Hard work

[Mrschaney]

You hear that marriage is supposed to be such hard work. My husband and I joke about it. After 6 years together, 3 married, it has been nothing like work for us. He thinks marriage is hard for people who dont want to compromise. Do you all agree?

[DKT3]

You hear that marriage is supposed to be such hard work. My husband and I joke about it. After 6 years together, 3 married, it has been nothing like work for us. He thinks marriage is hard for people who dont want to compromise. Do you all agree?

 

That's great. However, over time issues will arise that compromises wont come so easy. A time when resentment has grown. Life gets in the way of your marriage and the two of you go from eye to eye to shoulder to shoulder, that's when it can become work. Work doesn't mean it can't be a happy marriage, it just means it wont just happen, there will come a point where you have to make it happen.

[Mrschaney]

In 6 years we’ve never disagreed about anything. I never planned on getting married. He swore after his divorce he’d ever marry again. Then we met. We want the same things in life. We have the same interests. We hace a great sexual chemistry, and we genuinely like each other. So, we decided we should be together and got married. We changed our vows from “until death do us part” to “for life and eternity “. Two people who had sworn off marriage are too perfect together to not do it. And at 44 and 51, we did. We’ve never fought, argued, or disagreed. Im just really lucky I guess.

[d0nnivain]

You are lucky.

 

DH & I got married later in life. I wouldn't say our marriage is work, per se but it was an adjustment. After 40 years of being single the 1st year of marriage was a struggle for me, I had to learn to function as part of a team, to take somebody else's needs & wants into consideration rather than doing whatever I wanted. Even after 10 years I am still adjusting to his family & their differences from mine. You can search my post history to see that my MIL remains a challenge for me. DH put up with a lot when I sunk into a major depression & became non-functioning after the deaths of my parents.

 

 

But at ground we chose to be married, to care for each other. We are willing to compromise. We are also more fortunate then others in that we don't have too many external forces -- money, kids, poor health, addiction etc. -- working against us.

[stillafool]

You hear that marriage is supposed to be such hard work. My husband and I joke about it. After 6 years together, 3 married, it has been nothing like work for us. He thinks marriage is hard for people who dont want to compromise. Do you all agree?

 

This is how my husband and I feel about our marriage. It isn't hard work when you are with the right person. When we were building our home people told us that many couples fight during the process and some end up breaking up. Not for us, it was a joy for us every day because our tastes are compatible and any compromise came easily.

[d0nnivain]

DH & I have also endured some things that rock other people's marriages. We had to drive cross country for 17 hours with a time crunch due to a snow storm.

 

We also remodeled our kitchen. That was stressful & there were some heated debates but they were just that debates between two people with forceful personalities. When we were squabbling over what cabinets & the color of the counter-top it never crossed my mind that DH didn't love me any more. I certainly didn't stop loving him. It was kind of fun to have somebody to wrestle these issues with. In the end, he's very easy going so that helps a lot, especially since I'm not.

[Mr. Lucky]

When we were squabbling over what cabinets & the color of the counter-top it never crossed my mind that DH didn't love me any more. I certainly didn't stop loving him. It was kind of fun to have somebody to wrestle these issues with.

 

My wife once told me "there's no one else in the world I'd rather be mad at".

 

Optimist that I am, I took it as a compliment.

 

My own observation is that marriage is often harder work for one of the two partners...

 

Mr. Lucky

[d0nnivain]

My wife once told me "there's no one else in the world I'd rather be mad at".

 

Optimist that I am, I took it as a compliment.

 

My own observation is that marriage is often harder work for one of the two partners...

 

It's hard to find somebody you can "fight" with in a healthy sense, meaning disagree without rocking the foundation of your relationship. I think discourse is healthy.

 

I do sadly feel like DH makes more compromises for me then vice-versa & that breaks my heart. I know part of it is the extrovert / introvert thing. I just keep dragging him around in the whirlwind that is my life. For the most part he's happy to come along & knows he can say no. He does say no sometimes & that is OK. Some of it I know he likes get out there from the safety of being by my side. I'll pave the social path so he doesn't have to do any heavy lifting, like break the ice with strangers. We did talk about this before marriage & agreed I'd be the "social director" so it's not like we didn't know what we were in for.

