Does being married for a long time suck ?

I have not known that many happily married people. It seems that most marriages have a ton of drama, having kids creates a lot of conflict and little time for sex, and couples seem to argue a lot or have a lot of resentment toward each other. what is it about marriage that is so life - changing in a negative way? does getting married young affect a marriage later down the line? are these just the complaints of people who got married too young, and are tired of their spice?

 
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I had my 10 year marriage anniversary this year, so here goes. Life in general is hard and people of all ages and marital status have struggles as time passes. 

I heard the saying "Happiness = Reality - Expectations" (edit: fixed per iercurenc) and I agree with it. Today, I would argue that people's expecations are higher than ever (especially due to social media), and reality is worse off (especially financial stress) than in several generations. The result is that overall happiness is lower.

Another problem is that people put so much value on their own happiness. Today, more than before, life is pretty romanticized through social media and there is pressure to be "happy" every day. You have to find work that makes you "happy," and hobbies on the weekend that make you "happy" and are socially popular. Beyond that, achieving personal happiness is *the goal* for a lot of people today. This is to the exclusion of other goals, such as supporting family members, spouse, children, or advancing career or financial goals. 

There is also a "toxic positivity" effect where people are reluctant to embrace reality. Marriage over the long term involves being happy SOME part of the day, but most of the day is taken up by responsibilities. When you get home from your jobs (there is an excellent chance both spouses work) in the evening, both tired, there is a lot of work to do: cleaning the house, cooking food, washing dishes.

Tik Tok doesn't show married couples scrubbing toilets. You're supposed to be drinking cranberry juice, long-boarding a hill and singing Stevie Nicks karaoke. The younger generation triple-underlines happiness as the desired state of being, and advises anything to achieve it: work less, leave "toxic" significant others, don't have children, don't engage with anything undesired, take as many substances (alchohol, drugs, pharmaceuticals) as desired. "Avoid pain, embrace dopamine" is their mantra. This crowd loves pets because pets don't argue back or have goals/desires of their own.

Real relationships are not like having a dog. Real people have their own hopes and dreams. They have their own budgets in mind, and bad habits. It's messy having to deal with another person -- and for that person, your happiness is not their #1 priority! Even worse, if you both just have your own happiness as the #1 priority, it's likely that you will only be happy together insofar as your desires overlap. It's a new-age way of thinking about life and it results in an undue amount of anxiety about whether a marriage is "working" or one is living the marriage of their fantasies.

The best advice I can give to anyone entering into a marriage is to really think about the above and consider why you are getting married. For me, I don't mind doing some household chores because it might take away from some of the annoyance and pain in my spouse's day. I don't mind having to make some financial sacrifices if it makes my spouse feel more secure. You will have to deal with not only deaths of your own friends and family as you get older, but also have to shoulder the pain of your spouse's. These things don't feel like sacrifices because I'm a mature adult and am not just min-maxing my personal enjoyment 24/7/365. Adopt a more stoic attitude in life and ignore pretty much all social media. You'll be much, much better off for it.

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.
 
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Very well said.

I think a relationship in which you can laugh with someone, or sit on the couch and hang out in slow moments, is a healthy one.  As you say, life isn't a series of Instagrammable moments, those are the rare highs.  Much more is cooking together, watching TV, sitting in bed.  If you are content to do those things with someone 90% of your time together, the rest will be easy.

That, and communication.  Someone who talks to you and to whom you can talk is prerequisite #1 for a healthy relationship

 

+1 SB. Great stuff. Also, I think that the term "happiness" encompasses too many things. In my opinion, there is a near term happiness such as slamming drinks with your buddies until 2 a.m. versus a much deeper happiness or satisfaction such as knowing that you are a decent person who is loved and is willing to make sacrifices for others.

Yes, if you are married, you will probably have a lot less shallow happiness achieved by hanging out with your buddies whenever you want, but you have a deeper long term satisfaction that no amount of happy hours and Sunday Fundays can fulfill. It's two different kinds of happiness yet we tend to intermingle them into a single word...kind of an English language problem really.

 

Depends entirely on who you're married to. 

