Marriage: It’s NOT Hard Work!

Marriage. It’s hard work. Bologna. If my beloved had said,You know, honey, being married to me is going to require hard work, I would have cut and run. My idea of a great marriage is not tantamount to labor camp. Yet we hear over and again,Marriage is hard work. It’s not.

What’s hard work is:

Being right. Just as you can’t have left without right, up without down, cold without hot, or light without dark, you can’t be right without someone else being wrong. While there are things that, based on empirical evidence, are objectively right, your opinion is not one of them. We all have opinions about virtually everythingthe prettiest color for the bathroomthe superiority of cats over dogs (or vice verse)the best team in footballthe perfect recipe for mac n cheesewhat music is worth listening to, and so on ad infinitum.

And while it may be difficult, if not downright impossible, to believe that anyone would love eggplant, prefer beige to taupe, and think a day at the water park is as good as it gets, your partner has opinions, too. Expressing your opinion is easy. Listening to your sweetheart’s opinion is easy if not mind-boggling. So far, no hard work. It’s when you elevate your opinion to universally right and then try to convince your sweetheart that he or she is wrong that the going gets tough.

Differences are just that. Your sweetheart is not your clone. Get over it. If you insist of making differences matters of right and wrong, you’re going to be exhausted from the hard (and futile) work of convincing your sweetheart how right you are and how wrong he or she is. Worse, you’re going to be an irritating bore. It’s not necessary to reconcile all your differences to peacefully coexist. Really, it’s okay if you’re a Democrat and your sweetie is a Republican. Where differences do have to be reconciledyep, you do have to agree on what color to paint the bathroomit’s just a matter of negotiation. And, come on, differences make life more interesting, don’t they? No matter how wonderful you are, would you really want to live with your mirror image?

Remodeling your partner. If your sweetheart engaged in a campaign to remodel you, how successful would that be? Are you interested in being whipped into shape by someone whoknows more about what you should be than you do? Of course not. Well, it cuts both ways. Sure, you can nag, cajole, manipulate, and badger your partner into compliance, but talk about pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill. It just doesn’t work and the effort is both exhausting and futile.

The price tag for insisting of beingright about your opinions, the price tag for continuous efforts to remodel your partner, is huge. Resentment is the enemy of intimacy. So, if you’re dead set on working hard, then work hard on yourself and leave your partner to do the same. The better person you are, the better partner you’ll be.

Shela Dean is a Relationship Coach, Speaker and Author of the Amazon Bestselling Frequent Foreplay Miles, Your Ticket to Total Intimacy, available on amazon.com. For more information, please visit Shela’s site.