Private details of a marriage

Last night I read an article from the New York Times Magazine called Married (Happily) With Issues. As I read it--the full thing, all 10 pages--I found myself almost involuntarily comparing my marriage with the author's. Not just in terms of length of marriage but also in terms of routines, affection, communication, sources of conflict. I found more differences than similarities. And yet like the author, I know that my marriage is very happy.

Only the people who are in a relationship can really know what's going on in that relationship (and sometimes even they don't know). Even if I sat here and wrote a blog post that spelled out every mundane detail, every little interaction and discussion and piece of our marriage, still nobody except Torsten and me could ever know what it's like or how it feels.

The author of this article walked us through some very intimate parts of her marriage, fights and sources of pain. She gave great detail. And as I read, I tried not to judge. Because even these things that she was describing, even the ones that sounded foreign and horrifying to me, even those things can't really be understood by anyone who wasn't a part of them. Because different things are sacred to different people. What is a horrible, cruel thing to say in one marriage is irrelevant and casual in another.

I'm reminded of a post that Slynnro wrote once (and that I now cannot find) about how she and her husband do not go grocery shopping together, and people judge them for it. I can see why some people's first reaction would be surprise, or even horror, if for them shopping is a big deal, and a source of intimacy or collaboration. But I think that's what people are really reacting to when they learn details of other people's marriages. It's not, "How can you be happy together if you can't even shop together?" (even if those are the words that are said); it's, "I interpret this detail to mean that you don't share intimacy, because I myself draw something important from this same detail in my own relationship."

This is why, even if I shared every detail of my marriage on my blog, my readers could still never really know exactly what it all means and how it all feels. Because ultimately, though of course we're capable of empathy, our reactions to other people are usually reflections of ourselves.

And still, even believing this to be true, I found myself judging some of the things the author described. For example, I was horrified when she detailed how her husband invoked divorce during a fight. For us, in our marriage, such a thing is unthinkable. If Torsten ever suggested anything about a divorce to me, I can't even imagine how I would react--it's just that unfathomable. I can't imagine any situation, ever, where I would say such a thing to him.

But that doesn't mean it's the same for all couples. And that doesn't mean that just because neither of us can even conceive of contemplating divorce in any context, our marriage is perfect. I will say that so far, we haven't had those struggles that people talk about when they say that being married is hard, and takes work. Of course, it does--I acknowledge that--and yet at the same time as I think about it, I don't think it's hard, and I don't think we work at it, exactly.

And maybe that's bad? Maybe we should be working at it. Or maybe we're just defining "work" differently--because we do take care of each other, and make a point to be thoughtful toward each other, and make compromises for each other, and make choices that we wouldn't make if we as individuals were the only factor in the equation. Maybe that's what other people call "work"? Or maybe we're missing something that is necessary for some couples to be happy together, but is not necessary for us.

Of course, we've only been married for a little over a year. We don't have kids and our lives are relatively stress-free. Perhaps what causes a marriage to require work is time, and distance, and competing priorities. Maybe right now our marriage doesn't feel like work because it's so easy and natural to focus on each other.

Certainly there are things we could do better, and this article, though the author's marriage seems quite different from my own, made me realize some of them. In some places in our marriage, I put myself first, and then I feel guilty about it. And in other places I put Torsten first without even realizing it, and to my own detriment, and in a way that isn't necessary. Maybe I feel that one balances out the other? And I'm pretty sure that the key to balancing this out without creating a competition, even if it's all in my head, is to talk to him about it and express my thoughts and needs.

The thing is that I'm so comfortable with him, and he's so easy to talk to, and we talk about so many different things, that I don't even really notice if there's something I'm not talking to him about. I don't notice that it's there or that it needs to be discussed. It isn't actively bothering me. My needs are met, as are my non-need-wants, and so are his. And so I don't even notice the little things that slip through the cracks sometimes. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't bring them up when I do notice them.

And maybe in other marriages these little things would be big things, huge problems. Or maybe they wouldn't be things at all. I can speculate about this, but I can't know. Because the only marriage I can really access and understand is my own.