Why NOT to Marry

The BBQ Pit
1

You can’t know why NOT to marry until it’s too late. Let me try to summarize:

Once the honeymoon phase wears off, both you and your spouse’s real personalities come out. The person you’d die for becomes a drag and/or a nag. You ask your spouse for a simple favor, and one day, it’s like you asked him/her to perform the Twelve Tasks of Hercules. All of us have idiosyncrasies that manifest and grow over time. People are dynamic, not static beings. Marriage til death do we part are tough words by which to live!

Your needs and interests change. I don’t have any stats, but I’d wager more couples grow apart than grow together over time. You enter into a marriage contract with NO end date (all other contracts have an end date) for better or for worse, and that’s just not reality. It’s a losing proposition. If you’re fortunate, your spouse may allow you to retain some semblance of independence. This is something to get straight from the start. In fact, as things come up, get it straight from the start. If you don’t like her meatloaf, tell her from the start. Otherwise, odds are it will be that much worse when it comes out down the road, and 99% of things will come out in time. Sharing the money is another sore subject in my marriage. It is an endless battle no matter how we’ve compromised.

Above all, I think losing one’s independence is the hardest to accept. Especially if you cannot afford a divorce. And, if you divorce, please don”t wait to have children first. A friend of mine advices to live with someone five years before marriage. Still, there are no guarantees.

…and loneliness is not a good alternative, either. :wink:

2

I’ve watched a lot of marriages implode.

I’ve been happily married for twenty years.

Part of how I got there was watching marriages implode, and then not doing those things.

Sorry it didn’t work out for you.

3

I’m sorry. It’s painful and complicated when it doesn’t work. I’ve been fortunate.

4

I’ve seen commentary on the internet from women who have figured out that when men say “I’ll do anything for you” they mean they’ll fight bears, kill an intruder, pull you from a burning car, etc. They don’t mean “I’ll learn how to cook for you,” or “I’ll research how to clip coupons,” or “I’ll vacuum more often even though the floors don’t bother me.”

One of the things that helped me in my marriage is this: Every time I’m about to do something “for me,” say I’ve made a snack and I’m going to sit down and watch a show that only I like, I stop myself and ask a question: Is there something I could do that’s nice for my wife first? For some reason, it took me something like 15 years of marriage to realize that “I love you” doesn’t just mean “I’m going to put your needs before mine,” it also means “I’m going to put your wants before mine.”

When you’re constantly demonstrating your love through tangible, daily actions, you get it back in kind.

5

The marriages I watched implode were usually those where one person was never in love in the first place, but was too afraid to say so out loud, or was somehow compelled by circumstances to marry despite their will. Then it’s a ticking time bomb to misery. Not necessarily divorce, but just misery.

One author wrote it best: “If, even at its very best, the relationship wasn’t good, then the prognosis is poor. It likely will never become good.”

6

One of my wife’s best friends got married at age 29, to a guy she hadn’t been dating for very long, because she had decided that, if she wasn’t married by 30, she would be doomed to be an old maid forever.

The marriage lasted less than a decade, because they weren’t really that compatible (and grew even less so with time), and because, frankly, I don’t think they ever really loved each other. So, she was divorced before 40, and never got married again.

7

I’m going to disagree a little with the OP: I don’t think maintaining independence is as important as stated there. Each person in a relationship or marriage needs to be able to maintain their identity, but in a state of interdependence, for it to have lasting strength. I also very much agree with @steronz ‘s approach to building strength in a relationship.

8

Marriages I see fail are usually because they married too young, or they never lived together before getting married.

Any friends I have who lived with their spouse at least a year before marrying and are over the age of 30 seemed to survice.

9

All the more reason that it’s important to figure out how to be single without being lonely.

If you literally cannot be happy in a solitary state, then yeah, you probably should get married (or maybe join a residential religious community or other companionate group?), even if married life isn’t perfect. You’ll have to tolerate the imperfections causing some unhappiness, but it’ll be better for you than dealing with the unhappiness of loneliness that you know you can’t tolerate.

