On marital advice

And what your spouse deserves

Being married is fantastic. It’s far, far better than I ever expected it to be.

For years, I swore that I wasn’t going to get married. This is because I assumed that marriage would involve living with someone who thought I should simply learn to be rational enough not to care if there was always several pairs of boxers on my bedroom floor. I assumed that marriage would mean being partnered with someone who would complain endlessly if it had been more than 48 hours since we had sex. I assumed that marriage would mean choosing between living in a house that was a tolerable degree of clean, which I would do entirely by myself, or living in a house I found stressfully cluttered. I assumed marriage would mean that if I couldn’t make as much money as my husband did, he would feel entitled to ignore any of my requests to split up the labor of keeping our house in order, our children looked after, and moderately healthy food on the table at regular intervals. I assumed that marriage meant that all of my desires and preferences would be seen as inconvenient nagging, while all of my spouse’s desires and preferences would be prioritized for the simple reason that he’d feel more comfortable ditching the kids to take care of himself than I would.

You can complain about me believing these things if you wish; I expect it to raise a few hackles that I had that model. The important (and glorious) reality is that it didn’t end up being true, even though I got married in my early 30s, which many people throughout the course of my life assured me was past the prime at which I could secure a quality husband.

But that too was part of the beauty of it all - I married a woman, and she gets near-absurdist mid-century wifey behavior out of me simply by being who she is. I had no framework that could have anticipated this. My relationship to marital advice has changed beyond recognition.

Typical (traditional) marital advice assumes that your spouse deserves the absolute best of you. It works beautifully when you agree with that, especially emotionally. Making your spouse a meal is a privilege when you have a wonderful spouse. Thanking your spouse for the many wonderful ways they keep your family alive and functional, comfortable and well-fed, feels like the least you can do given a spouse who is participating in your marriage with a generous, loving air. Taking care of tedious and/or difficult tasks so your spouse doesn’t have to is one of many ways to show your immense gratitude that such a wonderful person has blessed you with their own efforts. Having sex with your spouse because they are amazing and attractive and you’ve got lots of energy because your life and efforts together support both of your energy levels is second nature.

More than we acknowledge, good and bad things come in cycles, not in steps or local maxima - all of the above good tends to beget more good until something comes along to disrupt it. My spouse and I, for instance, hope to have children. Should we be blessed with them, we’re aware that the energy and free time available will drop steeply, and major readjustment is unavoidable. We actively discuss ways to preserve a sense of mutual good will when we have much higher demands on our time, energy, emotions, and resources. We recognize that good marriages tend to exist in an ever-evolving exchange of positive feeling. Bad marriages tend to devolve into resentfully trading punishments for the other’s limitations.

I was shocked to realize, upon getting married, how good traditional, Christian, conservative marriage advice was, or perhaps how applicable it is (to two women, no less). One of many problems with it is that it’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach - it assumes that you can pretend marital good will if you don’t feel it already. Make your man a meal. Give your man sex. Dress up. Look pretty. Keep the children quiet. Don’t nag. Ask for what you need. These are the things women often do with enthusiasm for a spouse they feel a lot of good feelings toward.

I know that there is mirrored advice for men; one of many reasons it looks different is that the foundational pillar of male contributions to marriage is assumed to be the money brought in by his career,¹ and since he, bachelor or married father, cannot reasonably expect to be a functional adult without bringing in money from a career, it’s essentially assumed that he’s always faking it till he makes it if he is not already making it - he has no choice. Treating her well is also encouraged, although frequently expressed as a list of don’ts rather than do’s² - don’t harm her, don’t cheat, don’t gamble your money away.

Faking it till you make it will take a person quite some distance from doing nothing, to be clear. The problem is that we never want to deal with what it doesn’t fix - attitude. Emotional valence has a lot more to do with the success of a marriage than any particular behavior or habit.

If your wife makes you a meal hoping you will do the dishes and quietly fumes when you do not, the most likely outcome of this effort is both parties having a lower opinion of the other. Similarly, if you do the dishes hoping your wife will allow you to bed her later, you will also resent her should this approach prove unsuccessful, and you’ll leave it less likely to do dishes while she’ll come out of it even less likely to assent to your sexual desires.

Both of you sense the other’s emotional stance, and if you are of typical maturity, you probably feel pushed around by it. You feel pushed around when your wife is cranky about the amount of childcare you’re doing, even if it’s solely expressed in a cool demeanor and silence. You feel pushed around when your husband looks aggrieved and annoyed when you turn him down for sex, even if he doesn’t say anything. And both of you likely feel justified in doing things that you know will diminish your partner’s well-being because you (correctly!) identify that they’re behaving in ways that do the same to you.

