Insights from a Thirty-Four Year Old Newlywed
Now that Tristan and Stephanie have shared their perspective on marriage, I figured I’d share my unique perspective on marriage as a newlywed.
My background
Similarly to Tristan and Stephanie, I had also came from a divorced family. While my biological parents split up when I was a toddler and I have no recollection whatsoever of what had actually transpired, the ensuing drama lasted well into my adulthood. Without getting to much into the events themselves, both my biological and step-parents had heavily influenced my views on relationships and marriage–more specifically on what not to do. Like most impressionable coming-of-age teenagers of my generation in a similar situation, the only thing we had to emulate or base our reality off of was what we saw in the media.
While I eventually did see through the veneer of corporate propaganda, coming to understand the truth of the world around me had led to me acquiring a negative attitude towards women while emulating a number of self-defeating behaviors in regards to personal relationships. I grew bitter, resentful, and cynical because I had let a number of personal tragedies in my life manifest itself into a mental trap of being incredibly inconsiderate, rude, and selfish. I saw relationships in terms of give-and-take, checklists, and keeping tabs. Eventually, I did find a way out of all of that. Part of that is meeting a woman who refused to give up on me through it all, and the other is healing through faith in our Lord, Jesus Christ.
While this all sounds like the making for a good redemption arc for a movie, the truth is that I nearly waited until my mid-thirties to tie the knot. Even by Millennial standards, this is a good five or six years later than average. I get it, it’s not a competition or a race, some people are late bloomers, and so on and so forth, but not everybody is willing to take the same opportunities towards self-improvement and growth that I did. With that said, I hope I can provide the following insight into marriage so that it may some day help other men let go of their apprehensions and take the plunge.
The journey towards marriage is perhaps the most underwhelming, anticlimactic thing that will ever happen in your life
This may sound odd to some of you, but you will have very little choice in who you “fall in love with” and end up marrying. That being said, you do have absolute free will to be with whoever you choose–but that’s not what I’m talking about. You’ll find somebody, you’ll hang out, go through the awkward courtship ritual, and, soon before you know it, you’ll be married with little ankle biters running around. The idea that you “found the right one” will come to mind only in hindsight. In fact, it will happen in such a mildly anticlimactic fashion that you’ll be thinking about how you got from that point of time up until now.
If you ask any long-time married couple (10+ years), they will briefly tell the story of their romance and eventual nuptials as if there was a haze surrounding it. Of course, they will call out key events like their wedding day, perhaps their first date, a specific romantic gesture, or the day he proposed, but otherwise they will shrug and say something to the effect of “I guess it just sort of happened.”
People end up together for a whole multitude of reasons that can’t always be fully expressed in words. However, this is in contrast to what you see in your garden variety romance film where people decide to spend the rest of their lives together based mostly or even entirely on impulse. That’s not love, that’s a cocktail of hormones rushing through your body that’ll eventually return to normal levels somewhere between ten and eighteen months after meeting someone. The “real deal” is so subtle that it might not even register on your emotional Richter scale. You know that you love that individual and you will do anything to make sure they’re taken care of, but it won’t be fanfare and fireworks every step of the way. Just because your relationship doesn’t fit cleanly into the three-act romance doesn’t mean you should just give up because you don’t get exactly what you want.
Just Married? It gets harder from here…
The most difficult thing you will ever do is live your life with another human being, someone other than yourself where you have to make collective decisions with. The first several years of your courtship, your journey to marriage, and all of the life events that happen with any couple will challenge your patience and ability to communicate.
For instance, I am a rational thinker like most men. Things either are true, false, or otherwise an argument could be made why a specific thing or situation falls into a gray area. What is missing from my thought process are feelings. That is not to say that I lack empathy or have a hard time understanding conditional hypotheticals, I just understand that how anyone feels about a particular thing does not change the substance of that thing in and of itself. On the other hand, my wife makes most of her decisions mostly based on how something makes her feel. Because of this, sometimes I am challenged with the aspect of solving an emotional issue with a rational solution. The rational solution is most always the correct answer, but I have to somehow translate it into emotional terms rather than say “okay, I’m going to do the thing”, “trust me, it’ll get handled”, or “why don’t we try this instead”.
