The Best Marriage Advice I’ve Ever Received
A lot of people share “wisdom” when you get married. A small percentage of it doesn’t suck.
R. and I exchanged vows at the Portland Courthouse on a perfect summer day in June 2017, surrounded by a small group of friends and family members. After taking photos around town, we had an intimate dinner with our families before celebrating with a larger group at There Be Monsters on SE Morrison. It was perfect.
Six months later, we had a reception in our home state of Ohio for our larger families and even more friends. It left much to be desired. I think in retrospect, I would have done quite a bit differently. But that’s OK. The wedding is always the sideshow. After the cake is cut, the toasts are made and the dancing ends, you’re left with the person you promised to love until one of you dies. I’m good with that part.
Another thing that often leaves much to be desired, however, is the advice everyone feels obligated to give you about how to “make love last” or whatever. Most of it consists of well-worn nonsense like “never go to bed angry” and “love conquers all” and “happy wife, happy life”…even if that last one is obviously true. It’s hard to take a lot of it seriously, especially when it comes from people whose relationships you don’t exactly admire, respect or wish to emulate.
Now, if you’ve been with Yes, Misstrix for a minute, you’ve already read my best marriage advice. You know that I believe marriage is made in millions of small moments and that we should all be having amazing sex in our long-term partnerships. But I’d like to share two pieces of marital advice that I found to be genuinely insightful, one of which became a helpful mantra for when the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan after R. and I made a spontaneous (and potentially ill-advised) move to Thailand.
“Calling each other husband and wife makes you sound like an old married couple. Call each other boyfriend and girlfriend instead. It’s much sexier.”
I cannot overstate how much I love this advice from my boyfriend’s good friend, L. I’ll be honest in saying that I often forget to do it in practice, but I’m really all in on the sentiment. Having a boyfriend is way sexier than having a husband. It’s like a little mind trick that makes your person seem seductive and intriguing and exponentially more fuckable.
Every once in a while, I remind R. of this advice, and we give it another go. We refer to one another as boyfriend and girlfriend and feel like horny high-school students who spend all their time thinking about passing notes in study hall and banging as quietly as possible in the stacks. It’s thrilling. I highly recommend giving it a go.
The one unfortunate thing that (I think) prevents us from doing this long-term is having to explain it to people. Like…does Karli have a side piece? Who is this boyfriend? Is R. OK with it? Are they swingers now? THIS, my friends, is how rumors get started.
I guess we could just choose not to care about what other people think, but as a writer, I do value clarity. I don’t like misleading people. That means this bit of advice tends to be most beneficial when R. and I treat it as an inside joke between ourselves. It may not play well in public, but it delights us greatly at home. Regardless, I’m enamored with the idea of being someone’s hot AF girlfriend, even if that someone is my husband. Maybe you’ll find a way to make this advice work for your relationship, too.
“The first five years are the hardest. If you can survive those, you can make it through anything.”
My dad told me this, and to say I was resistant to it is a massive understatement. I didn’t want to believe that this was true. I certainly didn’t think it would be true for me. I mostly just assumed that my parents were kind of bad at things, and this wasn’t the type of advice I would benefit from hearing. Of course, that proved to be spectacularly untrue. I’ve come to appreciate the value of these words more and more over time.
A little background on my parents. They’ve been married for 42 years, and they still love each other, although you’d never know it from the way they pick on each other. They met at a company called Arrow Distributing, where they both worked—my mom in admin and my dad in sales. They were friends for years before they got together. Even with all this history, they nearly didn’t make it.
For one thing, my dad wanted to continue partying and acting like a single dude after they got married. My mom was ready to be a grown up and start having kids. A few years into the marriage, she told him point blank that he should think about whether he really wanted to be married. She called his ass out, and he decided he wasn’t going to fail at the relationship. Then, just when things felt settled, it took them almost six years of trying to have their miracle baby (moi 😉).
Those years were tough, too. My mom would cry every single month she got her period. She wanted kids more than anything and was willing to adopt if she couldn’t have them herself. Back then, my dad wasn’t on board. He wanted “his own” kids. Once again pushed to the breaking point, fate intervened. A new doctor found scarring on my mom’s uterus that he felt was causing the problem. A single surgery and a fertility drug prescription later, my mom got pregnant right away. They survived five tumultuous years, added 37 more and will be together until death do they part.
With all that in mind, however, you can probably see why I was skeptical of the five-years-of-hardship bit. R. and I were ready to settle down with one another. We weren’t planning to ever have kids (oops). We were on the same page about what we wanted out of life. But our first five years were the hardest, too. We shared a lot of love, many fun moments and more grand adventures than we can easily count. We also learned that we aren’t always on the same page, we struggle with communication when we don’t agree and we have to ride out occasional low periods like everyone else.
When a fairly significant miscommunication resulted in a not-particularly-considered move to a Southeast Asian country we’d never even visited (and where we also couldn’t speak the language), things felt like they’d gone completely off the rails. We fought a lot. Then, COVID hit and we got stuck in different countries. Our relationship was in chaos. Eventually, though, we found our way forward as a couple. It took us some time to come together again (both physically and emotionally), but, like my dad, we also didn’t want to fail at making our marriage work.
Years later at another wedding where I was asked to write advice to the new couple, I would recall my dad’s words and compose a note with this wisdom:
My dad always said that the first five years of marriage are the hardest. I thought he was just kind of bad at marriage, but I found it to be true for me, too. I wish you both many amazing years together, all of which are easy, fun and filled with love. Maybe just don’t move to Thailand on a whim.
And I stand by this advice. R. and I are approaching our seventh year of marriage. It feels like the longest, shortest time, and I’m grateful for all the ups and downs that brought us to this very moment. I know we could have done it without the counsel of others, but it sometimes helps to know how other people stay in love for the long haul. Maybe you’ll find these two pieces of advice are precisely what you need to continue choosing love as long as you both shall live.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
P.S. With the holidays, two trips to Ohio, COVID and a eye issue that messed up my vision for almost two days, I am all over the place with the newsletter schedule. Thankfully, things are getting back to normal now. I appreciate your readership and your patience!
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