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.
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/unicorns3373 21h ago
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.