I also suffer from the condition of being the most obnoxiously opinionated person on the planet. Perhaps my colleagues and acquaintances are most spared from this, but my (now) wife has had to suffer the last seven years of hearing my every opinion on everything from the global warming hoax to why black socks are preferable to blue or brown. That being said, everybody has what is crudely referred to as “baggage” and there will never be an absence of it in any relationship. No couple is perfect. Whether or not you can handle it is up to a matter of personal preference. But that is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to avoid marriage.
Compatibility is a concept that a Harvard MBA marketing team came up with to sell dating site subscriptions.
You know what “compatibility” is? Somebody who agrees with you most of the time. Even if you did get what you want, you would get bored very quickly and come to regret it. For that reason, compatibility is a non-factor to a successful marriage. I know this because I married a liberal. We fight about politics on occasion and I have absolutely no problem telling her why I believe her views are wrong at worst or misguided at best. However, we can work through that because her politics don’t inform our combined understanding on what morals and values we share or how we live our personal lives.
Don’t worry about being “the man”
A fictional character from a show once said “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king”. If you have to put your foot down, say “we’re doing this my way because I said so”, or you’re simply defensive about your status as the man of the house, perhaps you need to relax and allow yourself to naturally assert into your role. All you have to do as a man is more-or-less be there, be involved, and make decisions…any decision. As long as you can focus on doing those three things, the rest will fall into place.
You will fight, you will argue, you will bicker, you will have disagreements. You are not special. Sometimes when you make a decision as a man, it will be challenged. You just need to know that your decisions being challenged isn’t the result of you failing as a man or a leader.
On the other hand, I can’t tell you how to handle being challenged because every situation is different. Sometimes, you have to face up to the fact that you made a mistake and subsequentially made a bad decision. Sometimes, you have to reevaluate your decision based upon new developments or facts. Sometimes, you just have to calmly and assertively explain why your decision is the right one. However, I do know that you will fail in this endeavor if you immediately respond by asserting your own ego into the situation. Sometimes, you have to take a step back and consider the impact of such challenge in the grand scheme of things. Does it involve a major life event like buying a house, having kids, or changing jobs or is it as banal as buying two orders of fries and a shake instead of one fry and a cheeseburger? Most often, the fight is so miniscule in impact that it’s not a hill worth dying on.
You’re probably too needy
The comedian George Carlin offered advice to people who oftentimes whine that their needs aren’t being met: drop some of your needs! Being the product of a broken home, I had a warped perspective on what I ought to be entitled to in a relationship or a marriage. In fact, Tristan had already alluded to this when discussing a denial of self, sacrifice, and how maintaining a relationship based on contractual obligation does not work.
The more materialistically-minded men out there say they want a lot of things. Truth be told, they may get those things and come to regret it. More importantly, those of us like myself who did not have a role model could only form their perspective on things based upon witnessing the relationships of others. The problem with doing this is that it’s impossible to view another’s personal relationship from a holistic standpoint. Since most healthy, well-adjusted couples make a habit of not putting their personal struggles up on display, the relationships that “everyone else” has always appear to you as if the grass is greener on the other side. This begs the question “if they can have it, why can’t I?” If that’s the position you’re taking, then no relationship will ever be good enough for you because your requirements aren’t being fulfilled. As soon as you can remove yourself from the perspective of checking off certain boxes or giving a damn about what others think, then you can get down to the essential task of dropping your needs.
Marriage will force you to reevaluate your needs and determine if you can adequately take care of the needs of another human being, perhaps two, three, or four, oftentimes at your own expense. It sounds like a huge undertaking, but countless men have taken up the mantle and have been doing it since the dawn of civilization. If they can do it, so can you. Don’t sell yourself short.