On the other hand, if you have learned how to be happy while single, then if you meet someone whose companionship makes you even happier, then wow, win-win! You know you’ll be fine on your own, it’s just that being with this other person is better. I would think that’s well worth putting up with an occasional helping of meatloaf you’re not crazy about.

ISTM that a lot of happiness in life, whether married or single, comes from resolving to make the best of what you have to the extent that you can. Nobody’s life is perfect, which is all the more reason to enjoy everything about yours that you can find to enjoy. And also to try to increase the happiness of those around you.

10

I love this. I gotta try it.

As a couple, probably one of the biggest adjustments we had to make was becoming parents after 18 years with just the two of us. It changed the nature of our relationship, because our priority now has to be the kid. And in the beginning our interactions really seemed kind of rote and perfunctory. I felt pretty discouraged. With time we’ve been able to use parenting as a foundation to deepen our relationship - for example, we recently collaborated on a document we wrote to our son’s IEP team since his needs weren’t being addressed in school. We each spent the whole day on it, passing drafts back and forth. My husband was over the moon with the fact that we were both on the same page with regard to what our son needed - as a clinician, he said it’s rare for parents to be on the same page when there’s a kid with a disability. Then my son’s therapist said it was the best parent letter he’s ever read.

More recently, we’ve been a team with regard to figuring out the right school for the boy.

And you see the most mundane, logistical things can become meaningful if you feel like you’re working at it together. For us it’s like life has been a series of projects we’re working on. Raising our son is the biggest project yet.

Shared values are critical. Because my husband and I both care about a lot of the same things, it has made things overall much easier, even as we’ve changed. What’s really hard is when someone’s values change. I’ve seen that happen too.

My husband’s parents divorced after twenty years married. I remember his Dad saying to me, “Is a twenty year marriage really a failure?” That’s a long time to be with someone. Credit where it’s due.

My own mother is on her fifth marriage last I heard from her.

11

I’m now at an age where I know more people whose marriages have fallen and are falling apart.

I think only one of them falls into the category of “grew apart, could not have seen this coming.” For this couple, they were both very religious when they got married; one of them crashed hard out of the religion and became very disparaging of it, and the other doubled down with commitment to the religion, and they just couldn’t coexist peacefully any more. I don’t think anyone could have told you this would happen.

What else? One couple where the wife always had little comments about how her husband was not as accomplished educationally/careerwise as she was. (Which was true, but…) Well before they were married. On their wedding day, even. That was the one where I was least surprised by the divorce. Frankly I was surprised they got married at all.

Two couples where they got married young. The wife did everything: worked, cooked meals, was in charge of all the kid stuff. In both cases, the wife got more and more resentful until the resentment that had been built up was so great that there was no going back from it. Now, the other end of this is that I don’t think the communication in either marriage was stellar, because things like that can be worked through if both parties are willing to communicate about it. I know that in at least one of the cases the woman was not great about communicating her issues. On the other hand, in both cases the man should probably have realized how much more the woman was taking on…

One couple where the husband just was not dependable, whether it was for stuff like “can you be around on Saturday to help with the kids” (maybe, but if a better offer comes along I’m going to do that) or "can you apply for jobs now that you’ve lost your last one” (I’ll take a stab at it but mostly I’ll pretend to be useful by pretending to fix the car) or “you have this plan to do a family hike across the US but have you, like, done any prep for it, or given any thought to the fact that no one else in the family wants to do this, or thought about stuff like whether the kids’ schooling needs to be thought about?” He’s a quite handsome guy and did have a reasonable job when I first met this couple, and I think they also married young so he probably seemed like more of a catch then – but I think he was an absolute nightmare to be married to with kids.

One couple where the wife is to be honest a bit of a flake and has been a bit of a flake ever since I’ve known her. Also not that surprising that at some point her flakiness took the form of “I’m going to pursue self-fulfillment by separating from my husband.”

One couple where they were totally different people (think: conservative plumber marrying liberal graduate student), like, before they were married the entire wedding party was like, “wow, it’s really surprising the two of you ended up together.” Not that this kind of thing can’t work, but I think it takes two people who have a bit more ability for introspection than these two had.

So, what are the lessons I’ve learned here?

