Who is Marriage For?

it's certainly a choice

Sam Heydt - Marriage, Disavowals and Ambivalence (2024)

The complaint I have most flung at my husband in our billion (17?) years together is that he works too much. Consistent 10-12 hour days, and long periods of production when he was away for months at a time—including when we got married, and both times I was pregnant. The understanding now is that we all have dinner and weekends together, and if that can’t happen it’s an infrequent exception that we need to pre-schedule.

But I have also felt and expressed every other complaint about marriage. It’s technically bizarre to strap yourself to a partner forever and then just sort of run a small business with absolutely zero experience in said business. Raising people who while also trying to balance the workload at life at home, and not drive each other away with the exhaustion and rage and that ensues. And in our time together I’ve fallen into pit after pit of rage and resentment: how dare he just… take a shower, while we have an infant, without asking permission? How did he just walk by that thing that clearly needs to be done right now? Why isn’t he wired exactly like me?

When I was growing up, my father had some solemn things to say about (straight) marriage. “When women figure out how to have and raise children on their own, men will cease to exist,” he said, very matter-of-fact. And I’ve thought of this when my husband can’t be around. What a bill of goods I was sold, to have made myself as available as I am. Who needs you, I’ve grumbled when he’s in long periods of production. I can do all of this myself. But that’s the least generous, most defensive part of me, the part that convinces myself, when I’m mad, that he is the absolute worst.

He is objectively not the absolute worst. But we are two… not-uncomplicated people. We have waded through trenches of misery and pain, we’ve fought like you would not believe two people can fight. About things I can’t even admit to you. Most of them very very stupid, in the rear-view mirror. We once had an eight hour fight about how we got out of a taxi. The frequency of this nonsense has diminished, as has the amplitude, as we have figured out what our fights are actually about.

But when I’ve really let loose—when I feel like everyone’s robot assistant, when I yell about everyone just waltzing around at the end of the day, after I’ve done XYZ, he looks at me, puzzled. “You don’t have to do any of it,” is the basic gist. Nobody expects me to cook every meal, or keep the house pristine, or do everything with the kids. And I realize I’m just trying to be my mother, who I adore. She raised and fed and educated us, all with no help. She bent herself into bizarre shapes to be there for us, any moment we needed her, especially as my Dad worked long hours at the hospital. And I loved every moment of it. But I’m not her.

And she nearly drove herself crazy doing it, she tells me. She sometimes wishes she had been just a little less available, for her own mental health and ours. What point is progress, she says, if I don’t learn from her mistakes. Once I started noticing all the little things that my husband did that drove me crazy, I realized I was just, maybe…jealous? What if I just took a shower, without asking permission? What if I planned a workout, and didn’t frantically figure out all the logistics around it? What if I went away for a week-long research trip, or to visit my brother abroad, just because? What happened is that everyone was absolutely fine without me, and much happier with the returning version of me that wasn’t a bedraggled drudge.

My hobby, or one of my hobbies, is spotting people’s mental prisons. It’s taken me a long time to realize what my own is—I’m a total martyr. I think I hold up everyone’s sky with my trembling, exhausted arms. But that’s a self-imposed expectation, probably traced back to eldest immigrant daughter baggage which I will unpack in the book. In consistently questioning why I feel so responsible for every second of everyone’s happiness and well-being, my husband’s been nudging me toward the door to my cell, which, to my surprise, has always been wide open.

Another thing my Dad used to say was that marriage should be a series of eight-year options. Every eight years, you decide if you’re going to re-up or part ways, without any hard feelings, just a hug and a high-five for a job well-done. That way you’re still in it for a long haul, but frequently re-assessing your desire to stay in it. By this metric, tons more marriages would be considered a “success,” if that’s even important. My parents are, of course, in year 45 of theirs.

Maybe I’m alone in thinking this is romantic, but I really do. Marriage is not for everyone. It’s probably not even the right choice for most people. But it seems to be for me. And I was thinking about this when I tried something last month, and it was to stop complaining about how much my husband works. “It was never meant to be a criticism,” I told him, and I’m sorry that it has been expressed as such. “I’d like you around more,” I said. I think we’re both super clear on the fact that either one of could us figure out how to maintain a house and raise kids solo. But the thing is we actually really, really like each other. Experiencing life simply isn’t as fun without him. He says that he finally believes me.

We just now had lunch for Valentine’s Day, and tried not to talk about work or the kids, but that stuff always seeps in. “what are your hopes and dreams for the summer?” I said over tempura, to change the subject. It’s silly, but it’s nice to be silly, when so much of our lives are decidedly not. We’d just like to be present, we decided. We’re going to enjoy the life we’re building.

xo