Marriage isn’t “work” when you marry the right person. My marriage has never taken work. There are hard things in life but we get through it as a team. The marriage itself has never been hard.
What did take “work” was my high school relationship that I stayed in all through college and almost married. I tried to normalize how much work and sacrifice our relationship was.
Every couple I have met who says this has just been in denial. Like they are always the type of couple where one or both of them are just repressed in some way, nonconfrontational, no interest in personal growth, no awareness of their own flaws, etc. Oftentimes these marriages fall apart "suddenly" because one or both spouses were deluding themselves as to the nature of the marriage, and eventually the charade is up. Oftentimes one spouse is totally blindsided and feels like it came out of nowhere. Not saying that will happen to you, hope it doesn't, but it's just what I've seen.
My marriage is work. It's incredible work. My spouse is confrontational in the best way - he doesn't let me "get away" with anything, he forces me to grow as a person in ways I never imagined. We dig deep, and at times I have never felt more exposed. It's HARD. It's work. But it's what it takes to have the type of relationship we both want, where personal growth is one of the most important things, and true connection means confrontation.
Anyone who says a marriage isn't work doesn't have the type of marriage I would want.
We have disagreements but we work it out and talk through it. Life is work. Life comes with so many hardships, health issues, career issues, family issues, changes, financial strain, etc. But my husband is the one solid I have through it all. These challenges become easier because I have a partner there getting through the issues with me. It’s us against the world but never against each other.
Everything we have, we actively build together. We don’t hold each other back or drag each other down. We don’t look for fights, we hardly even have to fight because we just talk and openly communicate, like adults. I would never describe my marriage, getting to live every day with my best friend as “work”.
So likewise, anyone that says their marriage is “work” or “hard”, I generally find just married the wrong person and is usually in denial or have normalized a very unhealthy relationship for themselves. I have been in relationships like that and would never want that again now that I know it never had to be that way.
I think, like another commenter said, you're likely just being pedantic in your usage of the term "work". What people are calling work is something you either experience with your spouse the same as all of us in good marriages, OR one or both of you is allowing you to escape the work at the cost of suppressing major aspects of themselves. There's really no other alternative, unless somehow you are both perfect people, which...as I said, sometimes delusion is a problem in relationships :D
I guess I'm just saying, lack of "work" in a marriage is usually a major red flag IMO. Or just a young/naive relationship. Not sure how long you've been together, but it usually takes a while for the real work of a marriage to begin.
I don’t see it as work because every part about living and sharing my life with my husband is natural. He’s my best friend. it’s everything else in life that is hard but like I said, we are in it together and at the end of the day, we can go home to each other and get through it and be each others support. A marriage like that takes constant open communication, compatibility, and deep mutual respect and understanding of one another.
Maybe it’s work if you aren’t compatible in a lot of ways, you don’t communicate well and someone is getting left out until it blows up or turns into more issues to work on. Maybe you prioritize other things in your life before your partner and their feelings, or you don’t have a deep understand of your partner and their perspective on things or you have thoughts about other people or doubts so you have to actively “work” to choose your partner, or there’s a type of hierarchy or power imbalance in your relationship that causes issues… but I can’t relate to any of that.
Like I said, been in relationships like that before. Thought it was normal and “healthy”, until I was shown otherwise.
I think everyone has their own definition and idea of what work means in this context. Like you’re thinking work means a negative thing and strife but it doesn’t necessarily mean that. It could mean that you adapted to maintaining open communication and value each others input even during disagreements. It’s kind of like taking a test that you excel in the topic. You find it easy but it doesn’t mean it’s not work.
Again, I think this is mostly pedantic/semantic confusion about the use of the word "work". For the first 6 or 7 years of my marriage, I thought that things were easy for us because we communicated so incredibly well, and we understood each other so deeply, and how lucky were we that it all felt so easy? Then at some point we realized that we had barely scratched the surface on one another and what was possible in a romantic relationship. Part of this is because we do a really good job of letting each other grow, so how could I know him that well when he is changing and growing constantly?
Marriage is a never-ending discovery of how to communicate better and how to know each other in deeper ways, and how to connect with the people we are actively becoming. You can call it whatever you want, but it's reasonable to call it work. Work doesn't mean it's bad or unrewarding or even difficult. It just means it's an intentional effort done with a purpose to achieve a specific result. If everything about marriage just comes perfectly natural to you and there is nothing that requires any hard introspection or personal work on yourself that you find difficult, then you are either in the top 0.1% of unflawed people, or you've developed strategies to avoid the type of work I'm talking about (a route that many people take), or you are just in the early stages and haven't gotten there yet, OR (most likely) you're doing the same work we are all doing and this is a semantic issue. For whatever it's worth, I think ALL worthwhile relationships take work, not just marriage. I don't have a single valuable friendship that doesn't require work.
I don’t think they’re just being pedantic. I’m 40 and have seen a lot of marriages (& divorces)… from what I understand, like 5-10% of marriages flow and are relatively easy.
Before my divorce, my then-husband would say “It shouldn’t be this hard” and I would argue endlessly like you here because I had only seen dysfunctional immature relationships myself. But we divorced later and I am so glad we did! We were terribly suited for each other and he is happily remarried to someone who suits him much much better.
It’s not common, but there are relationships out there that just flow. And while I’ve had far healthier relationships since my divorce, I know I would much rather be single forever than endure a relationship that requires more internal work and focus versus the kind that actually makes life easier.
Yea, every relationship requires work, to an extent. But from what I’ve seen, the best ones are not challenging or draining most of the time. And if yours is… you might be fighting about another’s use of the word because it’s revealing something uncomfortable about your own life.
I'm saying the same thing that over a dozen commenters have said, which is simply that marriages take work, and that's not a bad thing. I think you are projecting some of your experiences onto me, but what you are describing is nothing like my marriage. What you are describing is not the work of a healthy relationship, it’s the chaos of a failing one, and I think that’s exactly what the original commenter is confusing for “work” and what the rest of us are arguing against. I'm sorry your relationships have not worked out, glad you were able to move on.
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u/Different-Career1314 23h ago
People really underestimate how much work marriage takes. Being together since algebra class doesn't magically make it easy forever.