Marriage gives you a happy life because it makes you a better person. That’s why it’s so hard for so many: they go into it thinking that just being in the right relationship is the ticket to everlasting joy, and find themselves explosive and inconsolable, terse over the smallest of issues, when they realize that it is not. This is the expectation that will wreck you, if you let it.
…r, but also because this is the essential purpose of long-term partnership: to assist us in growth. If our lives are about becoming ourselves, then our closest partners are our greatest teachers. When we are triggered by them, we are being awakened to something within ourselves that we have yet to see clearly. Nobody can do this as well as someone who is so intimately connected to us.