"The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly" - Robert A. Wilson | "If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything" - Winston Churchill | "It's a testament to the sheer belligerence of the profession that people would rather argue about the 'risk-adjusted returns' of using inferior tooth cleaning methods." - kellycriterion
 

Synergy_or_Syzgy said it far more beautifully than I ever could have

Disclaimer, I'm not married so I won't pretend to say what marriage is like / isn't like. What I do know are general life principles that have already served me well & have observations that I've mulled over for a long time which I'll offer here:

- First of all, happiness is a foolish thing to optimize LT. Happiness is fleeting. What you really show work to optimize is contentment. This is when you take a breather and sit down in the back lawn or take a walk as a sun is setting & think about your life, you feel satisfied. This is when you look at your family & friends and think, I've done well. This is when you look back at all your decisions and can say, everything happened for a reason & look back with few regrets but not really wanting to change much in hindsight 

- I'm 10000% convinced that while hedonism is satisfying short-term, Relentlessly pushing for hedonism (drugs, video games, hookups with random skanks, etc) while can be fun for a little while will hollow you out LT. The truly most content people I know are ones who are married & sharing this wonderful journey called life together with a true LT commitment. Not something that needs to happen immediately, but a true life partner with the same values & LT mindset is worth more than all the dopamine hits in the world

- The happiness = reality - expectations is 100000% true. I've experienced it with girls, with my own goals, and my own expectations about anything & everything. Charlie Munger once said "the first rule of a happy life is low expectations." I think a lot of girls want to be treated like Disney princesses these days what with social media and the extremely low switching costs (every average girl has hundreds of guys in her DMs) means there is a much greater willingness to switch partners at the slightest opportunity. The 'Yass kween dump his ass' mentality does hurt the other person but in the end it really just hurts yourself as the gap between expectations & reality grows just a little bit wider (comment above about toxic positivity rings true). Just really bad all around, I know a girl who dumped this pretty great guy because 'he couldn't take good pictures for my IG' -- could not believe my ears when I heard this and I moved away from hanging out with this girl. If that's how she treats a guy who ticked pretty much every box & cared about her, how would she treat her friends? 

- I really do think dating 'too much' & breaking up constantly hurts the soul a bit every time. 100% go out and date a few girls, you have to get to know what you like / what you don't like but can tolerate / what's a dealbreaker. But when you've dated 27 girls, I think it creates a few issues. 1) your own switching costs become very low (and so you lose that sense of true commitment, 2) your expectations for what a relationship look like get way too high & you become less tolerant of smaller flaws, and 3) it slowly kills your ability to feel joyous with the person you are with & instead your mind is racing as to what the next one will look like. I just don't think it's super healthy to be going crazy with that, I've had some hookups but I'm very much a LTR kind of guy. I can tell you the most content / thrilled I've ever been was in a relationship. Wilt Chamberlain who famously slept with over 20k women said that at the end of day, he'd have rather just had 1 with the right girl

All that said, marriage itself won't bring contentment. It's marrying the right person AND being the right person (in the right frame of mind when thinking about the future, good values, etc) that I think brings this about. I agree that marrying too young often not great, but I think if you marry from say late-20s to early-30s you've had time to grow up & get to the point there marriage either makes sense for you or it doesn't but you can make a good decision about it. I know you say a lot of married couples you know are not happy but most older single people I know are not happy either, just compare apples to apples because I'd bet my life that you'd find a significantly greater % of people in their 40s who are happier / more content married than single & never married. Anyway, just my 2 cents 

 
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Just want to say if you are really seeing stars and are so sore you are struggling to climb up the stairs, you definitely need to tone it down a bit. You are setting yourself up for your body to break down or a muscle injury that is going to make you lose a lot of progress that you’ve made to date.

The hardest part about fitness is the long-term consistency required. You have to enjoy the journey and not focus too much on the timing of results because progress is slow. Most of the guys you see in competitions are taking steroids to achieve that type of body in that time frame, so do not try to beat yourself up to match them because you can’t get there as quickly unless you try to bypass the body’s natural adjustment mechanism (and that of course has the chance of death with several bodybuilder examples). Also people on IG photoshop all the time, so you should have healthy skepticism when seeing the “I went from figure X to figure Y in 3 months!” posts.

Array
 

Parents married in their 20s back in the 1990s. I didn't grew up with much, but I'm so grateful to have the best parents I ever had. They worked a typical lower middle class job, stable family and home. My parents always had time to take care for me and just be around them through out my childhood, and even during high school. My parent's friends always compliment the other partner because they're beautiful/smart/a great parent, etc. Overall they are in a great relationship. They don't swear, are evangelicals, and they rarely even drink alcohol. They eat healthy and go to the gym. Parents still remain romantic from time to time, but even during disagreements, they always find a way to compromise. So in short, if you find a person who you really see them being a good mother and wife (and attractive for a long time)

 

Honestly yea. I want to find the right person who will be a loving wife and mother for a long time. Looks and values are super important, and they need to be shared closely. If possible, I'd like to have kids around my 20s, even early 30s, because I will still be young to see them grow up (and not look like a grandfather when they graduate high school). With IB it may be tough, but I will find a way to spend time with the family. Children being raised by a nanny isn't a good thing, kids need their parents' guidance and support early to have a good life.

