When I got married, I had no idea what to expect. But that didn’t keep me from having sky high expectations.
“When I got married, I had no idea what to expect. But that didn’t keep me from having sky high expectations.”
I had visions of a backyard painting studio and several picturesque reading nooks, many years spent talking over cups of wine and dying candlelight. Everyone we knew agreed that we seemed very happy and were destined to have beautiful babies. Still, I couldn’t really picture what it was going to look like day to day, or how we were going to make it all work.
My templates for marriage were less than inspiring: I was a child of divorce, and most of my friends were too. All the love stories I’d seen in movies and books ended with the wedding, and sitcoms showed affable man-child husbands being managed by their exasperated wives. Whatever came after the wedding seemed like a mix of disgruntled monotony punctuated by occasional babies, vacations, and events at best; riddled with betrayal and dysfunction at worst. And yet I knew I wanted to get married, because I wanted to know what it would feel like to be in a relationship with someone who promised to never leave me.
“I knew I wanted to get married, because I wanted to know what it would feel like to be in a relationship with someone who promised to never leave me.”
Marriage means something different to everyone, but to me — a serial monogamist since age 16 — it meant no break up. I know this sounds both obvious and also old fashioned, not to mention demonstrably untrue — people get divorced every day, and marriages end just like any other relationship for all kinds of reasons. Good reasons! Just because a marriage doesn’t end doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
(I want to say here that the story of each marriage is, truly, its own unique and singular thing: We all have our own reasons for getting married or not, staying married or not, and my story is in no way a commentary on anyone else’s. My desire to never get divorced is a personal goal, not a universal moral decree. [And if I’m being honest, divorce is just the sort of logistical, expensive nightmare that my ADHD-addled brain avoids at all costs.] So please regard my commentary on the subject as pointedly and deeply specific only to me, my spouse, and our particular marriage. 💖)
Here’s the thing about me: I am both someone who is very open to the idea of embracing the unknown, and I am also someone who likes to be in control. In many ways, this makes me the ideal candidate for something as bonkers as promising my future to some dude, however great he may seem at the time. Marriage gives me the structure and boundaries of a controlled environment with the thrill of having no clue how it’s all going to turn out. But getting married seemed also like a lot of work to a potentially redundant end: We were already living together, had already adopted a dog and mixed up our lives enough that for all intents and purposes very little was going to change after a wedding. So for me, I felt that if I was going to go to the trouble to make a public and legal vow, I wanted it to be iron-clad.
“I am both someone who is very open to the idea of embracing the unknown, and I am also someone who likes to be in control.”
Why bother, I reasoned, unless the whole point is to do the audacious, terrifying, impossible thing itself: To make a promise on behalf of some unknowable, future versions of myself to keep loving whoever my partner was going to become. No outs, no addendums, no excuses. We promised to choose each other and our marriage every day, every time the choice was offered, and we put that vow in writing above our bed.
That is bananas! Who makes that sort of deal? There are so many things that could go wrong, so many ways we could grow apart or change. We could stop wanting the same things, or begin working toward different lives without even realizing until it was too late. One of us could lose our job while the other’s career skyrocketed; one of us could find community while the other floundered; we could face any number of health tragedies or accidents, financial or family-related crises that could push us to the breaking point. Or we might simply change in quiet, subtle ways that no one can quite put their finger on, until everything that once bound us together had been eroded away. Either one of us could wake up one day and realize that the person lying next to us is not the person we married, but a total stranger.
“Either one of us could wake up one day and realize that the person lying next to us is not the person we married, but a total stranger.”
And here’s the thing: The idea that we might one day look at one another and declare “You are not the person I married,” is not even just a hypothetical possibility, but an inevitability. Neither one of us are the same people we were ten years ago, and I thank our lucky stars for it!
Personal growth is the privilege of those fortunate enough to age. We don’t just change, but (hopefully) evolve — we get clearer on our values and beliefs, expand our capacity for compassion and forgiveness, and gain wisdom from the endless failures and errors we make along the way. Signing up to grow alongside someone else requires a willingness to not just accept each other’s development, but to commit to meeting, welcoming, and loving the new person they become, over and over again.
This is one of those ideas that seems deceptively simple, often only revealing its depths in practice. Personal growth usually comes not from the comfy, easy times, but from hardship and setbacks — the times when we tend to be at our absolute worst. It’s one thing to promise to love someone through the good and the bad when you’re wearing a gorgeous dress and surrounded by flowers at golden hour, but what about when you’re trying to rouse your partner from their third week in bed after an unexpected layoff, when the bills are piling up and the only interactions you’ve had in days have been petty, dumb arguments about the litter box that somehow devolve into a screaming match where you both say things you don’t really mean but can’t find a way to take back?
“Personal growth usually comes not from the comfy, easy times, but from hardship and setbacks — the times when we tend to be at our absolute worst.”
While that isn’t a specific example from our marriage, it is familliar to me in tone and intensity. Ten years of marriage have revealed us to each other in ways that neither of us could have anticipated, let alone prepared for. And it was hard, uncomfortable, and circuitous work figuring out how to map our way back to each other after these tough times. We managed with all the skills of a new homeowner rewiring a house using only video tutorials, scrap wire, and a half-used roll of electrical tape. Sure, we managed to get the lights to turn on and off, but there are some areas where they only flicker, and definitely an exposed wire or two that might give you a shock if you aren’t careful.
When our daughter was diagnosed with diabetes, we experienced the sort of total emotional collapse that no YouTube handyman could’ve coached us through, even if we had the proper tools. This was a job for a professional — and to be clear, I am talking about a couples’ therapist.
