A Few Myths About Love
And the realities I’ve learned instead
In February 2015, my partner and I interviewed a couple about what makes their marriage work. This particular couple was a couple of lawyers. They liked to get to the point. They liked lists, and I liked their lists.
They gave us some little tips to make marriage work that opened my mind to how many myths we carry culturally about what makes a successful relationship. They said, “you actually can go to bed mad,” for example, and also, “marriage is just two people thinking marriage is about giving 60/40.”
Some of their ideas resonated with us then, and some just weren’t very Us. Mostly, though, when I reflect back on that interview, I’m surprised by how much has rung true these past few years as we’ve gone from boyfriend and girlfriend to partners to husband and wife.
We’re only two months into our marriage, but here are some cultural myths about love that I’ve debunked in my own partnership so far:
Myth 1: A lifelong romantic partnership is the ultimate interpersonal goal.
If I’ve learned anything from my own relationship and that of the 50 couples we interviewed, romantic partnerships are not for everyone. The flip side is that anyone can live as wonderful, challenging, and rewarding a life without entering into one, including me.
Partnership is work, and sacrifice, and requires countless tiny ego deaths. It is also strangely comfortable, and surprisingly delightful, and unfolds in mysterious ways like nothing else can.
On a personal level, I wish I could do both. I would love – in true existentialist paralysis fashion – to live a life where my singular lifelong partnership is with myself, and one where that life is with my husband.
They are simply different paths. Then there’s serial monogamy, various aromantic ways of being, polyamorous structures. None are better in the sense that none make life inherently more valuable or worth living.
Myth 2: The things that annoy you now will only get worse down the line.
Oh man, this is just so patently untrue. My experience has had the complete opposite trajectory. I used to feel enraged by, terrified of, and/or disgusted with various of my partner’s traits, like his propensity for procrastination, his angry tantrums, and his distractibility. Over time, these things have come to elicit some mixture of compassion and appreciation. Often I have to stifle giggles because I find his behavior so adorable.
What changed?
I worked on myself. I stopped blaming him for so many of my feelings. I stopped looking at him as a hindrance, a challenge, an object. Or rather, I learned to be skeptical of those viewpoints. I asked myself, “what if my point of view isn’t more right than his? What would it look like to see him as a gift?”
And you know what else has changed in the process? Those behaviors that used to grate on me most have started to surface less, now that I don’t make them so much about me.
Myth 3: Getting to the bottom of things is healthy and necessary.
It used to be that I could not function until we had talked even our minor disagreements to death and he had delivered the apology and promises I wanted to hear. I cannot emphasize enough what a buzzkill it is to be attached to this sort of resolution.
What if our need to get to the bottom of things – to analyze exactly what happened and how, to express appropriate regret and good will – is just an anxiety response? What role does this sort of discourse serve other than making ourselves feel better?
Is it really a question of whether the person meant to hurt us? Whether they love us enough? If it is, nothing they say should make you stay. If it’s not, then perhaps it’s time to stop demanding that they remind you in the exact ways you think you need to be reminded.
“But how will they know I didn’t like what they did?”
In most cases, they know, and you know it. When they don’t, you’ll tell them, and it will be much simpler than we’ve all been told it needs to be.
Myth 4: You need to be on the same page about the big stuff like babies and religion and money before you get married.
Dude. Dude. Duuuuude.
This might be the biggest one.
Nowhere in any traditional or contemporary or woo woo hippie wedding ceremony does anyone ever say (and trust me, I’ve read them all) “I promise to love you til death do us part, unless you reveal to me that you don’t want kids anymore, or you quit your job, or you start believing in God”
I sort of think this might be responsible for a good chunk of American divorces. Don’t marry someone for the circumstances you feel were promised to you. Just don’t. If that’s what you want, you’re having a pre-modern marriage (aka transaction), not a partnership.
If you want a partnership, that has to be the top thing you want. And of course within that comes spiritual and personal fulfillment for both people, assuming you both value that. When we value that in ourselves we wind up supporting it in each other which results in it being fostered in ourselves, and so on.
But nowhere does this guarantee a three-bedroom house with 2 dogs and daily sex.
That being said, don’t be blind. Go in with eyes open and make sure the actual big stuff that matters lines up (like sharing a prioritization of partnership and values of growth and presence and enjoyment of life). If you do that, how many kids you have won’t matter to you anyway.
When we commit to building a life with another person, we build a third road with them, one paver at a time.
That’s the rub. That’s what’s fucking hard about those days when you just want to walk down your own road alone. But that’s also what’s magical about the moments when your partner encourages you to spend some time doing just that.