 

Married 13 years, together for 16 years. It's been mostly good, but had a lot of difficult times as well.  Marriage is a lot of hard work, and as stated above, you're partnering with someone to build a life together, and it's about intersecting interests, rather than someone else having 100% your best interests at heart all the time. Therefore I'd recommend men not get married until mid-30s, by which point you have greater knowledge of self and what you're looking for. I got married to early, and I'm luckier than I deserve in that my wife is pretty easy going, low drama, and pretty decent on the hot-crazy matrix. I'm a pain in the ass and she puts up with me. But delaying the start of marriage and spending more time getting situated and understanding myself more would have been wiser. 

 

What did having children do to your marriage

Strengthen it? Weaken it? Change it in a way that was neither good nor bad?

 

My parents have been married for 60 years. I hope to have a marriage like theirs someday.

-

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

 It seems that most marriages have a ton of drama, having kids creates a lot of conflict and little time for sex, and couples seem to argue a lot or have a lot of resentment toward each other.

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty..." Yes, married couples argue and it sucks (okay, there are some objectively bad marriages, but if you're thoughtful about the person you marry this is easy to avoid). Raising kids is insanely difficult, stressful, and taxing. But smart people know that the rewards are far greater than the costs. Even putting aside the joys of raising children, think about how you're going to spend your own later years (50s and beyond). Do you want to be living alone, puttering around with cats and some trivial hobbies? Or do you want to be surrounded by your spouse, your children, and your children's children, watching them grow up and seeing their success, knowing you brought them all into this world? Unless you are in the 1% of people with a genuine burning desire to dedicate your life to some other craft or profession that is incompatible with family life, I think most people who forego starting a family will end up alone and miserable by their mid-50s if not earlier.

 
roger__sterling

 It seems that most marriages have a ton of drama, having kids creates a lot of conflict and little time for sex, and couples seem to argue a lot or have a lot of resentment toward each other.

"Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty...

"The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care." - The Offspring, Self Esteem

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

roger__sterling

 It seems that most marriages have a ton of drama, having kids creates a lot of conflict and little time for sex, and couples seem to argue a lot or have a lot of resentment toward each other.

"Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty..." Yes, married couples argue and it sucks (okay, there are some objectively bad marriages, but if you're thoughtful about the person you marry this is easy to avoid). Raising kids is insanely difficult, stressful, and taxing. But smart people know that the rewards are far greater than the costs. Even putting aside the joys of raising children, think about how you're going to spend your own later years (50s and beyond). Do you want to be living alone, puttering around with cats and some trivial hobbies? Or do you want to be surrounded by your spouse, your children, and your children's children, watching them grow up and seeing their success, knowing you brought them all into this world? Unless you are in the 1% of people with a genuine burning desire to dedicate your life to some other craft or profession that is incompatible with family life, I think most people who forego starting a family will end up alone and miserable by their mid-50s if not earlier.

All of this is true except for the situation where your marriage/partner sucks ass

 

On his death bed my grandpa looked at his 2nd wife and said “my mother gave me life, but you bitch took it from” 2 days later we were burying him.

Not a shit response. Happened in real life and Pop-pop was a savage mf RIP 1925-2016

 

1) If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worthwhile.  Marriage fits this description - children even more so

2) life gets more difficult as you get older and take on more responsibilities.  Some people blame life getting more difficult on their spouse even when it’s not their fault

3) Blaming your spouse for the fact you have challenging responsibilities-  is a good way to ruin a marriage (and your life). You need to see your spouse as an ally to tackle life’s challenges - not blame your spouse for the fact there are challenges

4) life without responsibilities may be happy but it won’t be satisfying in the long term

5) talk to a man who’s lived his late 30s single - 95% of them aren’t actually enjoying that situation. It sucks balls actually- even with the random hookups, new women often - I would never ever wish to go back to that

 

If you have no responsibility in life....then nobody needs you...

You know how people wonder what the meaning of life is?  The meaning of life is this:

“My life today is wonderful. I believe that I am needed… That’s the most important sense of life, that you are needed, that you are not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats something.” President Zelensky 3/3/22

https://twitter.com/ifindkarma/status/1500730800496472070?s=20&t=CwF_j7…

 

I don't know what "long time" is, but my wife and I have been together for 6 years and it only gets more fun each year. Couldn't imagine being with anyone else, so I hope we can sustain that. If you marry someone who is truly your best friend it's easy

 

Take this for what it's worth.