[anika99]

In 6 years we’ve never disagreed about anything. I never planned on getting married. He swore after his divorce he’d ever marry again. Then we met. We want the same things in life. We have the same interests. We hace a great sexual chemistry, and we genuinely like each other. So, we decided we should be together and got married. We changed our vows from “until death do us part” to “for life and eternity “. Two people who had sworn off marriage are too perfect together to not do it. And at 44 and 51, we did. We’ve never fought, argued, or disagreed. Im just really lucky I guess.

 

I think it helps that you and your husband got married later in life as mature established adults.

 

It's different for couples who marry young because they are still so immature in so many ways. They see every dispute as a fight for power and they see compromising as losing. Sometimes they are already in debt for student loans or haven't landed a great job yet and when a couple is just getting by and struggling to pay bills it becomes easy to fight about money. Then comes the babies and the childcare and trying to balance working and parenting and that can also be very stressful to a marriage.

 

It sounds like you were able to bypass a lot of those difficult phases and your husband probably matured a lot during and since his first marriage. Your marriage sounds awesome and I'm happy for you.

[Els]

It shouldn't "feel" like work, of course, but any successful relationship requires some degree of effort from both partners. It's just that putting effort into a good one feels like working on your absolute favourite hobby, where it just flows by and you don't feel like you did any work at all, whereas a bad one feels like showing up on Monday morning to a job you despise.

[Rockdad]

So many good points have been said so far. No it isn't "work" per se for us and wonder what is all the uproar about it? We were together 5 years before our 1st argument. Didn't say we were never tempted to when a rub happened we simply refrained from it. However we do reflect back from time to time when we were young and dumb getting married to the Ex's and just what a brilliantly smart move that was.

[quoththeraven]

Lol! Try raising children together, suffering job loss, losing a child in an accident, dysfunctional in laws, and a host of other life losses. You ARE lucky but old age and all of its problems await you, so don't count yourself unscathed yet. You're thinking relationships are easy because you haven't been through much. Best of luck to you my dear!

[quoththeraven]

Also, six years together? ?

[Guildford]

My wife and I have been together 50 years, almost married for 50. One thing I can be sure of is that she didn't marry me for my money, I was flat broke when we married. Adjusting to each other was work in the beginning but now we get along fine without any arguments (except for politics). To be successful in marriage you must be flexible and role with the punches, and you must both be determined that the marriage will hold.

 

I firmly believe that had I access to Loveshack in the beginning years the marriage would not have held. Had I posted my problems, there are too many posters here who would have said "dump her" or "divorce her."

[preraph]

You are a lucky couple. I'd go nuts having to always compromise. Like my mother said, I've been set in my ways since I was 18. I always knew what I wanted and exactly how it should be. Now I'm 66 and I'm even more that way. Easy going people are better at mating and marriage.

[georgia girl]

We’ve also been married five years and have completed most of our renovations; I lost my mom; and we have both had significant health scares. But, we don’t argue. For us, there is just nothing that would rise to the level of arguing. We get irritated with each other, of course, but we are both reasonable, willing to see the other person’s side and not likely to dig in our heels on any particular topic.

 

On the flip side, our relationship had a unique circumstance when we were dating. My husband, an endurance athlete, suffered a serious cycling accident and had to be medically evacuated from our rural area to a tertiary hospital 1.5 hours away from us with multiple head and neck injuries. I drove up to the hospital, not knowing if he was alive or dead. The first time we told each other we loved each other was when they were wheeling him into emergency surgery to give him a safe airway. He fully recovered and nearly two years to the day, we got married. So, as long as no one is in the hospital with broken bones, there just doesn’t seem like much to argue about for us.

 

I think the key is to always be good to each other and to want the best for your partner. And to laugh a lot. Life is not nearly as serious as we sometimes make it out to be.