How to Not Suck at Marriage

Tips from a woman whose parents fought for fifty years.

Sherry Mayle
Nov 7 · Unlisted
by B-D-S Piotr Marcinski/Shutterstock.com

My parents have been married for over fifty years. I want what they have, without the death threats and fistfights. Mom and Dad could make a fight out of anything from Christmas to the TV contrast setting. When I was twelve, they fought over gravy.

The gravy fight started on a Sunday when Dad decided he’d rather complain about the gravy than eat it.

He made a face and said, “This gravy is sour as owl shit!”

His mother, who came to dinner five times a week despite Mom’s multiple indications she ought to do otherwise, nodded.

“Worse than usual,” Grandma said.

Never one to let somebody get one over on her, Mom told Grandma to kiss her rosy, red ass and Dad to fix his own damned dinner.

Dad shook his head at Grandma. “This woman can’t cook nothin’.”

Grandma grinned.

I sat beside Dad on the couch with a plate of mashed potatoes in my lap, so I had a front-row seat for when Mom got up from her large, wooden rocking chair and flipped it across the room at Grandma.

What can we learn?

Lesson 1: Everything in moderation, dear, but mostly your mother.

While baking Grandma Josephine her daily pie, Mom used to complain, “There’s not one person I want to see every day of the world. Not even my own mother, and she’s dead. If she clawed her way out of the graveyard, I still wouldn’t want her here for dinner every damn day of the week.”

This is sound advice (especially the part about not inviting zombies to dinner.)

If you want your family and your spouse to grow closer, invite them to dinner, space it out. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, especially for relatives.

Don’t invite your friends over every day either. Sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother would have us believe otherwise. Those people didn’t really live their lives like that. It’s a storytelling device so the writers can tell you a fun story in twenty minutes without having to come up with an excuse for why everyone is together.

Avoid the standing invitation, and have some respect for your spouse. This is obvious, but Dad somehow missed it — someone out there needs to hear it.

Lesson 2: Talk about why you throw chairs.

I don’t know if Mom and Dad talked about Mom’s “temper,” as she called it, but in my relationship, we regularly talk about my mental illness. Not because I want to, but because I’m about as skilled at hiding my emotions as the family dog.

I have borderline personality disorder. That means a lot of things, but mostly it means I’m as likely to throw a chair at you as Mom ever was.

For me, talking to my fiance about the mental illness isn’t the hard part. The fear of abandonment that’s a symptom of this mental illness is what’s hard to bring up. It’s humiliating for me to say out loud I feel like I’m not good enough and that he’ll soon find someone better.

I want to be, and be seen as, a confident, strong woman. Such women don’t sit around indulging their insecurities. They have marketing and shit to do.

I’m lucky. My face betrayed me, which started an ongoing conversation about my mental health in relation to our relationship. When I’m stressed, I’m more likely to think he’s plotting to leave me. We work around this.

If I’d never told him, it would’ve eaten our relationship from the inside out. That’s what happens to wounds we won’t look at — they grow necrotic in the dark.

Be willing to be the most vulnerable version of yourself in your marriage. Maybe you used to do this, but you’ve stopped. Reclaim the intimacy. Book time alone to figure out what you’re feeling, take deep breaths, and commit to the idea that you can’t overcommunicate with your spouse.

Lesson 3: Fix your own damn dinner.

Mom made dinner for Dad every single day. As a kid, you don’t see what a big deal that is. As an adult, that would be like winning the lottery. Figuring out what to eat every day is the worst part of adulthood.

To make breakfast and dinner from scratch every day and then have that food criticized would drive a sane person mad; imagine what it’d do to someone on the border. I’d definitely throw chairs.

The lesson here isn’t about dinner — it’s about gratitude. What does your spouse do for you? Pay attention. I can guarantee they’re doing way more than you notice at first.

Do more. I’m so lazy, but I like it when Aaron is happy, so I take out the trash and do the dishes more often than I would if I lived alone as a swamp demon. In return, he cooks me dinner plus breakfast on the weekends.

Marriage is like the worst group project ever, and it’s for life. If you screw it up or let one person do all the work, you get an F, the punishment for which is losing half your shit.

Carry your weight. Fix your own damn dinner. Say thank you. A lot.

Last Lesson: When you fight, know what you’re fighting about.

Everyone has disagreements, except marriages in which one person is a doormat. The goal is not to avoid fighting but to know what you’re fighting about. Stay on topic.

For example, Mom and Dad weren’t really fighting over the gravy. After Grandma fled the house, Mom immediately switched the topic from gravy to Dad’s affair.

“Sherry Marie,” she said, formally addressing her 12-year-old audience. “This whoremonger can’t even wash dishes! He let the dogs lick the dishes clean that night he had Pissy Wanda in my bed, when I was out of town, burying my dead mother!”

Pissy Wanda was a friend of the family whose last name was never said. Apparently she had a small bladder.

My parents had last seen Pissy Wanda twenty years before I was born. This hadn’t stopped Mom from including her in every argument with Dad since. Mom had a superhuman ability to twist any topic back to her primary grievance: Dad slept with Wanda while Mom was out of town, burying her dead mother.

(Mom always stressed the dead part; maybe Dad’s infidelity would’ve been less offensive had she been out of town burying her mother alive.)

Dad denied it, but for decades, Pissy Wanda haunted my parents’ marriage. Even after the woman gave up and died, Mom still dragged her body through the living room into arguments about gravy.

You or your spouse might do this too. You can’t control your spouse — you can only be an example. There’s a guaranteed way to ensure that when you fight, you aren’t dragging in old resentments: Resolve them.

What are you still mad about?

Don’t hold onto resentments. Make a list. Right now. For every item, decide to do one of three things:

  1. Get over it. Go to therapy, journal, run a marathon, clear out your chakras — whatever you gotta do, do it, and then get over it.
  2. Talk it out. This is another way of getting over it. See Lesson Two.
  3. Consider leaving. If you can’t get over something (especially after a lot of time has passed — say twenty fucking years), you need not be with this person.

Your heart, and your kids, and your unbroken furniture will thank you.

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Unlisted

Sherry Mayle

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west virginia hillbilly turned california stoner. comedy writer. one weird lady. sherrymayle.com

The Mindful Swamp Witch

Stories to inspire your inner witch.

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