I was born in the U.S. but virtually everyone in my family immigrated from Latin America. There's a lot of married couples among them and they all seem very happy which they attribute to strongly embracing gender roles and treating marriage/family as a duty/responsibility and not a "fun" Instagram-worthy activity. They routinely put the needs of their kids and spouse above their own for the sake of the family (i.e., duty > personal fun). This is basically the opposite of how a lot of American millennials approach marriage.

"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."
 

Do you really believe most of the married couples you know are unhappy? Or is it just that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all the drama marriages are simply the ones that complain the most and it appears like they speak for everyone.

In my social circle, we don’t spend time talking about the low drama couples, we tend to gossip about the drama people so I think at times it can seem that everyone married is struggling.

The US does have a high divorce rate and the average American is rather immature, so maybe in recent years it appears that more and more people are quitting on their marriages, but I believe that for highly functioning people (and I imagine most of the people who frequent this forum tend to be hard working winners in life) marriages tend to be successful.

If you’re interested in what makes a good marriage I can give you some examples I’ve seen. The successful marriages I’ve witnessed have a healthy combination of similar interests and personality differences that compliment each other. But there are common threads I’ve seen in each.

Both people are similar in education level and financial resources.

Both people have similar homes - meaning both had strong parents who stayed together or both had broken homes.

Both people believe the same way about important things like political leanings, wanting or not wanting children, value of education, boundaries for parents and in-laws, views on monogamy and importance of religion.

Marriage can be stressful of course, but so is life in general. I think as long as you don’t settle or marry young or marry with a very large delta in age or money or intelligence, you have a great chance of staying married.

 

Its definitely lower than they make it out to be. Marriage/divorce, if looked at as a game, it really a game where only the people who are "bad" at it get to keep playing. Meaning, if you're in a good marriage or know how to have an effective marriage, you can only get married once. Where as, people are don't know how to make a marriage work, get divorced maybe multiple times. As stated with the FIL above, if he divorced 3 times, say he got married again and it lasted, it would need two other "successful: marriages to account for his other two divorces. 

 
Smoke Frog

Do you really believe most of the married couples you know are unhappy? Or is it just that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all the drama marriages are simply the ones that complain the most and it appears like they speak for everyone.

That how we have it society though; thats why more parents are worried things that have a .01% chance happening to their kids, but don't worry enough about drowning/swimming pools. 

 

Not married, in a relationship and have a lot of friends who are married. Some from what I see good, some from what I see okay/not great. Here is some thoughts:

- Marriages create drama for a lot of reasons. Mainly, I feel, people get married for the wrong reasons. For some, its because they really don't have anything else going, meaning, they don't have a hobby or a good job, so marriage kind of shields them from that stuff. Others, its to keep up with friends, or they want "their" turn to get married. So, sometimes people who probably aren't that compatible or haven't thought it out far enough get married with that idea that it might not work out, but at least they "did it". So then, you're married to someone that maybe you don't see eye to eye with or have the same thoughts/values, and thats where the drama comes in. I always say its like watching your weight or your money. If you're careful with savings and your money, you're not going to wake up one day and go "oh no I'm broke", same thing with who you marry, if you're intentional you're prob do okay.

- There is no book on how marriage should work or what a successful marriage looks like. Sometimes, people get married for very specific reasons, i.e., the young model who marries the older rich man. Is this the classic idea of marriage, idk, but he enjoys taking his trophy wife to parties, she enjoys spending his money, they may not see much of each other, but it works. I have friends like this, married, but my friend does everything with her family because that's basically her stipulation. She went to college, doesn't work, he's not super well off, but she gets to stay home with their kid. If he made more demands of her would it work, idk. 

- Kind of relating to my second point, people get married but don't understand what it means to "live in it". Think of it like IB, everyone talks about it in high school/college, thinking about all glamor/money and things you can get. Then you get an IB job, and everyone pats you on the back and congratulates you. But now, you're working 100+ hours a week, at 3am on Wednesday, that's you living in it. So sometimes, people get married to someone who is physically attractive, or has money or a cool job, but then when they wouldn't come to your family holidays, or you do separate vacations, what did you really achieve? You're living in it at that point. I know people who are like this, had a cousin who was engaged to a firefighter, long story short they broke up and she married a trust fund guy in real estate, and they live somewhat like above. 

 

I’m amazed that the token WSO comment of having a strong iron clad prenup will help in lasting marital happiness hasn’t been stated.

Few other pieces of pro marriage material from pick up artists.

When Strauss announced their baby news, he announced the release date of his book “The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships.” The book details how Strauss realized all the dates were not fulfilling for him and that marriage finally made him content.

Stephen Jackson

 

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