In an unusually earnest moment on Twitter about a month ago, I told the story of how Logan and I met. It’s a long story that begins in the cornfields of a small Christian liberal arts college in Indiana, and ends with a slideshow of photos of us put to the song “All of Me” by John Legend as Logan asks me to be his girlfriend 6 months later.
This is usually where the meet cute story ends. People smile and laugh, and they know the happy ending—we dated for 4 years, got married, and have been married 4 years since. We assume that the arc of a marriage is either too intimate to inquire about, or a happy marriage must inherently be an uneventful one. After all, most memoirs written about marriage are either unhappy or tragic.
But I have found myself really unsatisfied with this ending point. For me, the interesting part is what comes after. You’re together—now what? How do you work through your many differences? When you transition from the high-drama world of crushes and dating to the low-drama world of ordinary contentment in marriage, many struggle with the whiplash. Some are unsuccessful in making this transition at all, as we have mistaken emotional chaos for love, adventure, and intimacy.
I was raised in Evangelical Christianity, which has a lot to say about marriage—none of it useful. According to pastors, marriage is when you’re finally allowed to have sex, wives make marriages bad by refusing to submit to their husbands and being “nags”, but marriage is HARD WORK, and that’s God making you a better person!! It’s supposed to be hard because you, teenager sitting in the pew, are a shitbag in need of a savior.
I reject the message that marriage is fundamentally hard. I think we’ve been fed this notion because the truth is much less pleasant: marriage is hard for women (collectively), because men (collectively) make it hard. So if women are taught that marriage is supposed to be hard, society can anticipate their disappointment and say, well, what did you expect? And women will be dissuaded from expecting more from their husbands than what they get.
I know it’s more complicated than this. Many women have issues (surprise!!) in the same way men do. But collectively, women are taught to do housework, talk about their feelings, and follow through on their commitments in ways that men are not expected to. Women are more likely to go to therapy, more likely to have intimate friendships, and more likely to have effective conflict management skills. All of these things are crucial for happy relationships, and a happy marriage is no exception.
I have a feminist marriage. What I mean by that is I have a husband who does 95% of the cleaning and cooking, especially since my daughter was born. Since I take on the role of the primary caregiver, this makes the labor in our family fairly even. I have a husband who takes the baby for walks in the middle of the night, who is fully committed to helping me finish my dissertation, who listens to my fears and concerns and respects my opinions. This has revolutionized my opinions about marriage and parenting. Turns out parenting is not that hard if you have an equal parenting partner! Turns out that “resentment” in a marriage doesn’t really happen when you have an equal balance of work and power! Turns out that you can be sleep deprived with a newborn and still really like each other! Turns out that marrying someone you respect, not in a submissive sense but in an admiration sense, will continue to pay dividends for years to come.
All of the things I had been told for decades about what marriage would be like were a wash, and while this brought me relief (marriage sounded horrible!), it also made me frustrated. Were we truly a lone island in a sea of misery? I didn’t think we were that unusual, but everything I saw and read made me doubt my confidence. I wanted to read stories that felt like our story—peaceful, joyful, ordinary. Thus, when we got engaged in 2016, I began my search for the ever-elusive memoir of a happy marriage.
So far, my search has been unfruitful. I have been underwhelmed by countless memoirs over the years, most recently Foreverland, which—in spite of its generally positive reception from critics and readers—frustrated me so much that I closed the book three chapters in and turned to Instagram and Twitter for assistance.
The feedback was almost unanimous: Nobody knew of anything like what I was proposing. But lots of people echoed my desire to read stories like this. Many shared that they themselves were very happily married, that marriage had been a source of healing for them (same here), and were troubled by the tired jokes marriage memoirs make and the oversimplification of marital self-help essays. So it wasn’t just me! But also, the problem was bigger than I realized. I hadn’t been out of the loop—these stories just aren’t being told. Why?
I would like to posit a few theories. First, maybe being a truly successful writer is not that compatible with a happy marriage. (Ha ha, I’m kidding. Mostly.) Second, and more likely, happy people just don’t feel the same urge to make sense of their experiences through writing. When you make a massive claim about how your marriage is “happy”, you’re inviting other people to pry into your personal relationship with their own standards of happiness to see if you measure up. If you’re not happy by their standards, you’re a fraud. If you are happy by their standards, you’re rubbing it in their faces, you’re out of touch, or you’re gloating. It’s one of the main reasons I haven’t written more reflections about my own marriage—I’ve only been married 4 years, no one wants to hear me prattle along about how ~happy~ I am when so many bad things are happening in the world, people are dying, and we still don’t have healthcare. At best it’s naive, at worst it’s arrogant.
The third option, which in my opinion is the most interesting, is said best by Ann Patchett in her essay, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage:
I can’t imagine that there is a right way to be married. The most essential terms for happiness I can think of—commitment, acceptance, love—could be challenged by one successful marriage or another. Even the very worst ideas for marriage, my own personal worst ideas, would be tolerable circumstances for someone else. I can tell you how I came to have a happy marriage, but I’m not so sure my results can be reproduced…
Perhaps what we don’t need is advice on how to have a happy marriage, but stories about happy marriages. There are as many ways to have a happy marriage as there are happy marriages. In my observation, most happily married people I know are loathe to offer marriage advice, because they know how useless it is. I often tell my friends that one of the worst parts about happiness is that it largely comes down to luck. I didn’t self-improve my way to happiness. Logan and I did some work to have a happy relationship, and yes we did go to therapy together, and all of those things made us better, but we were just lucky to meet at the exact moment we did, and to keep choosing each other every moment after. We were lucky that always, even from the start, we have never found the other person irritating, no matter how easy or hard the season. We have always been on the same team, no matter what.
Hypothetically, I’m sure we could have been happy with other people and other lives, but this is the life we have, and this is the one we are happy with. I come home from work and hear music playing, Logan cooking as he holds Mia and dances around the kitchen, I watch them play outside as the sun begins to set, and I give thanks that this is the life I have, and I can’t imagine a life where I could ever be happier.
"Perhaps what we don’t need is advice on how to have a happy marriage, but stories about happy marriages." I love this so much, Hannah! Thank you for sharing your insight.
And your final paragraph is such a beautiful and touching picture.
I love this, and you will have ups and downs. I can say that with full confidence after almost 21 years of marriage. But I find even the mundane satisfying because my husband and I are doing it together. At this point, I wouldn't want to even TRY to find someone else to do life with.
And now I'm wondering if I need to work on a book about just a plain happy, boring marriage :-)