“The sessions we attended both together and individually were a lifeline during what was the hardest period of both of our lives.”
The sessions we attended both together and individually were a lifeline during what was the hardest period of both of our lives. With a designated time and place to funnel all our biggest feelings, it made it easier to focus on the day to day of establishing our family’s new normal. Instead of letting the low simmering feelings of grief and anxiety come out in such sneaky disguises as an argument about the dishes piling up in the kitchen sink, we could table the irritation for our next session. “Let’s talk about it with Carol,” was our shorthand to let it go for the moment. It was easier to do this when we could write out the offense on a sticky note and stack it next to the appointment circled in red on our kitchen calendar. “Fine,” the other would say. “We’ll talk about it with Carol.”
The funny thing is, we almost never did talk about the sticky notes with Carol. By the time our appointments came around, we had lived what felt like a hundred more years, with so many new layers of our own emotional journeys revealing themselves to us as we limped through the crash course of medical parenthood. Sitting on our therapist’s couch in her softly lit office, the complaints on the sticky notes looked exactly like what they were: Small, petty moments of frustration during an enormous and terrifying life transition. In Carol’s office, we were able to talk about what was really going on, learning to accept our new reality by naming our fears, finding effective coping strategies, and most importantly, strengthening our partnership at the same time.
As we got through the hard times, our appointments with Carol thinned out, and eventually things felt more stable in our lives. We were busy, and it seemed harder to get a joint session on the calendar when both of our schedules were so packed. But we had learned so much from our sessions, from how to recognize particular triggers and more consistently avoid them, to how to better navigate the fallout when a trigger was unavoidable. We learned more about each other’s fears, and with Carol’s guidance we were able to share with each other some of the ways our new life had reshaped the quietest, most inner parts of our core selves.
“I’d never felt more connected with Aaron, more capable of compassion for the times when he was not his best self.”
I’d never felt more connected with Aaron, more capable of compassion for the times when he was not his best self. I felt more seen and understood by him, and I could truly appreciate all the little changes in his behavior that showed how much he respected and valued me. At some point, everything about our life that had seemed so impossible was now just the norm. We did it! We’d made it through, and thanks to therapy, we were fine.
Life went on. And while it was true that we were still “fine,” we were also still normal humans who, when worn down by periods of high stress and little rest, turn into short-fused grouches prone to snapping or weeping at a moment’s notice. During a stupid argument about something I can’t even remember, I tried forcing us to practice a technique Carol had taught us, setting a timer that would limit our griping to just 15 minutes. But we were too tired, too irritable, and too out of practice. The timer went off, but we could barely hear it over the litany of complaints we were lobbing at one another. Aaron hit snooze, and we went around and around for another three cycles of 15-minute timers, until we were both too exhausted to care anymore.
Carol always tells us that there is a point of escalation when we are physiologically incapable of absorbing new information. We’ve all heard of the fight-or-flight response, or the acute stress response that occurs when our sympathetic nervous system perceives a physical, emotional, or mental threat to our safety — like, apparently, a fight with your spouse about something stupid when you’re both extremely tired and stressed.
“There is a point of escalation when we are physiologically incapable of absorbing new information.”
When triggered, our bodies react in ways that are in service of our safety: Our muscles tense, and we might clench our jaws or grind our teeth; our heartrates escalate, sometimes to as high as 150 bpm or higher, even while we might not be moving at all; we might get the overwhelming sensation to physically stomp, kick, or lash out. And when both parties are experiencing these things, it can be nearly impossible to de-escalate with words alone, especially the sort of words from the rational parts of our brains that have been turned off and locked up for safekeeping.
So after we had both finally gotten some sleep and found a time to do the 15-minute exercise in a calmer moment, we decided we should go back to Carol. Even though most days we seemed to be doing pretty well, it felt much harder to remember how to access the skills and techniques we’d worked on in therapy when we hadn’t talked about them in so long.
Without an appointment already on the books to which we could stick a Post-it note with whatever petty complaint, eventually that petty complaint started feeling more urgent, and much bigger than it actually was. Having the option to say “Let’s talk about it with Carol,” again built in the time and space we both required to be able to see what really needed tending over what was just a normal domestic tension. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? A good marriage isn’t one that’s free from conflict, but one where both people are free — free to fail, but choosing to learn from it; free to leave, but choosing to stay.
“A good marriage isn’t one that’s free from conflict, but one where both people are free.”
Aaron and I were married with as solid a foundation as anyone could hope for: We were good friends, and we both wanted to stay married. We both also embraced the idea that we can’t really know or control our future, but agreed that we were up for facing that unknown together. This is actually a core tenant of our marriage — our first dance was to the Lisa Hannigan song “I Don’t Know,” the lyrics of which list what we might not yet know about the other, while declaring us game anyway.
“We think of our marriage as a third party: There is Aaron, there is me, and then there is the thing we have agreed to keep and care for together.”
We think of our marriage as a third party: There is Aaron, there is me, and then there is the thing we have agreed to keep and care for together. Sometimes I think of it as a house, or a potted plant — a relatively self-sustaining thing that can be largely left alone, but every now and then requiring a little attention. Sometimes it might be simple maintenance, and sometimes it might need more dramatic intervention. In all cases, I might ask an expert for some tips, maybe even buy a book on home improvement or plant care. I can’t always anticipate what might go awry, but I can trust my ability to seek out someone who might be able to help figure it out.
Couples’ therapy is the way Aaron and I can show up for our marriage together, a reminder that we are both invested in the health of this distinct thing we decided to create. And even if we can’t know who all the different people we might become over the course of our lives together might be, they’ll be game to keep our marriage going — especially if we leave the right care instructions for them to follow.
Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.
