After the blur of a beautiful wedding day, the real work of marriage begins.
While I don’t know the nuances of every marriage, it’s fairly safe to say that even if we’ve begun to make the effort to learn from past relationships that we inevitably carry the baggage of all that was left unresolved. There are triggers that evoke frustration and habits we’ve resolved to change but haven’t yet. There are wounds scabbed over that sting afresh instantly in times of anger, shame, and vulnerability.
Healthy relationships haven’t always been modeled for many of us, perhaps too much raging or too much sweeping it under the rug until the sound of the silence pulses as loudly as any scream. It takes such effort to unlearn the thought patterns and behaviors picked up from our parents, from the TV families we watched, and from trying to forge a place for ourselves among siblings and friends. We enacted survival mechanisms and barriers that we think protect us and enable us to feel comfortable taking up our own space in the world.
I say this to remind myself as much as anyone else to keep growing, learning, and unlearning our way to understanding our family histories and the stories we’ve told ourselves to cope, the roles we played to keep the peace and keep things humming along, even at the cost of our own honesty, authenticity, and agency. We have to make sense of past relationships and decide the kind of spouse we intend to be today and every day after. We have to have patience with ourselves and our spouses. We have to offer grace.
When tempers flare and the argument swirls, think of your partner as a small, doe-eyed child. We flex tendencies we’ve witnessed in our parents, in other role models. Under the snapping and judgments lies our collective anxiety, lies the pressure to always be on. Under the anger lies a hurt built from all the ways we’ve been let down. We get defensive in our attempts to maintain perfection, pull it together when we don’t feel like it, shove down our emotions and faults all while sacrificing our own humanity.
A full, vulnerable sense of humanity is what one must bring to a marriage to make it work. You can’t bring the surface-level, Instagram-worthy-only self. It’s not even merely about accepting each other in sweats and no makeup. It’s embracing each other at your most fragile times when it feels easier to jump ship than extend one small word of apology. It’s calling to mind the reasons you fell for each other in the first place when you start to waiver or feel temporarily blinded by jealousy, fear, hurt, or anger. It’s giving the benefit of the doubt and cutting them slack.
It’s about making the conscious effort every single day to show up as your whole self with your shortcomings and bad habits as much as your radiance and optimism. Diving into all of it, all the time, is the only way to form the kind of bond that lasts a lifetime. It’s work. And it’s constant. Luckily, it’s filled with so many pearls of loving connection.
I wish to be open and vulnerable every day, to bare myself where it counts. I wish for all of us in our relationships to help each other make sense of the scars and the scattered memories and the regrets and the failures and the unfailing hope laced throughout. Be brave with your words and your eyes and your touch. Then we’ll have true peace and marriages that are undeniably better than any fantasy you may have had for yourself. That’s my wish for my husband and I and for all of you, today and every day.
Gabrielle Koontz 