piece of paper intensified things.

Finding balance

Raising expectations
I thought married life might result in lowered expectations when it came to the little things - pick your battles, and all that - but in my experience, the absolute reverse is true. The old stereotype is as soon as people get married they don't have to make any effort any more; what's the point? The point is this: you are with this person for the rest of your life. And so things we might have once let slip suddenly seemed of astronomical importance. A year down the line and I have stopped peppering my sentences with 'like' (damn you, American podcasts) and he dries the dishes and puts them away immediately after washing.

It's good to talk
In turn, we have become far better at communication than we ever were before. We were never the type of people that had screaming matches, but I was prone to being sullen and sulky, and he would put walls up. But with the stakes raised, both of these responses to disagreement felt childish. So we learnt how to disagree effectively. The past year has reinforced the idea that disagreements are an inevitable part of any relationship and that you'll never perfectly align your views with another human being. Besides, that would be boring. So now we bring up issues when we're in the right headspace and have the time to hash them out, kindly and with respect. Well... most of the time!

Accept and move on
While I've found certain expectations have intensified there is, conversely, a greater sense of acceptance than ever before. It's like this: your partner can stop leaving their dirty clothes on the floor and learn to put them in the laundry basket instead, but they can't change who they ultimately are. There are integral parts of all of us that are undesirable, it's the nature of being human, but marriage is agreeing to love someone in spite of that. This has been a freeing exercise and I've found it's made me more grateful. I appreciate him exactly as he is, flaws and all, more than ever before.

Feeling content