  1. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Don’t think it will change after you get married.
  2. I agree with OP in that one should really get (1) figured out before one has kids, because it’s all going to be much worse with kids.
  3. Communicating in a marriage can sometimes be scary (no really – there are times that I’ve been reluctant to do it because I worry about what my husband will think or say, even though 99% of the time he’s perfectly lovely about it and the remaining 1% has never gone beyond, say, sarcasm which he’s also willing to dial back if I tell him I don’t like it), in my case because my family is really not great at it, but you have to do it anyway
  4. Like @steronz says – if you are always thinking about your partner and demonstrating your love through doing things that will benefit them BEFORE they ask you to do it, it goes a long long way. Most if not all of the divorces above (except maybe for the first one) would not have happened if both the partners had lived by that.
12

Happily married for 27 years. Not a single argument.

Yes goals change. And correct, people are dynamic. So both parties need to be flexible.

Luckily we grew along the same path. We discovered much together.

13

Oh Lord, I can’t say that. And we’ve had some dumb ones. A long time ago we got into it over Green Day’s album American Idiot.

Ten years later, Spouse Weasel said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that time we were fighting about American Idiot, and you were right.”

Never met a man more stubborn.

14

That’s weird. Happily married for 27 years (that’s great!) but never an argument in 27 years?

I don’t know you our your spouse and maybe you did the seemingly impossible. If so, great for you and your spouse. Just seems really unusual.

To the OP…I have been married and gotten divorced. Best I can say is marriage is a trade-off. You lose some things and gain other things. Hopefully the gains outweigh the losses (and in a good relationship they totally can and are worth it).

But relationships can be difficult. Not news to anyone.

15

Cook you’re own meatloaf then, if you think you can do better. Is she your wife or your cook?

16

I’m the exception that proves the rule. I didn’t get married the first time until my late 20s, and we lived together for a year before tying the knot. It only lasted five years. I stayed happily single for the next 15 years and dated occasionally until my daughter went off to college. At that point, I decided I didn’t want to be alone anymore and dated seriously again, and immediately met someone. We lived together for almost two years before marrying, and that one lasted 20 years before I decided to end it. I’ve now determined that marriage isn’t my thing. I enjoy being alone, and I’m not afraid to die alone. I think I was always one of the “single at heart” people who were perfectly happy being single and got married (twice) for the wrong reasons.

17

I think 3-5 years is a good test of a relationship, depending on age.

I met my husband at age 18, we started dating at age 19, we married at 23. So, four years together.

God, when I see 23 year olds I can’t believe how young we were.

18

My parents were married for 57 years, and I almost never observed them to actually argue or fight. As one of their children, on the couple of occasions when my father lost it and threw a tantrum about nothing, I thought the world was coming to an end. I guess it taught me something when it didn’t.

My husband and I fought a lot when we and the relationship were younger. Eventually I learned that most of the stuff we fought about wasn’t worth it, and that trying to get him to ever admit in so many words that he was wrong was impossible, so I stopped trying. Not that everything is rosy, there are still occasionally times when I just have to go to another part of the house and let the situation cool down. I would describe the average level of tension as very low, with very occasional short-lived spikes.

19

There are a lot of domestic tasks I performed as a single man that I gradually stopped doing in the years after I got married. Laundry for example. When I got married, it wasn’t my intention to stop doing those domestic tasks because I didn’t view them as women’s work nor did I marry Mrs. Odesio because I wanted a maid. But Mrs. Odesio has it in her head that there is a specific way to perform each task and any deviation from that is wrong. Because of this belief, when I do perform domestic tasks she has a tendency to micromanage me.

Don’t confuse this with weaponized incompetence. If I don’t know how to do something I’ll tell her flat out I don’t know how to do it. The only time I take initiative with household tasks is when she leaves for a few days. I’ll clean the entire house from top to bottom because I don’t have someone there to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

It could be this is an issue unique to Mrs. Odesio and I. But I do sometimes wonder if there are other men who don’t like doing things around the house because their spouse likes to micromanage them.

20

Friend of mine got pregnant at 13. Her and the dude, 15 at the time, married. Still together ages 68 and 70.