And round and round the cellar slide to hell we go.

People know a lot about why you do what you do, all without you saying a word. People - even men - care a great deal about what sex means. People - and your spouse and children perhaps most of all - are profoundly affected by how you manage your own emotions.

So what does work, if putting on a brave face and a good show is not actually going to hide your true feelings?

You’ve got to train your focus away from your spouse and onto yourself, or at least do so more than you were before. Specifically, you’ll want to get clear on what you truly believe is the right thing to do given a spouse who is showing up in disappointing ways. To ask yourself: “How do I think, at the end of the day, I am obligated to act in a marriage, especially when I’m not getting what I want?”³

It’s easy to ignore when we simply act try to make life uncomfortable for our spouses if they do not comply with our preferences. It’s a very typical equilibrium if you don’t want to lose your spouse or your marriage but can’t stand any given behavior, habit, or dynamic, so it’s something most of us have to identify and then grow out of in order to enjoy a consistently fulfilling marriage. This is a dangerous but easy local minima to inhabit - unchecked, this behavior makes a marriage increasingly unlivable and unsalvageable, but just once or occasionally, it’s normal and recoverable.

Part of the unexamined logic behind a punishing that subconsciously hopes for compliance is that our spouses cannot be trusted to be their best if we are not involved. Tragic, if true.

Our spouses have more opportunities to surprise us with good character the more we choose to leave them alone about how they step up to the plate. It always feels better to have a spouse who does good things for you out of their own desire and values than it does to have a spouse who is only doing good things to avoid negative consequences (even ones like you silently pouting).

Basically, you may be right that your spouse doesn’t deserve extreme wifey trad treatment. You may be right that your spouse doesn’t deserve princess treatment. It’s likely that if they don’t, you don’t deserve it either. You two are in this together, and if they’re being difficult, it’s next to impossible that you aren’t contributing in some way, even if only in being easy to disappoint.

This is easier to illustrate in circumstances that are lower stakes than marriage. The best piano teacher I ever had was also the best credentialed, and likely the most expensive, with two magnificent Steinway grands in her basement where I’d enter to play the concerto I’d dreamed of learning since I was a kid. One of them might have been a concert grand. Her most effective teaching - or at least her most memorable - was that she alone never asked me to practice. Never criticized or commented on a failure to practice. Not only that, but there was no identifiable annoyance, disapproval, or frustration in her tone when I’d play a difficult section just as poorly as I had the week prior. She’d simply direct me to the offending line and we’d run it together for a portion of the lesson, all while I melted with agonized embarrassment and musical remorse internally. I’m so sorry I didn’t practicceeeee, my brain would wail as I plunked through an annoying bizzaro 5 on 9 rhythm with her, I’ll do it next time I know it sounds awful aaaauughhllll

Before this teacher, I didn’t know that I had any authentic desire to practice. Previous instructors were easy to disappoint: I resented their irritation, their lectures, their uncomfortable complaints about my behavior, and it felt completely reasonable internally not to comply. With this teacher, I practiced more consistently and for longer stretches than I ever had before, hours at a time, willingly, because it came from me. In the absence of any irritated authority figure who felt I should do what they said, I was able to identify the way I wanted to perform with a novel clarity.

It may not perfectly apply to every disagreement you have with your spouse, but it’s worth finding out how your spouse behaves when you verbally, behaviorally, and especially emotionally leave them alone to identify their own highest self.

Because if their highest self, without your input, doesn’t want to participate in making your life better, that’s important information. You might even learn that your higher self doesn’t care as much about some of their behaviors as you thought.

There are a few key questions when it comes down to it: to punish your spouse into compliance is to treat your spouse like they don’t deserve your best. And to be clear, maybe they don’t. Are you going to stay with someone who doesn’t deserve your best? And if they do deserve your best, do you know what giving someone your best looks like when their behavior is imperfect? That’s a personal and individualized question, and I don’t have the answers.

Only you can figure out what kinds of behavior you respect, and only you can act on it.

1. This was also one of several features that I found explicitly off-putting about marriage - some amount of money is necessary for a stable life but insufficient for a good relationship and I despaired of ever communicating that to a husband.

2. One wonders if here, as in parenting or finding lost items, we wouldn’t get better results from men by clarifying what we want rather than the negative space of what we want

3. A favorite and often-referenced figure of mine will say that the measure of a marriage is how both people act when they’re not getting what they want